My recent absence from this blog was due to my increasing commitments on a number of fronts: Family, business, and other political activities as they relate through my involvement with the Virginia Club for Growth.
Although blogging is a lot of fun, it also requires a lot of time. Faced with a limited number of hours that can be devoted to this activity, it becomes necessary to take some extended breaks from time to time.
I also can’t help but wonder whether blogging can have a serious positive impact on changing the course of Virginia politics. The number of regular bloggers is rather limited and those that participate are already committed to a particular political philosophy.
In other words, the likelihood of changing any minds through extensive blog discourse is rather unlikely. So given my increasingly diminishing availability—after all there are only 24 hours available in a day—I have to consider whether blogging is an effective medium for reaching out to the greatest number of activists and voters in general, with the goal of convincing them that we must bring back some sanity to our state government—a government heading to fiscal ruin, given the unprecedented growth in government spending programs over the last decade.
As my friend John Taylor of the Virginia Institute for Public Policy likes to say: It took Virginia 386 years to reach a $30 billion bi-annual budget, yet it took only one decade to double it to $60 billion! Folks we simply cannot afford such an out-of-control, burgeoning government. We need to instill some discipline in government spending and control the size and growth of government—otherwise, we’ll simply end up as another economic basket case, like California.