The fiasco occurring in Washington is a timely reminder that America needs to return to the constitutional balance of power between the federal and state governments.

Our founders intended for the money and power to reside in the states, not be sent to a far-off federal government. They knew if that happened that our individual liberties and the ability of states to experiment, innovate and solve their own problems would be greatly hindered. They were right.

"As the fiscal crisis in Washington, D.C. advances, there is no better time than now to have a vigorous debate on how we best pull our country back from the fiscal brink and reinvigorate American Exceptionalism,” wrote Matt Mayer of the Liberty Foundation in his report titled Competitive Federalism: Leveraging the Constitution to Rebuild America. “By encouraging competition among the states and between the states and the federal government, our Founding Fathers guaranteed the ultimate success of America, as failure in one state couldn’t doom the entire country and state successes could be adopted and tailored by other states,” Mayer continued. “We can solve our complex problems in an iterative process as states learned from and built upon the lessons emanating from the fifty laboratories of competition across the United States.”

It's up to Kentuckians, not the politicians and bureaucrats in Washington, to decide our state's education, health care and energy policies.

A great way to advance a return to the constitutional principles of federalism in Kentucky is to support the Bluegrass Institute.