The war of words in my old state of Michigan continues today in the Wall Street Journal, with a letter from one Robert Kleine, former Director of the Office of Budget and Tax Analysis, who writes that “Mr. Wolfram and Mr. Baxter have no other solution to Michigan’s economic problems than tax cuts and more tax cuts.” I happen to know Gary Wolfram and can say with utter certainty that he’d recommend a heavy dose of deregulation and downsizing of state government to go with the tax cuts. But the crucial point that the tax and spend statists always miss is this: resources are put to more productive use in the private sector by people who gain from good decisions and suffer from bad ones than if sucked into the state by taxes and then allocated according to the whims of politicians.