Governor Dannel Malloy has not been able to discover from
cross-talk between his office and CEO of Aetna Insurance Company Mark Bertolini whether
Aetna, following the company’s merger with Humana, will move its headquarters
out of state. The resolution of this mystery is important because a removal of Aetna’s
headquarters from Connecticut will reduce the state’s revenue stream. Should
Aetna pull a GE on Mr. Malloy, Connecticut's notoriously out-of-balance budget
will suffer yet another inconvenient battering – this on the eve of state
elections.
For this reason, efforts have been made to decipher the cryptic comments Mr. Bertolini earlier made to Aetna stockholders. Like the oracles
of the “False Prophet Alexander” lampooned by the Roman satirist Lucian, which oracles were richly detailed but
opaque, obscure and non-responsive, Mr. Bertolini’s statements to his stockholders admit of several meanings.
Their sense has befuddled both Mr. Malloy and Luke Bronin, the Mayor of
Hartford, a city now teetering on the brink of bankruptcy.
In one account,
Mr. Malloy confessed his administration was attempting to "get to the
bottom" of Mr. Bertolini’s obscure comment that Aetna is reviewing where
to locate its corporate headquarters; Mr. Bronin, having emerged from a meeting
with Mr. Bertolini, announced that Aetna, anchored in Hartford since 1853, was
"clearly considering the size" of its presence in the city.
“Are you going or staying?” is not a riddle of the Sphinx.
Here is Mr. Bertolini, the tease, tickling his stockholders' ears during Aetna’s annual meeting on May, 20: The Company, Mr. Bertolini said,
was required by the purchase agreement it had signed with Humera to move some
jobs to Louisville, Kentucky's largest city, home to Humera. And, the oracle
added enticingly, “Having said that, the rest of all of our real estate is
under review.” Aetna's corporate headquarters, Mr. Bertolini said, will remain
in Hartford – “until further notice.” In the post-GE period, one hears bells
tolling in such ambiguous language. Do the bells toll for Connecticut?
Mr. Malloy has confessed that neither he nor members of his
administration know how to interpret Mr. Bertolini’s evident unwillingness to
“commit to Connecticut,” as one paper put it.
"We're trying to read into that," said Mr. Malloy.
"We're trying to get to the bottom of it and look forward to doing
that."
The befuddlement of Democratic leaders in Connecticut is
becoming tiresome – and needlessly repetitive. Long before General Electric pulled
up its incorporation stake in Connecticut, moving its headquarters to Boston,
members of the Malloy administration and Democratic leaders in the state’s
Democratic dominated General Assembly were attempting to interpret unequivocal statements made
by General Electric CEO Jeff Immelt that taxes were too high, regulations too
entangling and budgeting at the State Capitol too hectic and unpredictable to
provide the necessary stability for businesses located in Connecticut. When the
chronically broke General Assembly, deaf to all pleadings, raised business
taxes by $700 million and initiated a new data processing tax, Aetna spokeswoman Cynthia Michener weighed in: “Such an action will result in Aetna
looking to reconsider the viability of continuing major operations in the
state."
Nothing cryptic there.
President and chief executive officer of the Metro Hartford Alliance Oz Griebel politely suggested that state planning should keep pace with corporate planning.
Budget crises were too frequent and tax policy too haphazard: “If companies are
looking out five to 15 years, the political structure has to do the same.”
State Republicans have been bold enough to suggest several
times that the frenetic patching of budget holes with tax and fee increases and
excessive borrowing will not be enough to pull Connecticut out of its nosedive.
Investor’s Business Daily (IBD) now reports that Connecticut has descended to last place in a “Best Run State” ranking. “The
ten most financially sound states in the country,” IBD reports, “are all
heavily Republican, while all but one of the ten worst states are heavily
Democratic.”
The state’s befuddling problem is easy to diagnose:
Connecticut, “heavily Democratic,” has continually increased permanent taxes.
Mr. Malloy is the architect of both the largest and second largest tax
increases in Connecticut history. On the other hand, no serious attempts have
been made to curb spending PERMANENTLY. The General Assembly responsible for
all the patch work solutions could not even restore Connecticut’s Constitutional
cap on spending, which had been attached a quarter century ago to then Governor
Lowell Weicker’s income tax bill to persuade doubtful legislators that the
income tax measure would not lead to improvident spending. It did. Attorney General George Jepsen,
once Chairman of the state Democratic Party, only recently found the cap to be
unconstitutional -- because legislators had never provided legal definitions to
implement the measure.
There are no permanent breaks on spending in Connecticut,
only pious declarations from Connecticut’s Democratic leaders that the problem
will be confronted sometime, somehow – perhaps after the upcoming elections.
In the meantime, the CEOs of large Connecticut companies
are correctly reading the signs of the times – and skedaddling to greener
pastures elsewhere.
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