Monday, February 28, 2011

Frankfort's Department of Oxymoronic Redundancy

The Louisville Courier Journal's Joe Gerth today describes "legislative productivity" in terms of the number of bills that become law in a General Assembly session along the way to suggesting Kentucky may not need annual sessions.

If I believed eliminating annual sessions would actually reduce government mandates or regulations or costs that do harm to Liberty, I might be more interested in going to the trouble of amending the state constitution again to remove them.

But before we even get into that, let's make clear that the definition of legislative productivity should not be seen as the number of bills passed but instead as amassed debt and distortive impact on economic activity. Putting it in those terms would more accurately describe the failure of Kentucky's political class.

It is worth mentioning here that in 2010 state government increased our debt costs by extending the terms on hundreds of millions of dollars worth of bonds in order to make the current budget appear balanced. And they authorized bonding of an additional $2.855 billion.