The best lack all
conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate
intensity -- W.B. Yeats
It did not take Governor Dannel Malloy long to renege on his
vow not to impose more taxes on those voters in Connecticut, poor suckers,
who trusted he meant what he said when, following the imposition of two major
tax increases – the largest and the second largest in state history – they
twice elected him to the position he is now abandoning.
But at last Malloy has arrived at the usual progressive default
position, according to a headline in a Hartford paper: “Connecticut
Governor To Propose Highway Tolls.” Malloy regards the current gas tax,
reduced partly by more fuel efficient engines, as “a dying funding source.” He has proposed tolls as a funding enhancement; other progressives had been flirting
with a mileage tax.
A toll, as anyone who has paid one
knows, is a tax – a tax being revenue collected by state government to pay
for services -- a good part of which is swallowed up by pensions and
salaries obligations. Over the years, progressive Democrats have used
taxes as a turnstile to re-route collections from the haves to the have-nots.
Increasingly, state workers receiving tax funds enjoy greater benefits than their
equivalents in the private economy who, in Connecticut, pay the brunt of taxes.
The state has long since passed the point of diminishing
returns, that hot spot in the economy when increases in revenue through the
imposition of taxes result in less revenue. A state knows when this point has
been reached; the signs are unmistakable. State revenue appears to decrease because increasing taxes spurs spending in legislatures. It is an inflexible
law in government that higher taxes lead ineluctably to spending increases.
Just as an increase in profits in the private market occasion spending that
leads to the growth of companies, so in state government tax increases produce
correlative spending increases.
That is what has been happening in Connecticut ever since an
unaffiliated progressive governor, Lowell Weicker, the father of Connecticut’s
income tax, was succeeded by progressive Governor Dannel Malloy. This
progressive gubernatorial bracket, along with the weak Republican governors it
enclosed, who hadn’t the intestinal fortitude to resist the tug of politically
convenient practices – always meet a deficit by increasing taxes; rarely institute permanent, long-term cuts in spending, which risks offending state
employees who have now become a fourth branch of Connecticut government – has
wrecked the real state, which should never be confused with the administrative
state. To put the matter briefly, Weicker’s income tax and Malloy’s crushing
taxes have saved state government the necessity of instituting long-term
permanent cuts in spending. All taxes, as we know, are forever. Former President
Ronald Reagan put it most forcefully when he said he had never encountered
anything so permanent as a temporary tax.
The Democrat Party in Connecticut is the party that has
learned nothing – taxes and excessive regulations kill – and forgotten
everything. The progressive wing of the party has now become party central. There
are no live options , i.e. moderate Democrats, sitting in power positions in
Connecticut. All have been displaced by progressives, quasi-socialists with knives in their
brains.
Connecticut levies two taxes on gas, one at the port and one
at the pump. Those taxes were supposed to have been devoted to transportation
maintenance and improvement. Instead, they were filched from lockboxes and
transferred to general funds, mostly to balance budgets chronically out of
balance – because tax increases spur spending, and few Democrats could be found
in the state to initiate broad-based, permanent, long-term cuts in spending.
Other funds were raided as well. Discretionary funding was crowded out by
"fixed costs," spending lockboxes that could not be affected
by cuts. Making programs untouchable is a strategic
device that saves progressives in the General Assembly from executing their
unpleasant constitutional responsibilities. The Democrat dominated General Assembly has willingly surrendered its constitutional control over budgets to cosseted
unions and an executive department apparat not answerable to voters.
This politically convenient destruction of constitutional
obligations has created budgetary anarchy in Connecticut, and the answer to
anarchy is a restoration of republican, representative liberty. State employee
pensions and salaries have become too costly to be determined by contracts negotiated
between unions and the governor’s office, nearly always ratified by a timid and
cowed General Assembly. Such contracts make the judicial department the
ultimate arbiter of state budgets. Connecticut is one of only four states in
the union that does not fashion its state employee salaries and benefits through statute rather than contracts.
During the upcoming political campaigns, Republicans who wish to live up to their name should agitate for an end to contracts, so that a representative General
Assembly may determine state employee salaries and benefits by statute. At the
very least, pensions should be removed from all contract negotiations with
unions, and new hires should
adopt either 401K plans or some other pension replacement device. If pensions are removed from
contracts, pension negotiations also will be removed from contractual
considerations.
It is a lack of conviction on the part of legislators,
combined with the passionate intensity of those who wish to enlist state
government in efforts, successful so far, that invest them with preferments
inimical to the general good, that has destroyed the larger state of Connecticut.
Our government has become a union-subservient oligarchy in perpetual opposition
to a sometime imaginary plutocracy.
Enough! It’s time to restore representative, constitutional
government in what once was the constitution state.
Comments