Courant: Small Office, Big Influence

HARTFORD – The Hartford Courant featured the Yankee Institute on the front page this morning, profiling our work and the outlandish allegations made against us by state labor leaders:

“Founded in 1984, the think tank has long embraced a philosophy that government should be small, taxes should be low, and a robust private sector is the key to economic growth. For part of its history, the Yankee Institute was a small, somewhat stodgy presence on the campus of Trinity College known for churning out academic papers on education and health care policy.

Cullen and Heath W. Fahle, the institute’s policy director, arrived in 2009 with the charge of making the institute “more practical and maybe a little bit less academic and theoretical,” says Cullen, who holds degrees from both Yale and Harvard.”

On the paranoid and desperate attacks waged by labor leaders against Yankee, Cullen describing the allegations as something out of a movie.

The hacking allegation is “unequivocally not true,” Cullen says. “They’re accusing us of having hacked into the computer system, of having taken assumed identities, spreading misinformation and covering up our electronic tracks. … It sounds like something out of ‘Mission: Impossible.’ ”

The Courant also paints the contrast to the labor rhetoric and Yankee’s reality:

In contrast to the union’s depiction of a sophisticated organization with ties to some of the nation’s most influential conservative groups, Cullen paints the Yankee Institute as a shoestring operation, with 3.5 employees and an annual budget of about half a million dollars generated almost exclusively from individual donors living in Connecticut. “They are ascribing powers of influence to us that we wish we had,” he says.

Read the full piece in the Hartford Courant.