“He deserves a going-out a lot more glorious than the one
that the Democrats handed him,” former Governor and Senator Lowell Weicker said
of Governor Dannel Malloy, who had been disinvited to budget talks between
legislative Democrats and Republicans. “The legislature dumped him,” Weicker
added. “I don’t think that necessarily stands to the glory of the Democratic
legislators.”
Birds of a feather flock together.
There is little difference in governing style between
Weicker and departing lame-duck Governor Dannel Malloy. Both are autocratic and
manipulative; both relied heavily on tax increases to fill budget deficit
holes; and both claim not to be guided by popularity polls, lofty governors
transcending the grubby hoi-polloi. Both were highly unpopular as governors,
Weicker because he muscled an income tax through the General Assembly, and
Malloy as the author of both the largest and the second largest tax increases
in state history. The tax hike in the current budget – which, for the first
time throughout the Malloy administration, bears Republican fingerprints -- is
a, relatively speaking, modest $1 billion.
Following his sole term as Governor, Weicker declined to run for re-election. After two terms in office, Malloy, disapproval rating 68 percent,
has declined to allow over-taxed nutmeggers to vote against him in a ratifying
election. Democrats during upcoming campaigns will be measuring the distance
between themselves and Malloy in miles rather than feet.
The absence of an income tax, mightily resisted by moderate
Democrat governors such as Ella Grasso, made Connecticut a haven for companies
and wealthy residents like Weicker, heir to the Squibb pharmaceutical fortune.
After 1991, the year Weicker pushed an income tax through a dubious General
Assembly, companies, perhaps anticipating massive tax and spending increases, sheltered
their assets, reduced production, and battened down the hatches, awaiting a
national rising tide that would lift all their boats. It never came. Republican
Governors John Rowland and Jodi Rell offered ineffective resistance to a
resurgent, progressive General Assembly. The recession malingered and recovery
was pushed far into the future. Economic advances during the as yet brief Trump
administration – the stock market has increased by $5.2 trillion, about half
the national debt Obama left the Trump administration – point backwards to an
anemic progressive regime. Current unemployment is the lowest in 16 years, and
President Donald Trump, sometimes a prisoner of his own hyperbole, likely is
not overpromising by much when he says “if Congress gives us the massive tax
cuts and reform I am asking for, those numbers will grow by leaps and bounds.”
The income tax had been falsely sold to the legislature as a
revenue stabilizer. Not true – the
income tax is more volatile than relatively stable sales or consumption taxes. Since 1980, income tax
revenue in Connecticut has increased a whopping 28 percent, yet the state
continues to suffer from repetitive deficits. That is because income taxes are
more susceptible to wild swings during market cycles. In the post income tax
period, state expenditures rose 138 percent, while income grew only 86 percent
between 1980 and 2016.
This volatility has primed reckless spending. Income tax revenue
has decreased in Connecticut during cyclical downturns while spending has
increased, creating repetitive deficits.
The spending imperative and the disinclination to cut spending long-term
and permanently leads to other dislocations: the sweeping of so called
lockboxes and dedicated funds; the cowardice of legislators who, heavily
dependent on union support for re-election, continue to charge the future to
pay for unsupportable union salaries and pensions; municipalities hooked on
state patronage; and the flight of businesses to less rapacious states – only
part of the economic evils let loose when the General Assembly opened the lid
to Weicker’s income tax. In the Greek myth, when Pandora, warned not to so,
opened the jar given to her as a gift from the gods, all the imprisoned evils
of the world flew out, hope alone remaining in its very bottom.
Hope springs eternal.
This year, the General Assembly produced a fusion product
after a Republican budget had been adopted by astonished legislators. The
latest budget iteration bears unmistakable Republican fingerprints but is, never-the-less,
a Democrat product. Republicans hadn’t the numbers in the General Assembly to
deny Democrats substantial tax increases. They did successfully insert a
Constitutional spending cap provision that had been a sweetener in Weicker’s
initial 1991 income tax proposal; the cap, attorney General George Jepsen ruled
several months ago, was never operative because the legislature had failed to
provide requisite definitions. The current budget provides the definitions,
engaging the cap. Republicans were also successful in capping bonding. A
provision that requires legislative assent for additional dollars provided to
unions in negotiations with the governor restores minimal legislative authority
over budgets. Republicans dropped a measure in their own approved budget,
vetoed by Malloy, that would have, if adopted, changed from contract to statute
the process by which unions, in collaboration with governors, establish
salaries and benefits. Connecticut is among only four states that surrender
legislative authority over budgets to union negotiations with compliant governors.
Budgets shape the future; so do political campaigns. Two
questions will be decided in the upcoming 2018 campaign: 1) What will the
future bring, more of the same or beneficial change, and 2) Do Republicans know
how to campaign?
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