The LooneyDuff to
Connecticut taxpayers: “Yes, we can
spend our way to Prosperity”
The headline in the Hartford Courant – “Lamont confronts spending cap” --
was slightly and unintentionally misleading. Actually, Lamont is, and has been
for his whole term in office, confronting Democrat gatekeepers in the General
Assembly, two of whom, President Pro Tempore of the State Senate Martin Looney
and Majority Leader Bob Duff, are arch progressives. House leader Matt Ridder
is more cautious than Looney, whose largely urban district has been in Democrat
hands for decades.
Perhaps operating under the false pretenses of British
economist John Maynard Keynes who famously suggested that states needn’t worry
overmuch about their national debt because “It is a debt we owe to ourselves,”
Connecticut’s debt lovers have been in the business for decades of boosting the
state’s accumulative deficit. Under the direction of dominant state Democrats,
Connecticut has managed to compile a gargantuan state debt of close to $80
billion.
In a September 29 , 2021 Yankee Institute report, Marc Fitch
told us, “According to Truth in Accounting’s annual Financial State of the
States 2021 report, Connecticut’s overall debt increased in 2020, leaving each
taxpayer with an overall state debt burden of $62,500 per taxpayer. The average
debt burden across the country was $9,300 which, as the report notes, is $2000
worse than last year… Using the latest Comprehensive Annual Financial Report,
Truth in Accounting found Connecticut’s total debt related to retirement costs,
bonding and other debt totaled $79.5 billion. Connecticut’s ranking in the
report dropped from 48th in 2020 to 50th in 2020.”
Fitch’s figures pointed to a multi-decade upward increase in spending
and a downward decrease in debt payment.
Looney in particular
has rarely supported spending cuts, perhaps the most efficient way to reduce
mounting expenditures. Any talk on the Democrats part of reducing expenditures
by cutting state unionized personnel is verboten.
The spending
guardrails
When, a short time ago, the General Assembly, with the
assistance of minority Republicans, enacted so called “spending guardrails,”
the state’s borrowing costs significantly improved because reliable national
and international rating agencies valued upwards Connecticut’s economic status.
Connecticut’s business climate began shimmering, a signal to surrounding
spendthrift states to send to “the land of steady habits” productive profit
enhancing businesses seeking to escape the claws of ravenous tax hungry neo-progressive
politicians.
Connecticut’s promising state surplus swelled significantly
– such things happen when responsible adults facing repeating debt gird their
loins and reduce spending. The swelling surplus has now caught the eyes of
chronic spenders in our Democrat dominated General Assembly. To
neo-progressives such as Looney and Duff, any state surplus is an irresistible
temptation to increase spending, and net spending, once increased, rarely is
reduced.
So then where are we as a state right now?
We have a governor in Ned Lamont who presents himself as a
moderate or “fiscal conservative” in economic matters and a cutting edge
neo-progressive on social issues.
For decades after so called “economic pragmatist” Lowell
Weicker graced Connecticut with a state income tax, succeeding governors and
spendthrift members of the state’s General Assembly did not dedicate a single
dollar to the payment of a mounting state debt. The first serious attempt to
control spending – and therefore debt -- was taken when Republicans captured
one house of the General Assembly. Bowing to a short-lived change in Democrat
political dominance, the General Assembly enacted spending guardrails, and the
guardrails produced a continuing surplus.
The word “surplus” is here used advisedly – with a sardonic
twist. If the state’s entire surplus had been used to discharge the state’s
accumulated deficit, Connecticut would still be in arrears for non-payment of
outstanding debt. If the assets of all the state’s millionaires were to be
expropriated by tax-hungry neo-progressive Democrats in the state legislature
and the millionaires themselves were to be lodged in gulags in, say, toney
Greenwich Connecticut, thereby reducing their future depredations, state debt
would continue to increase in the absence of permanent spending cuts enacted by
a General Assembly of responsible adults.
There is one and only one way to discharge Connecticut’s
debt, and that is by paying off the debt, rather than by striking a “fiscally
conservative” pose and continuing to spend highly inflated money on tax
chomping groups that support the re-election efforts of spendthrift Democrats.
Among Connecticut’s productive tax paying citizens, only a
few dunderheads were surprised when Looney and Duff proposed that the spending
guardrails – but not state spending – should be trimmed. The irresistible
temptation to spend money gathered but not yet disbursed will always override
responsible governance for neo-progressives.
The LooneyDuff guardrail trimming -- which opens the
possibility that the spending cap may be exceeded by $61 million -- caused
Lamont to pull back on the spending reins, and Jeffrey Beckham, Lamont’s budget
director, promptly sent a memo “to all agency heads last week that said
officials will closely scrutinize filling jobs in all categories: full-time,
part-time, temporary, and durational,” according to the Courant.
“Effective immediately,” Beckham wrote in his memo, “hiring
will be curtailed. The Office of Policy and Management will consider position
requests that it determines are essential for critical agency operations and
will evaluate such requests on a case-by-case basis. To support position
requests, agencies must submit complete justifications as to the criticality of
the position to be filled, including detailed explanations of need,
implications of not filling the position, and alternatives that have been
considered in lieu of filling the position.”
The canned response from Looney and Duff was not unexpected.
The presence of the state budget surplus accompanied by the proposed
constraints on spending, the two said, demonstrate that “any directives for
cuts or freezes from the Office of Policy and Management are premature and only
reinforce the need for further modifications to our onerous and outdated budget
constraints.”
Translation: Looney and Duff would rather abolish the
constraints on spending than to address responsibly an outstanding net state debt of $54 billon.
Truly, who does Beckham think he is – Elon Musk?
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