Governor Steve Beshear didn't say anything about raising taxes before this year's election. In fact, he bragged in nuanced fashion about not raising any "broad-based" taxes in his first term.
He got away with that because his general election opponent played the same nuanced game to, in fact, raise taxes. And they together also played a much more harmful trick on Kentuckians by jointly underfunding and raiding public employee pensions by hundreds of millions of dollars and borrowing to spend billions more.
So the two most powerful politicians in Frankfort see no downside to increasing revenues now. They need the money, as they see it.
This is the kind of bipartisan agreement we are going to have to fight against even harder in 2012. And that is why we need a state debt ceiling and/or to amend the Constitution to give us a real balanced budget requirement.
