Almost immediately after Governor Dannel Malloy and
Democrats in the General Assembly had put their budget to bed, a Hartford paper
noted that however much lipstick Democrats put on the budget porker it was in
many important respects still a pig.
Another media resource noted
that while the governor had indicated he had been faithful to his earlier
promise to hold the line on taxes – but not, tellingly, on spending – the new
budget, Mr. Malloy’s second, placed new limits on tax credits, extended
expiring taxes, boosted the gasoline tax 4 cents per gallon, drained from the
transportation fund $120 million
collected at the pumps during the last two years, depositing the money targeted
for transportation needs into the general fund, resorted to $550 million worth
of fund raids to plug holes in the budget, borrowed about two thirds of the $1.2
billion necessary to convert to a GAAP accounting system and shifted a little
more than $6 billion of Medicaid spending from a constitutional capped budget
so as to draw down an otherwise embarrassing deficit.
And so the budget session ended -- in magic tricks of a kind
once derided by Mr. Malloy and the Malloyalists.
On to the campaign.
The first campaign pitch of the season was delivered by Mr.
Malloy at the close of the session. The closing session of the General Assembly
usually ends with a love fest among incumbent legislators, both Democrats and
Republicans, who fetch from it bragging rights useful to them in upcoming
campaigns.
This year was different, frostier some have noted. Those
who pay for the legislative bills may want to applaud the last day of the
legislative session. Mark Twain, were he alive – and even dead he is livelier
than most people in Connecticut who write about politicians – certainly would
have reason to rejoice. It was Twain who said “No man's life, liberty,
or property are safe while the legislature is in session.”
On the last day of the legislative session, the Bureau of Economic Analysis reported that
Connecticut had come in dead last among the 50 states in economic growth, a
measure of the combined total of goods, services and salaries, the state’s
equivalent of the nation’s Gross Domestic Product (GDP). Connecticut’s
Gross State Product (GSP) fell by 1 percent in both 2011 and 2012, the only
state in the nation that had experienced such a dip as well as a painful
downward revision from last year’s estimate of 2 percent growth.
Democrats pronounced their budget plan a success and loudly
patted themselves on the back, brushing aside a report from the state’s
non-partisan Office of Fiscal Analysis that had projected, only moments after
the General Assembly adjourned, a $712 million gap in the first year of
Connecticut’s new budget. Mr.
Malloy, whose budgets have consistently been short by hundreds of millions of
dollars, pointed out that the economy was not static but dynamic: “They're
predicting deficits assuming that all conditions remain the same. I think what
we've shown fairly broadly in this administration is that conditions don't
remain the same. We're eliminating waste. We have numbers built in the budget
that in fact do that."
Ah yes -- the
numbers.
Comptroller Kevin
Lembo this year submitted to the General Assembly a bill that would throw
windows open on the numbers and expose to public view the hundreds of
millions of dollars the state spends every year in economic assistance and tax
credits putatively designed to promote economic development and job growth. His
legislation, the Comptroller said, “would have established key transparency and
open government measures related to these dollars.” Although Mr. Lembo’s sunshine bill survived the House, it died
from inattention on the floor of the Senate, crushed by the forces of darkness
in the General Assembly that prefer a gloaming in which numbers might more
efficiently be fudged. Mr. Lembo, it should be mentioned, is the only Democrat
in state government whose numbers have been consistently correct.
When legislative
gate keepers Senate President Pro Tempore Donald Williams and Majority
Leader Martin Looney were asked why
they didn't call the bill for a vote, “Williams and Looney,” Jon Lender of the Hartford Courant reported,
“mentioned a number of factors, including time, lack of an urgent need, and
what they characterized as only lukewarm support by the office of Gov. Dannel
P. Malloy.”
When politicians find they cannot control the course of
events, they more strenuously seek to control the flow of information, the
better to create politically palatable fictional narratives – sometimes called
campaigns. In a state in which competing parties have been neutered, fictional
campaign talking points are rarely effectively rebutted by a somnolent
politically compromised media. Some few reporters in the state stand out as
exceptions that prove this rule, but there are far too few of them.
The state Republican Party enjoyed two brief bright moments
of bipartisan conviviality a short time ago when Republican votes were needed
to pass a gun restriction law. The two parties came together a second time when
Mr. Malloy needed Republican assistance in plugging an ever recurring hole in
his first budget during a special session. After this bright dot of bipartisan
sunshine, both the governor and Democratic legislative leaders, brought down
the now familiar iron curtain when, for the second time, Republicans were
shooed out of the room during budget negotiations.
The doleful Bureau
of Economic Analysis report is more than a report; it is a marker of the
state’s destiny. And the state’s swollen budget is also a directional marker.
Budget wise, the state has returned to 1991, the date at which a state income
tax was implemented to put Connecticut on a firm and permanent economic
footing. Because spending has tripled since that auspicious date, the foundation
has given way. The state is progressing backwards. Our destiny points downward,
the usual direction of a one party operation. Darkness, secrecy, shady backroom
dealings and the politics of the shadows has always followed in the uncontested
rut of the one party state.
Comments
Governor Malloy and our legislators still don't get it.
They are the leaders of The League of Economic Morons.