Blind Squirrel Still Unable To Locate Nuts

I'm convinced that Ross Douthat's job at the NY Times is to make us actually want Bill Kristol back. Today, ol' Ramblin Ross takes on the economics of America's state budgets and manages to trap himself in his own web of "logic" rather neatly.

The urban scholar Joel Kotkin has called this recession a blue-state “meltdown.” That overstates the case: The Deep South has been hit hard by unemployment, and some liberal regions are weathering the storm reasonably well. And clearly part of the blame for the current crisis rests with decisions made in George W. Bush’s Washington.

Which is actually correct. And then in the very next paragraphs, the conclusion that Ross draws?

But in state capital after state capital, the downturn has highlighted the weaknesses of liberal governance — the zeal for unsustainable social spending, the preference for regulation over job creation, the heavy reliance for tax revenue on the volatile incomes of the upper upper class.

And, inevitably, the tendency toward political corruption. The Republicans have their mistresses, but the Democrats are dealing with a more serious array of scandals: the Blagojevich-Burris embarrassment in Illinois, Senator Christopher Dodd’s dubious mortgage dealings in Connecticut, the expansive graft case in New Jersey, and a slew of corruption investigations featuring Democratic congressmen.

So, there is no such thing as a "blue state meltdown" (an oversimplification) but of course liberalism has wrecked the states and Democrats have destroyed economies through corruption (which apparently is fine to say).

You know, just like in heavily Democratic, liberal states like Alabama.

The possibility that conservative state governments spending money swiping revenue and using it on tax breaks, tax cuts and tax loopholes for the wealthy and then not having enough revenue for existing social programs hasn't occured to Ross, no doubt. The answer is to just cut the programs and block any tax increases to pay for them. It's government by posession: if you give the money away to the people that don't need it, just cut the programs for the people who do need them. Corporate welfare over voter welfare, that's the conservative way.

Only, that's failed badly too.