Governor Dannel Malloy began his education reform proposals
by challenging the usual pedagogical assumptions. He likely will end his term
as governor by supporting a union led, reform-resistant status quo.
Malloy is at swords' points with Democratic leaders in the
Democrat dominated General Assembly on the matter of tax increases.
Progressives in the General Assembly want a bevy of tax increases. They have
proposed toll taxes, an increase in the progressive tax on Connecticut’s idle
rich and an increase in the sales tax, among others. Democrats are now touting
the benefits of a sales tax increase. Without such as increase, progressive
Democrats in the legislature and Malloy now say, fire and brimstone resulting from Malloy’s cost
reductions will reign down upon the heads of every man, woman and child in
Connecticut who has not yet fled for other less punishing states.
Having said numerous
times he would not favor tax increases to discharge Connecticut’s perpetual
budget deficits, Malloy, even though he is a lame-duck governor, might think it
awkward to betray his earlier often iterated promises.
Malloy told the New Haven Register recently, “I think the legislature has become fond of giving everyone a veto to
the budget. The unions have a veto. The local governments have a veto. The
hospitals have a veto. Everybody else has a veto, which makes getting their job
done very hard. We need to undo that. In good times, no one has to make hard
decisions, which is what ruled my predecessors and quite frankly prior
legislators’ approaches to their job. But these aren’t good times.”
Speaking of vetoes, Malloy has yet to signal to Democratic
legislators that he would veto any dilatory budget that contained a tax
increase -- possibly for good reasons. The absence of a veto promise is a dog
whistle to tax hungry Democrats.
The Democrat spending plan is more than 50 days in arrears.
Democrats were waiting on Malloy to strike a salary and pension deal with
unions, after which the terms of the deal were to be hardwired into the state’s
budget before it was to be presented to the General Assembly by progressive
Democrats. Malloy’s budget plan, which once again will be in the red by the
time a firm budget makes its way through the legislature, introduces a
progressive feature into the distribution of education dollars by the state. The
Malloy plan redistributes state education funding from towns that have
successfully controlled their budgets to towns that, like the state, have
allowed their budgets to run to seed. Nothing succeeds in Connecticut like
failure.
Connecticut’s municipalities reacted as expected to two new
assaults on their own budgets. Under Malloy’s plan, towns will assume payment
for one third of pension costs, and state educational funding to towns will be
progressively reduced. These knives to the throats of municipalities have some
value as campaign prompts. Progressive Democrats in the General Assembly, who
favor tax increases over punishing reductions in state education funding, will
be able in upcoming campaigns to present themselves to stunned municipalities
as white-hatted saviors. An increase in the sales tax will relieve the state of
the necessity of wringing money from municipalities to pay for the progressives’
ruinous policies, and never mind that both palliatives are unacceptable because
neither will reduce punishing increases in spending. In fact, tax increases
are, as former Governor Lowell Weicker once reminded us, the gas that fuels
spending and reduces business activity, which – still a big surprise to some –
reduces tax revenue.
Connecticut, a repentant Hartford Courant Editorial Board confessed
several months ago, no longer is suffering from a revenue problem – that was never
the case -- it is suffering from a spending problem and a disposition on the
part of state government to rob Peter (dedicated funds) to pay Paul (big
spenders in the General Assembly and the Governor’s office). The paper's message never
reached the ears of Malloy or his progressive Democratic accomplices in the
General Assembly. Connecticut’s house is on fire, as the prophet Weicker
predicted, and the fire brigade is composed of arsonists parading as firemen.
Karl Kraus, a famous German social commentator and a contemporary of Sigmund
Freud, once said “Psychiatry is the disease it purports to cure.”
So too with progressive political prescriptions: you cannot cure a spending
problem by increasing spending. The irresistible itch to spend is only
temporarily satisfied – never resolved – by tax increases. As a solution to
Connecticut’s death spiral, tax increases are the problems they purport to
cure.
Comments