Having raised taxes during his first term by $1.5 billion,
the largest tax increase in state history, Governor Dannel Malloy is now poised
to sign a biennial budget the bottom line of which is either $36.6 billion or $44
billion, according to CTMirror. Over two years,” CTMirror
reports, “the new budget would spend $44 billion, based on the current method for
reporting Medicaid spending,” a true figure of expenses now hidden behind an
iron mask of gimmickry.
Democrats
in the General Assembly – Republicans by design were excluded in the
construction of both Mr. Malloy’s budgets – this year engaged in the most
costly gimmick in state history, moving upwards of $6 billion in Medicaid costs
outside the state’s constitutional cap, a sleigh of hand that makes a fiction
of both the cap and the constitutional voice of all the citizens in
Connecticut, whatever their political affiliation.
Medicare costs for the next fiscal year amount to about $5.3 billion, part of which, about $3 billion, is offset by federal aid. The federal government -- now in arrears by about $17 trillion, a debt that has been increasing on an average of $2.77 billion per day since September 30, 2012 -- partially finances Medicaid for the first two years of Obamacare, after which the states assume payment for both the program and Medicaid liabilities, which will be considerable.
The
constitutional cap was a legislative placebo offered by the administration of
former Governor Lowell Weicker that enabled Mr. Weicker to harness a few votes
in the General Assembly to pass his 1991 income tax – after Mr. Weicker had
publically sworn in his gubernatorial campaign that instituting an income tax
while the state was facing a deficit of a little over $1 billion would be like
“pouring gas in a fire.” The ploy worked, the income tax was passed and, in the
course of the following two decades, the bottom line of Connecticut’s budget
more than tripled – that’s TRIPLED. Connecticut’s last pre-income tax budget
was $7.5 billion; the current Malloy budget is $18.6 billion in the fiscal year
beginning July 1 and $19 billion the next fiscal year.
In
2013, we may conclude positively and without any ambiguity 1) that spending
follows in the rut of taxation so that increased taxation ALWAYS is followed by
commensurate increases in spending, 2) the word “constitutional” is an term of
art among Connecticut progressives in the legislature and the state house, and
3) Connecticut is now – like some of its corruption clogged, mismanaged cities
– a one party state.
The
two most important characteristics of progressivism are its disdain for limits
and its blind faith in the omni-competence of government. Joined to a unitary
state, the heady combination is both intoxicating and corrosive to liberties.
Not only is the Malloy administration the most expensive in state history, it
is also the most aggressively progressive.
Democrats in Connecticut completed their absolute
control of state government the day after Dannel Malloy was sworn in as
Governor, and the problem with absolute power, Lord Acton reminds us, is that
it corrupts absolutely. “Great men,” Lord Acton averred, “are almost always bad
men.”
The limitless power now enjoyed by Democrats in
Connecticut would make a saint stray in the direction of arrogance, and none of
the members of the state’s General Assembly are saints. If men were saints,
government itself would be unnecessary; so said James Madison, widely regarded
as the father of the U.S. Constitution as well as the Bill of Rights, both of
which set limits to governmental power.
Madison’s full quote, found in the Federalist
Papers, should be swallowed whole unparsed:
If men were angels, no
government would be necessary. If angels were to govern men, neither external
nor internal controls on government would be necessary. In framing a government
which is to be administered by men over men, the great difficulty lies in this:
you must first enable the government to control the governed; and in the next
place oblige it to control itself. A dependence on the people is, no doubt, the
primary control on the government; but experience
has taught mankind the necessity of auxiliary precautions.”
One of the auxiliary precautions that people
supposed would prevent the state’s General Assembly from spending at will was
the constitutional budget cap – RIP, June 1, 2013.
Comments