A few Days ago, Greece collapsed under a load of debt regularly passed forward
by spendthrift and cowardly politicians to future bill-payers. Now at the mercy
of international loan sharks, the final comeuppance will not be pretty. Among
all the states in the United States, Connecticut most closely resembles Greece
at the tipping point.
Consider: The state is groaning under a load of pension debt, about $44
billion, that hangs by a slender thread over its head like a Damoclean sword.
Fearful – but not too fearful – of hiking taxes to absorb repeated spending
shocks, Connecticut’s progressive government has resorted to other tricks of the budget trade to discharge its debt.
The Malloy administration has twice raised taxes by substantial amounts.
In his first term, Governor Dannel Malloy, eschewing discreditable means of
concealing debt – kicking deficit cans down the road, shifting debt from
current to future budgets and borrowing large sums of money to pay for current
expenses – first imposed on Connecticut the largest tax increase in its
history; then Mr. Malloy increased taxes a second time, after having promised
in his re-election campaign that future deficits would be discharged through
spending cuts.
When progressive leaders in the Democrat dominated General Assembly cut
the spending cuts and progressively increased revenue, Mr. Malloy, besieged by
reporters who wanted to know why he had shamelessly reneged on his campaign
pledges – I will NOT increase taxes -- announced that he had kept his
pledge: The budget he had presented to his cohorts in the General Assembly was
balanced -- it was not – and contained no tax increases – it did. The Malloy
budget contained almost a billion dollars in revenue increases.
A kabuki stage-show followed in which Mr. Malloy pretended
he did not have a veto pen at his disposal nor, apparently, a phone he might
have used to communicate with his comrades in the House and Senate. Reporters
were expected to swallow this load of tripe and cease and desist from putting
questions to Mr. Malloy or the two Democratic leaders of the General Assembly, President
Pro Tem of the Senate Martin Looney and Speaker of the House Brendan Sharkey.
On the sly and, so we are to believe, without a nod of
approval from the nominal head of the Democratic Party in Connecticut, Mr. Sharkey
and Mr. Looney, progressivised the budget, restored some draconian budget cuts,
removed pensions from under the state’s largely fictional Constitutional cap,
drove a tax tap into municipal budgets, and flayed those CEOs of Connecticut
businesses who, their eyes focused on the exit signs, threatened to remove
themselves and their companies from the flaying. Stay here and be whipped said
the two progressive leaders of Connecticut’s governing Democratic triumvirate.
No thanks, said a number of premier businesses in Connecticut – we’re outta
here.
Well now, if it walks like Greece and talks like Greece and swims in
oceans of debt caused by reckless and cowardly politicians led about on leashes
by powerful union leaders, it must be Greece -- or Detroit.
The Malloy
administration to date has been the Gilded Age of gimmickry in Connecticut. It
began auspiciously with ardent promises that the usual gimmicks would be thrown
out the door in the new Democratic Governor’s open, transparent and honest
administration. Alas, the gimmicks have been enlarged and improved since
Republican “firewall” governors John Rowland and Jodi Rell left office many
years ago. And the most glittering gimmick on Connecticut’s stage just now, if
one discounts a number of pathetic, union dependent, Democratic members of
Connecticut closed-shop General Assembly, is the budget itself, which carries
forward for 30 years a massive, $100 billion infrastructure repair program,
the financing for which was supposed to have been immured in an easily picked “lockbox.” This year, progressive thieves
in the General Assembly have decided to dispense with the lockbox Mr. Malloy insisted upon as a conditio sine qua non of his
multi-billion dollar spending program, plundering to commence immediately.
The kabuki budget
retains most of the punishing taxes and regulations and big ticket spending
items placed in it by hard-of-hearing, merciless Democratic progressives in the
General Assembly, but some few of the whips and handcuff are deferred to a
later date in the hope that a temporary reprieve will change minds and hearts
in the boardrooms of Connecticut’s largest employers. Now that the Connecticut
Malloy-Sharkey-Looney triumvirate have inserted into the tax swollen budget a
measure that will assign to a study committee ways of improving the business
climate in Greece on the Connecticut River, perhaps the flow of moving vans transporting
whipped companies and taxpayers out of the state might be reversed.
This is just the
kind of hopeful but perverse refusal to recognize reality that preceded the
collapse of Greece. In Edgar Allen Poe’s “The Masque of the Red Death” the
lords and ladies in Prince Prospero’s impregnable castle hardly notice
that the Red Death, first having ravaged the countryside, has slipped in among them while they amuse themselves with games and other pleasantries, a perfect metaphor of Connecticut’s economic and social
condition.
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