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The Education Of Dannel Malloy


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.

     

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