Medicare has been much in the news, amid the swirling public-policy debate over President Obama’s push for “health care reform”. It is Exhibit #1 as a public health insurance program, which many Democrats insist is essential to true reform. President Obama’s chief budget officer,...

When private spending plummeted in 2008, economists’ kneejerk response was to plug the gap with new government expenditures. Massive public spending not related to war had not been tried since the 1930’s. But the depth of the crisis, an abundance of willing constituent/recipients, and the...

Governor Jodi Rell put the kibosh on the proposed new “University hospital”, on fiscal austerity grounds, before the public debate had barely started. Nonetheless, the joint proposal by the UConn Health Center and Hartford Hospital raised some hard questions that elected officials will have...

The mother of all post-World-War II recessions has left the State of Connecticut’s fisc in a shambles. In a trice, that unnatural disaster undid what four years of prudent budgeting had accomplished, including (by November 2008) a Budget Reserve (“Rainy Day”) Fund of $1.38 billion. That...