INDIANAPOLIS — There's an ancient Greek myth about the importance of finding the right balance.
Daedalus and Icarus — a father and his son — were imprisoned in the Labyrinth. Daedalus, a great craftsman, constructed wings out of feathers and wax so that his son could escape by flapping the wings and flying to safety.
Before the son took off, his father warned that he must fly high enough above the sea to keep his wings from getting wet, but not too close to the sun, or the wax holding his wings together would melt.
Icarus ignored his father's warning. He flew higher and higher, and eventually, the wings melted and he fell into the sea.
The moral, of course, is that the appropriate middle ground — what Aristotle called the "golden mean" and baseball sluggers call the "sweet spot" — lies somewhere between two extremes.
Two governors took their best shots at landing in that sweet spot — in this case, balancing the taxes that their states collect with the services their states provide — last week.
In Springfield, Ill., Democratic Gov. Pat Quinn celebrated a tax hike on individuals and businesses so that state can foot its bills for education, health care and public safety.
In Indianapolis, Republican Gov. Mitch Daniels proposed a new budget that cuts spending on higher education and some Medicaid services so that Indiana can avoid a tax hike.
Both seemed to find the decisions painful, but they also seem to be after what they genuinely believe is best overall for the citizens of their states. And their decisions gave us a fairly clean and straight-forward case study in how state government operates.
Which governor was the closest to getting it right?
Daniels seized the tax hike as an opportunity to poke fun at Illinois during an interview with a Chicago radio station.
"Oh, you guys are nothing if not entertaining over there," he said. "It's like living next door to 'The Simpsons' — you know, the dysfunctional family down the block — watching you guys do this."
Long-term, Daniels said, it's bad for the region and for the United States if states such as Illinois and Michigan "stay as down, as inhospitable to investment and growth, as they are."
Governments in those states, he said, have been hesitant to decrease spending as quickly as revenue has dipped. He said leaders there "just need to get a little more nerve about 'em."
Fair enough. To use the Greek analogy, Daniels is saying Illinois is flying too close to the sun. But let's not forget that in the past, Daniels has also made a point of ensuring that Indiana isn't flying too close to the sea.
In fact, he proposed a tax increase of his own during his 2005 State of the State address, as he tried to fix a budget that was structurally out of balance.
"Let's each agree to do a thing or two we'd rather not do, temporarily, so that the state we all love might get back on its fiscal feet, and do it now," he said then.
It's important to point out that what Daniels was calling for hardly compares to the tax increase Illinois enacted.
Daniels wanted a 1 percent income tax increase, for one year, and only on the richest 5 percent of Hoosiers — those making more than $100,000 per year.
Illinois passed a 2 percent income tax increase, for four years, on all citizens, and a corporate tax increase on top of that.
Daniels' proposal didn't end up passing. But the next year, he called for a cigarette tax increase, and lawmakers gave him one. He used the money to create the Healthy Indiana Plan, which insures low-income Hoosiers who otherwise might struggle to afford health care.
Today, almost no one would criticize that decision. It seems the governor found the right balance.