the banner headlines on Tom Dudchik’s “Capitol Report”
read, in screaming text.
“Capitol Report” is an aggregator site much
frequented by Connecticut politicians and state political watchers that retails
important stories. The lede to the featured
Hartford Courant story read, “The state Bond Commission will meet
Thursday to vote on borrowing hundreds of millions of dollars to finance
projects around the state, and the potential for a bonanza of funding for
Hartford.”
Mayor of Hartford Luke Bronin was once Governor Dannel Malloy’s General Counsel. Shortly after becoming Mayor in 2016, Bronin strongly hinted that the state’s capital city might easily tumble into bankruptcy if it did not receive a monetary hand-up from his former boss who, along with a Democrat dominated General Assembly, soon obliged and dispatched a multi-year bailout of nearly a half billion dollars to the city, which had been struggling to satisfy clamorous unions.
"Really?” state Representative Gail Lavielle remarked
on Facebook. “With a looming nearly $5 billion deficit? And $100 billion
in unfunded liabilities? Let's call
Salvador Dalí and André Breton right away, because this is
surreal.”
An
earlier story in CTMirror assured us – but, more importantly,
it assured lame duck Governor Dannel Malloy’s chief numbers cruncher Ben
Barnes, who will be leaving public service more than two years before he would
be fully invested in Connecticut’s pension system -- that a comfy feather bed
awaited him.
Upon his retirement from state service, Barnes, “who has
overseen Connecticut’s budget as the secretary of the Office of Policy and
Management from the early days of Gov. Dannel P. Malloy’s administration” was
due to fall short of full investiture in the state’s staggeringly
under-financed pension system. “Ten years of state service,” CTMirror reports,
“is needed to qualify for a full retirement package that includes both a
pension and healthcare benefits. Barnes has accrued seven years and
eight months of service toward a full state pension and retirement healthcare.” Connecticut’s
unreformed pension system, now plunging the state into penury,
is underfinanced by $127.7 billion, depending upon which numbers
cruncher is consulted.
That’s right: If you are a political public servant you can self-serve
by retiring with a full pension after TEN years in state service.
“Connecticut's unfunded pension liability rose,” according
to The Yankee Institute, “from $99.2 billion in ALEC's 2016 study
to $127.7 billion in 2017, leaving the pension system only 19 percent funded.
The debt from the public pensions amounts to $35,721 per person in
Connecticut, the second highest per capita debt in the nation
behind Alaska.”
Barnes, we are told, “is on a short list of candidates
interviewed for the vacant post of chief financial officer at the state’s
system of community colleges and regional universities.”
When word reached Courant “Daily Ructions’
columnist Kevin Rennie that Barnes would be featherbedded until the
he was fully invested in the state’s dangerously under-financed pension system,
he remarked on Twitter, “Barnes
scrambles for another state job after 8 years of failure. Hacks have no regard
for academia.” The “eight years of failure” have included
“politically balanced” budgets that tilted into the red soon after they had
been signed by the governor.
Connecticut’s Democrat Party knows how to take care of its
friends, a friend being anyone who can, through monetary contributions or
campaign efforts, advance the interests of Democrat office holders.
In an arresting Hartford Courant piece, investigative
reporter John Lender provides a typical “you scratch my back, I’ll
scratch yours” instance of pay to play politics involving Malloy, Barnes
and a richly rewarded political stakeholder. Tammany Hall chief George
Washington Plunkitt used to call the following series of events
“honest graft.”
A Democrat contributor had purchased a piece of property at
a market price located near a proposed railway station. The proposed station
had inflated far beyond the original purchase price of the property its sales
value. A problem arose when the town nixed the deal. Did the property revert to
its purchased value? Nope. Before you could say “honest graft,” tax
dollars began to flow in the direction of the political stakeholder, and the
property’s inflated cost was justified by Barnes and Malloy because,
to quote from Lender’s account, the office of Policy Management “still wants
the property for the purpose of ‘land banking’ it, Barnes said – that is to
salt it away for the future because it is such a good site. ‘We pushed very
hard,’ but fell short, he said. So now, ‘we are essentially buying it for
future use as a train station… Frankly, it has great value to the state of
Connecticut, in my belief.’” And the property value was immediately, if
prematurely, realized by the politically lucky property holder.
Honest graft, like the poor, will always be with us. So will
death and taxes. It is party hegemony and an inattentive media that
facilitates honest graft, and the most efficient way to prevent inordinately
high taxes from destroying the real wealth of the state is through a measure
that requires a super majority in the legislature to approve any net tax
increase.
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