A recent CTMirror story by veteran journalist Mark Pazniokas, “How Marty Looney shapes CT politics, Patience and persistence,” is, a staple of Pazniokas’ writing, both amusing and informative.
We find that Looney, whose political life spans more than 45
years, is Irish Catholic, a union supporter like his father, independent-minded
like his mother, and persevering. In sketching Looney’s character, Pazniokas
might easily have quoted Mark Twain: “The miracle or the power that elevates
the few is to be found in their industry, application and perseverance under
the promptings of a brave, determined spirit.”
There are, of course, two kinds of perseverance. Both the Devil
and St. Michael the Archangel are, many Catholics believe, persevering
creatures.
The success of perseverance in politics depends upon a few
variables. Looney may best be described as a leftist Democrat in a Connecticut
Democrat political party apparatus properly characterized as “left of center” and
not “liberal” in the sense that former President John F. Kennedy economic policy
was liberal.
Like New York City mayor socialist Zorhan Mamdani, Looney stands
to the left of his own party. Looney is, as state Senate president pro tem, one
of two important gatekeepers in Connecticut’s General Assembly. Matt Ritter is House
Speaker. Both Democrat gatekeepers are in charge of admitting bills into the
state legislature; they control legislative business in a legislature heavily
dominated by Democrats. When a majority of political angels and political
numbers are on your side, persistence, not in every case a virtue, becomes an effortless
exercise in repetition, and repetition is the lazy man’s stand-in for purifying
analytical thought.
The governor of Connecticut, Ned Lamont, is often presented
by Connecticut’s legacy media as an economic conservative and social liberal. Lamont,
who may exercise a veto power over bills that have passed both Houses of the
General Assembly, is also a Democrat legislative gatekeeper. He may affect the
nature of bills both through persuasion and direct action. Largely owing to
numbers, the Democrat caucus in the General Assembly, led by Looney and Ritter,
reigns supreme. Connecticut, for good or ill, has been a one-party state for
the last three decades. How that intelligence has slipped by unnoticed by
political commentators, reporters and progressive movements such as “No Kings”
is a mystery beyond finding out.
In Pazniokas’ account, “Jack Keyes, who is Looney’s law
partner and one of his oldest friends, calls Looney ‘a Sermon-on-the-Mount
Catholic,’ a believer that blessed are the poor.”
And here we come to the nub of the matter. We are, all of us
– poor, middleclass and rich alike – blessed or cursed by economic policy.
Excessive spending is the political apple given to Adam in Connecticut’s Garden
of Eden, and post-modern progressivism, contaminated by an alien Marxist strain,
has become a helicopter-mom politics, the state serving as a disabling mom.
There are in Connecticut two political parties: a dominant
progressive party that rejects out of hand any attempt to cut taxes, and a free
market driven conservative contingent that would, were they in power, boost
economic development by means of tax cuts – be it noted, not tax rebates, always
temporary, or tax credits, both of which provide temporary relief and campaign
bragging rights.
At the national level, progressives favor spending
increases, large continuing deficits, excessive regulation and lately an
elimination of tariffs. They correctly perceive that a tariff is in practice a
consumption tax and their opposition to tariffs is an unstated acknowledgement
of a conservative, free market dictum that whatever you tax tends to disappear.
If you tax wealth, for instance, wealth will disappear.
Kennedy’s way
Conservatives tend to be supply-siders. The solution to high
energy costs, they believe, is an increase in the supply of energy; in
addition, all and every energy regulation is at bottom a tax on a creative, profit
driven market place in which consumers, rather than politicians, determine
successful products through their purchasing activity. Former President John
Kennedy was a supply-side free market liberal known well for his quip “a rising
tide lifts all the boats.” A year before he was assassinated, Kennedy laid out
a new strategy for lifting all the boats. His address to the New York Economics
club has been preserved in the following YouTube video. Connecticut Commentary quoted
liberally from the speech in June 2013. This is, in part, what he said:
“There are a number of
ways by which the federal government can meet its responsibilities to aid
economic growth… the most direct and significant kind of federal action aiding
economic growth is to make possible an increase in private consumption and
investment demand -- to cut the fetters which hold back private spending. In
the past, this could be done in part by the increased use of credit and
monetary tools, but our balance of payments today places limits on our use of
those tools for expansion. It could also be done by increasing federal
expenditures more rapidly than necessary, but such a course would soon
demoralize both the government and our economy. If government is to retain the
confidence of the people, it must not spend more than can be justified on
grounds of national need or spent with maximum efficiency.
“The final and best
means of strengthening demands among consumers and business is to reduce the
burden on private income and the deterrents to private initiative which are
imposed by our present tax system – and this administration pledged itself last
summer to an across-the-board, top-to-bottom cut in personal and corporate
income taxes to be enacted and become effective in 1963…”
Connecticut Commentary noted, “Kennedy was as good as his
word. His program was enacted and a cataract of funds poured into the national
treasury. Following Mr. Kennedy’s tax cuts, enacted after the president’s death
in the Johnson administration, unemployment was reduced from 5.2% in 1964 to
4.5% in 1965 and further fell to 3.8% in 1966.
Though it had been estimated that the cuts would result in a loss of
revenue, tax revenue increased in 1964 and 1965. The tide had lifted all the
boats. After Mr. Kennedy’s assassination, his successor, President Lyndon
Johnson, diverted much of the swelling revenues to finance his Great Society
programs.”
Kennedy was a liberal Democrat, Looney is a progressive
Democrat. There is a categorical and practical difference between the two. As
to taxes, hard strapped taxpayers in Connecticut longing for spending cuts -- a
practical solution to inflation and irresponsible, campaign driven government
-- are becoming impatient with progressives now in charge of state budgets who
never met a deficit that discomforted them.
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