WhatFinger


Where prosperity still lives

Economic hope: Look to the red states



Yes, you can still find pockets of prosperity in this country, and as friends of the boss Steve Moore and Arthur Laffer point out in yesterday's Wall Street Journal, the places where you find it tend to have something in common:
Consider the South. We predict that within a decade five or six states in Dixie could entirely eliminate their income taxes. This would mean that the region stretching from Florida through Texas and Louisiana could become a vast state income-tax free zone. Three of these states—Florida, Texas and Tennessee—already impose no income tax. Louisiana and North Carolina, both with bold Republican governors and legislatures, are moving quickly ahead with plans to eliminate theirs. Just to the west, Kansas and Oklahoma are also devising plans to replace their income taxes with more growth-friendly expanded sales taxes and energy extraction taxes. Utah, while not a Southern state, leads the tax-cutting pack under Republican Gov. Gary Herbert. Much of this is the result of GOP victories in the 2010 and 2012 elections. Today 10 of the 12 governors in the Southern states are Republican, and in nine of those states the Republicans control both chambers of the legislature.

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I've thought for some time that this is a big part of the GOP's problem. Its bench is weak because the strongest candidates are those who have amassed a record of achievement at other levels - especially successful governors. Since the Red Wave of 2010 elected a whole new group of Republican governors - many of the Tea Party variety - we're getting to the point where a lot of these governors will have enough of a track record that they can make the case they are real achievers. But this isn't only, or even primarily, about electoral politics. Policy debates in recent years have been hard for Republicans to win because they couldn't claim a record of achievement from the last time they had control of the federal government. Things weren't as bad during the decade just past as they are now, but the GOP missed an awful lot of opportunities to fix things, and that makes it hard for them to argue now that their ideas are the answer. But as the nation's economic condition continues to deteriorate under Obama, Republicans can point to prosperous red states as a viable alternative, and make the case that real limited-government, free-market Republicans are showing the way.


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Dan Calabrese -- Bio and Archives

Dan Calabrese’s column is distributed by HermanCain.com, which can be found at HermanCain

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