While in the South – land of opportunity for Northern expats
– I was asked by a Connecticut resident who had moved below the Mason-Dixon
line several years ago seeking relief from ever-expanding taxation, the general
reluctance to make long term permanent cuts in spending, excessive regulation,
and the arrogance of progressives who had ruined his state, “Will President
Trump be a help or a hindrance for Connecticut Republicans running for office
in 2018?”
The non-simplistic answer to the question on everyone’s mind
is, as the new moralists might say, complex. The complex answer depends upon a
shifting political frame.
Will Connecticut Democrats be able to disassociate
themselves sufficiently from the ruinous policies of departing Governor Dannel
Malloy, whose approval ratings, never high, have now dipped far below the
approval ratings of the Democrat’s straw man, the redoubtable Trump, whose
ratings are in the ascendancy – though, one supposes, not in Connecticut?
Have voters in Connecticut been sufficiently racked and
thumb-screwed to cause them to alter usual inflexible voting patterns?
Registered Democrats still outnumber registered Republicans by a two to one
margin; unaffiliateds slightly outnumber registered Democrats. “Fool me once,
shame on me; fool me twice, shame on you,” the old adage warns us. Are
Connecticut voters who have not yet expatriated themselves fools? Are
Connecticut politicians shameless?
On the Democrat side, the likelihood of a radical break with
progressive policies – increasing taxes to discharge repetitive deficits, declining
to make necessary long-term adjustments in union contracts, filching from so
called lock-boxes to maintain irreducible and increasing spending limits, relying
upon what Sharyl Attkisson has called “transactional journalism” to maintain a
political status quo, assuming
banking functions to prop-up failing companies or to give a market edge to
major home-grown companies that are looking with longing at the exit signs,
heavily regulating all enterprises but state government, fooling most of the
people most of the time – probably is not in the campaign cards. It is nearly impossible to sugar-coat the state’s depressing realities: Connecticut has yet
to recover from a protracted national recession that began in December 2007 and
ended in June 2009; a number of major businesses native to Connecticut have
either left the state or merged with out-of-state companies, sometimes a
prelude to painful leave-takings; and progressive incumbent politicians –
Malloy, Lieutenant Governor Nancy Wyman, Attorney General George Jepsen – are
jumping ship.
The alternative default plan is to drape Trump, regarded as
a political albatross by progressive Democrats, around the necks of Connecticut
Republican politicians and hope that voters will not, as is generally supposed,
vote their own interests.
This plan may self-destruct for several reasons. Trump is a
national, not a state figure, whose indirect effect on Connecticut has not been
nearly as disastrous as the policies of unrepentant progressives such as
Malloy, who has firmly established a government of, by and for state employee
unions. Important job increases in Connecticut can be attributed to Trump’s increased
military expenditures – his is not a budget constructed by a “lead from behind”
commander-in-chief of the U.S. armed services -- and Trump’s successful tax reform efforts may increase both profits AND TAXES reliably paid by
redundantly wealthy millionaires huddled together in Fairfield County’s
so-called “Gold Coast” who cough-up every year more than their fair share of
tax revenue.
Malloy has yet to devise a plan to prevent such valuable tax
resources from leeching into near-by states. Perhaps an anti-migration wall
might be constructed to hem in Fairfield hedge-funders and Connecticut’s highly
offensive conspicuous consumption millionaires. Poaching Connecticut
millionaires became a successful enterprise only after the state had leveled
its tax playing field by instituting an income tax, for which we must thank
former Governor Lowell Weicker and the late Lieutenant Governor Eunice Groark,
who cast a deciding vote in favor of the tax.
National Democrats are now crowing that gas tax increases
will eat-up any benefits accrued by Trump’s tax reforms. They may have a point,
though they fail to note that gas prices decreased largely owing to a change in
oil recovery, fracking being the culprit. The average regular gas price in South Carolina presently
is $2.605; in Connecticut the price is $3.124, much higher because nutmeggers
pay a double tax collected both at the delivery port and at the pump. Proceeds
from the gas tax were supposed to be dumped into a transportation maintenance lock box,
which is now empty. Progressive Democrats in the state have proposed filling this
depleted lock box through the addition of congestion tolling, paid chiefly by
Connecticut residents, the deposits being dumped into yet another lock box
somewhat similar to the lock box devised when Connecticut’s state employee
pension plan was adopted. Connecticut's two major state employee benefit plans
established in 1939, “SERS and TRS were not pre-funded until 1971 and 1982,
respectively,” according to an 2015 analysis undertaken by the Center for Retirement Research at Boston College.
Isn’t it obvious to all that Connecticut’s government was
simply waiting for the usual golden goose to lay a golden egg the
state might use to pay off its improvident spending? W. B. Yeats said it best
in “the Second Coming” – “The best lack all conviction, while the worst/ Are
full of passionate intensity.”
Comments