States going bankrupt; say hello to socialism

The launch of Governor Deval Patrick's ambitious proposal to provide students with a free education, from preschool through community college, will have to be scaled back next year because of the state's ever-worsening budget problems, Education Secretary Paul Reville said.

"We don't have the dollars to do it," said Michael Widmer, president of the Massachusetts Taxpayers Foundation. "It's not that we don't believe in the virtue. We don't have the money."

[+]

As someone who commented on this story wrote, using Deval Patrick's campaign slogan in jest:

"Together we can..."
1) Run the state into receivership.
2) Overspend on the governor's car and drapes for his office.
3) Take the first four months in office off because our spouse is tired.
4) Not make good on a single campaign promise.
5) Do NOTHING to make this "historic" administration noteworthy.

Massachusetts politics are outrageously corrupt. Some people, even outside of Massachusetts, still see the Commonwealth as some beacon of hope for education and welfare. Somewhere along the way, the fact we borrow money from the federal government and waste insane amounts of it - while simultaneously having the highest revenue-generating state lottery in the country - translated into Massachusetts being a "progressive" state; a symbol of the future of the US. Let's hope people wake up soon and realize that less government is better, that legalizing gay marriage is just a BS symbolic gesture of liberalism, and that when our state goes bankrupt, no one will be able to help pick up the pieces because the federal government will probably be bankrupt too.

True leaders don't come from Massachusetts anymore - gravy-train incumbents like Ted Kennedy and John Kerry do nothing for this state and are only concerned with their own image on the Hill. Until people in this once great Commonwealth go back to the Constitutional values upon which this nation was founded (as a start, we could go back to defending rights and not entitlements), Massachusetts will go bankrupt and will be forced to cut its welfare programs and wasteful spending. The only question is whether or not we'll have the foresight to break our fall a little, a lesson that the country may finally begin to heed from Dr. Ron Paul, who has been spreading this same message for years.