It may not be too soon to consider, if only as a
hypothetical exercise, what a second Malloy administration might be like.
There is a short and a long answer. A second administration
would look very much like the first. Republicans, kept idle on the back
benches, would be curtly cut out of governing. During his first administration,
Governor Dannel Malloy simply waved Republicans away from the budget
negotiating table and formed a tax and spending plan through secret, closed
door negotiations with Democratic General Assembly party leaders.
Once a budget template had been agreed upon, Democrats in
the General Assembly outfitted Mr. Malloy with near plenipotentiary powers to
negotiate union contracts with SEBAC, a consortium of public employee unions.
Following negotiations, prolonged because union rank and file members appeared to misunderstand the terms of the agreement – which was exceedingly favorable
to them, according to Edith Prague, one of the most pro-union legislators in
the General Assembly -- Mr. Malloy’s readjusted budget was not resubmitted to
the legislature for re-approval.
Unless a miracle occurs before people tramp to the polls on
November 4th, Democrats will continue to dominate both houses of the
legislature. Most media outlets in the state, abandoning any effective opposition
to Connecticut’s one party ruling apparatus, appear to be satisfied with the
present political arrangement in which Democrats effectively control not only
the governor’s office and the General Assembly, but also all the state’s
Constitutional offices, as well as the entire U.S. Congressional delegation. Mr.
Malloy’s second budget, therefore, is a done deal —maybe.
There is a troubling hitch. The gimmes in the state,
progressives with knives in their brains, have set their sights on a more
steeply progressive income tax. A soak the millionaires tax has been a dream of
the extreme left in Connecticut ever since then Governor Lowell Weicker
instituted the state’s income tax. That brass ring is now within reach, and
more progressive business taxes are not off the table, which may help to
explain why businesses in the state are eyeing the exit signs. The gimmes’
rhetorical opponent is Mr. Malloy, the author of the highest tax increase in state
history, who has said numerous times during the current gubernatorial campaign
that he a) will not increase taxes or b) cut spending. Ruling progressives in
the General Assembly, always averse to spending cuts, are rather hoping that
Mr. Malloy’s opposition to further taxation is a convenient campaign pose.
Ironically, Mr. Malloy is the state’s last tax and spend
“firewall.” Once the progressive ascendancy has been reaffirmed in the coming
general election, the way will open to a more steeply progressive tax on
those millionaires in Connecticut whom both Mr. Malloy and other Democrats have
assailed as ravishers of the poor. After all, had not Mr. Malloy during his
first campaign claimed unequivocally, “Raising taxes is the last thing I’ll do?”
Upon being installed as governor, the first thing Mr. Malloy did was to drape
around Middle Class necks in Connecticut massive tax increases.
The increases were necessary to restore depleted slush funds
later used by Mr. Malloy to bribe multi-billion dollar companies such as United
Technologies to remain in a state that has driven away from its doors wealth
producing, over-regulated and over-taxed companies. A cut in all business taxes
might have lifted all the boats – leveling the playing field at the same time,
now tilted to benefit Mr. Malloy’s pet companies -- but progressives such as
Mr. Malloy preferred to engage in crony capitalism, a process in which
taxpayers assume all the risks of Mr. Malloy’s “investments,” while state
assisted companies consume all the tax benefits. The same taxes and regulations
that kill entrepreneurial activity in Connecticut boost the political fortunes
of its crony capitalist politicians.
Within Connecticut’s Democratic Party, effective opposition
to ruinous taxation, over-regulation and crony capitalism has all but
disappeared. In Connecticut, and elsewhere in the Northeast progressive
rustbelt, what used to be called, rather wistfully, “the vital center,” a moderate
media res between right and left, has
vanished, the center having moved to the extreme left. Mr. Malloy has become
the Eugene Debs of Connecticut politics. There is no effective and active
opposition to his right, either from right of center Republicans or vanquished
Democratic moderates.
So then, Connecticut citizens may expect during a second
Malloy term higher taxes, more spending, more crony capitalism, more
puff-puffery from politicians who have pledged to rescue the state from the
ditch into which they have driven it, more cuckoldry from Connecticut’s
quisling media and more progressivism, which is itself the disease it purports
to cure.
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