Skip to main content

Rell’s Non-traditional Approach To Bonding

The Democrat’s bonding proposal is understandable only as a campaign strategy.

Speaker of the House Jim Amann argues that Rell need not veto the Democrat bonding plan, busting with unaffordable but delicious goodies, because the governor is authorized by “tradition” to exercise what amounts to a line item veto. If the governor does not like a specific line item in the bonding package, it cannot be passed into law without her approval.

This tradition enables Democrats to front load bond packages with earmarks that will keep Democrat legislators in line, and it has the additional advantage of making the governor appear to be less than caring when she nixes the window dressing funds proposed by generous and compassionate Democrats.

In the best of all possible worlds, bonding would be reserved for capital projects that benefit the whole state, since the interest on bonding is paid by state rather than municipal taxpayers. But, somewhere along the line, the rational boundaries of bonding expanded to include municipal projects, and it was all downhill from there.

Governors, mostly Republicans, used bonding to persuade legislative leaders, mostly Democrats, to soften their hard core positions on bills. Legislators, mostly Democrat, used bonding to whip their troops in line to support bills favored by leaders in the House and Senate. Hey, you want that bridge to nowhere in East Podunck? Okay, you got it – provided you vote in favor of a stinker of a bill that might just put you in Dutch with your constituents; no vote, no bridge. Made an offer of this kind, even legislators of steely purpose and incorruptible principles might be swayed by fatal second thoughts. All state Houses are frat-houses presided over by harried house-mothers attempting, sometimes successfully, to keep the boys and girls from burning down the place. Parceling out goodies is one of Amann’s many benevolent whips.

When Gov. Jodi Rell vetoed the Democrat’s $3.2 billion general-obligation bond package rather than submit to a political process that closely resembles earmarking, she not only violated an honored tradition that for years has kept the legislature in Democrat hands; she lubricated the rhetoric that drives the tradition.

Rell claimed the bond package was larded with special projects requested by legislators, mostly Democrats. Her charge was answered in a major newspaper by Amann. The bond package, Amann pointed out, was little more than a legislative wish list, essentially a campaign document. The wish list could not be actualized unless the bond commission, controlled by the governor, assented to it.

It was like reading the private diary of a porcine young boy with two stomachs who was attempting to convince his mom that she should let him loose in a candy store with her credit card because the proprietor could always exercise his option to refuse to sell him sweets if he bought too much.

Rell’s veto put in Limbo about $1.4 billion in borrowing dedicated primarily for transportation and clean water projects, and this gave Democrats an opportunity to sharpen their campaign rhetoric.

“If the governor is serious about reducing the debt she helped create,” Amann wrote in his op-ed piece, “let her tell the public which town’s school construction, bridge and road repairs, flood control or sewage treatment projects need to be put off.” Amann then asserted that the “targeted community investments” Democrats had included in their bonding package, a slender $145 million, represented “less than 5% of the total bond package.

The claim that rejected bond proposals are negligible when measured against the whole package now threatens to become as traditional as the similar claim that budget cuts are negligible when measured against gargantuan budgets. That claim has helped increase the state’s budget from a pre-income tax bottom line of $7.5 billion to it’s present $16.5 billion within little more than a decade. Bonding packages have increased during the same time period by a similar amount.

Amann often has billed himself as a “fiscal conservative,” a private tradition now overcome by an irresistible itch to increase both the budget and bonding. With fiscal conservatives like Amann at the helm of the House, who needs reckless spenders?

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

The Blumenthal Burisma Connection

Steve Hilton , a Fox News commentator who over the weekend had connected some Burisma corruption dots, had this to say about Connecticut U.S. Senator Dick Blumenthal’s association with the tangled knot of corruption in Ukraine: “We cross-referenced the Senate co-sponsors of Ed Markey's Ukraine gas bill with the list of Democrats whom Burisma lobbyist, David Leiter, routinely gave money to and found another one -- one of the most sanctimonious of them all, actually -- Sen. Richard Blumenthal."

Powell, the JI, And Economic literacy

Powell, Pesci Substack The Journal Inquirer (JI), one of the last independent newspapers in Connecticut, is now a part of the Hearst Media chain. Hearst has been growing by leaps and bounds in the state during the last decade. At the same time, many newspapers in Connecticut have shrunk in size, the result, some people seem to think, of ad revenue smaller newspapers have lost to internet sites and a declining newspaper reading public. Surviving papers are now seeking to recover the lost revenue by erecting “pay walls.” Like most besieged businesses, newspapers also are attempting to recoup lost revenue through staff reductions, reductions in the size of the product – both candy bars and newspapers are much smaller than they had been in the past – and sell-offs to larger chains that operate according to the social Darwinian principles of monopolistic “red in tooth and claw” giant corporations. The first principle of the successful mega-firm is: Buy out your predator before he swallows

Down The Rabbit Hole, A Book Review

Down the Rabbit Hole How the Culture of Corrections Encourages Crime by Brent McCall & Michael Liebowitz Available at Amazon Price: $12.95/softcover, 337 pages   “ Down the Rabbit Hole: How the Culture of Corrections Encourages Crime ,” a penological eye-opener, is written by two Connecticut prisoners, Brent McCall and Michael Liebowitz. Their book is an analytical work, not merely a page-turner prison drama, and it provides serious answers to the question: Why is reoffending a more likely outcome than rehabilitation in the wake of a prison sentence? The multiple answers to this central question are not at all obvious. Before picking up the book, the reader would be well advised to shed his preconceptions and also slough off the highly misleading claims of prison officials concerning the efficacy of programs developed by dusty old experts who have never had an honest discussion with a real convict. Some of the experts are more convincing cons than the cons, p