And as so often is the case, California leads the way. Here's Joel Kotkin of newgeography.com: Recently, the "California dream" for those seeking a better place to live "has been evaporating." Now the combined state/local tax burden there is the sixth highest in the nation. And "since the financial crisis began in 2008, the state has fared even worse ... California is in danger of becoming, as historian Kevin Starr has warned, a 'failed state.' "
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Remember Ronald Reagan's phrase "It's morning in America"? Coming now may be a long dark night. Unemployment drifts at 9.5 percent, with underemployment (those who want to work but have stopped looking) in the vicinity of 20 percent. High minimum wages and high taxes put people out of work and keep them there; low taxes boost growth. President Obama and his congressional Democrats are talking about raising taxes, or at least letting the Bush tax cuts expire (which would be the same thing).
Chances are minimal that Obama will echo these Reagan remarks, made in the first summer of his administration when he proposed to cut federal income tax rates by 25 percent over three years: "This is not the time for political fun and games. This is the time for a new beginning. I ask you now to put aside any feelings of frustration or helplessness about our political institutions and join me in this dramatic but responsible plan to reduce the enormous burden of federal taxation on you and your family."
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Not only that. (1) The country is about to get a Muslim mosque adjacent to Ground Zero in New York. (2) The White House winces at the use of jihad and terror and Islamist as counterproductive and insensitive. (3) Congressional Democrats want -- in the words of a Wall Street Journal editorial -- "to limit what corporations can spend on political campaigns, while not imposing similar limits on their union friends."
And (4) the citizenry is burdened with a Democrat-approved plan to socialize the nation's medicine -- a plan Americans generally favor far less than when it was passed, indeed a plan an astounding 71 percent of Missouri's voters rejected in a referendum this month. Voters in 111 of Missouri's 114 counties trampled ObamaCare. Noted St. Louis County State Senator Jane Cunningham, following the vote: We feel in Missouri like we are fighting for citizens all around the country (who think) we must draw a line in the sand between what are state and individual rights, and what are federal rights and responsibilities.
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Maybe, given the way things are trending, some people are beginning to hanker for W. Could it be?