The lady doubtless has her reasons. Responding to Governor
Dannel Malloy’s recent boast, “I have made it clear that I am not proposing the
raising of any taxes and I oppose the raising of taxes across the board,” Mrs.
Boucher said, a note of exasperation in her voice, “Where are they going to
take the money from? You can’t be running hundreds of millions in shortfalls
every year. It sounds like they want to withhold road and education aid to
towns and cities. People are worried about the financial crisis and tolls and
higher gas taxes and mansion taxes.”
There are sixteen union contracts with state employees up for
renewal this year. Savings, Mrs. Boucher noted, can be found there. Union
contract negotiations did not take pride of place in Mr. Malloy’s State of the
State address before the Democratic dominated legislative body that had affirmed
all the budgets that, soon after they were presented to the General Assembly,
quickly spun out of balance.
Mrs. Boucher may have been reacting to the repeated shunning
of Republicans during Mr. Malloy’s entire term in office. There are no serious
Republican fingerprints on any of Mr. Malloy’s budgets; indeed, GOP leaders in
the General Assembly were by design excluded from all budget discussions. A
crack in Mr. Malloy’s iron curtain parted recently to allow Republican leaders
to participate in pre-budget discussions, but that was mainly for show, a
subterfuge particularly galling to Themis Klarides, the GOP Minority Leader in
the House, who said Mr. Malloy and Democratic Leaders Martin Looney and Brendan
Sharkey simply “wanted our fingerprints on the murder weapon” – a budget
chronically out of balance that does not seriously address the State of the State, which is, despite Mr. Malloy’s sunny assurances, heading at warp speed
towards a bankruptcy cliff.
Days before Mr. Malloy’s State of the State address, the indispensable Yankee Institute,
sent out a release on an audit of the state budget: “While Public Act 11-48
required the state government to use GAAP accounting, the report found that
state accounting is not meeting that standard.
Instead, it continues to utilize the modified cash basis of accounting
as a compromise to avoid significant operational changes in Core-CT processes.
As a result, budgets are not being controlled on a GAAP basis, and monthly
reporting on the Core-CT system is not on a GAAP basis.”
In previous reports, the auditors had noted that “the University of Connecticut, the University of Connecticut Health
Center, the Connecticut State University, the Connecticut Community Colleges,
the Office of Legislative Management and the Judicial Department are allowed to
operate as limited scope Core-CT agencies. These agencies process their
transactions through their own accounting systems and then periodically enter
the information into the Core-CT system.”
Applying GAAP standards to Core-CT agencies, the auditor’s
report showed that “Connecticut's net position is negative $35.3 billion, which
is $22.7 billion more (emphasis mine) in the red than reported in 2014.” This is
not a negligible accounting error; it is deliberate avoidance of statutory
responsibility by tax supported entities.
In this year’s budget address, Mr. Malloy has requested an
increase in his “discretionary power” over budgets. But – funny thing about constitutionally
allocated powers in a tripartite system of governance – the power to adjust
budgets with which Mr. Malloy wants to adorn himself is one that belongs
properly to the legislative branch, and any additional power over revenue
receipts and expenditures delegated by the legislature to the governor is
permanently lost to the budget writing branch of government. A very strong
argument can be made that Mr. Malloy’s recission authority – the much abused
authority to make limited budget cuts – should be withdrawn from a government
that is chronically incapable of balancing budgets.
Some responsible Democratic legislators, as well as Senate
Republican leader Len Fasano, who has a long and accurate memory, will resist Mr. Malloy’s power grab.
The General Assembly must have unimpeded authority to set policy and allocate
budget amounts on a line-item basis, Mr. Fasano said, “That’s our job.”
Mr. Malloy’s governing template is Wilsonian. President
Woodrow Wilson regarded the constitutional separation of powers doctrine as a useless
impediment, as do most modern progressives who have grown up in his shadow.
During his first few weeks in office, Mr. Malloy a) presented his budget to the
Democratic dominated General Assembly; b) accepted minor revisions and signed
the budget; c) negotiated very expensive contracts with SEBAC union
representatives; d) agreed to union revisions that materially altered future
budgets years out, and e) received from Democratic leaders in the General
Assembly plenipotentiary powers to accept a revised budget that had not be
resubmitted to the General Assembly for affirmation.
All of which has inescapably led to increased spending,
increased taxes, chronically out-of-balance budgets, opaque, not-responsive
government agencies, and more dodges, budgetary sleight of hand and media
manipulation than can be found in the usual failed European socialist state –
think Greece – or, to bring the horrid budgetary mess closer to home, any
socialist south of the border state presided over by the usual autocratic
caudillo – think Venezuela – which used to be called the Paris of South America
before Hugo Chavez sank his vampire teeth into its lovely neck.
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