We are fast approaching “V Day,” vote day here in
Connecticut, on November 6. Republicans are punching through the mask, Governor
Dannel Malloy, to hobble the gubernatorial ambitions of Ned Lamont who, along
with Republican gubernatorial hopeful Bob Stefanowski, has had little direct
political experience. Connecticut Commentary has styled this “the Junior
Varsity campaign.”
The first string team – Malloy himself, his Lieutenant
Governor Nancy Wyman, along with other possible experienced Democrat prospects for
governor such as Comptroller Kevin Lembo
– is sitting on the back bench. It would not be too fanciful to suggest that
Democrats have not fielded their strong team for two principal reasons: 1)
Malloy has sunk to a new low in his favorability rating, 15 percent, which
suggests that his policies have failed the state, and 2) it may be prudent to
wait until the storm of disapproval has passed; there is always tomorrow.
One notes a similar pattern on the Republican side of the
barricades. Two Republicans in particular, Co-President Pro Tem of the Senate
Len Fasano and Republican leader in the State House of Representatives Themis
Klarides have valiantly fought what Republicans would consider the good fight,
but neither of them were willing to throw their hats into the gubernatorial ring. And so, we are left with
Democrat Lamont and Republican Stefanowski, two wealthy businessmen of limited
political experience, vying for governor of a failed state. Malloy has weakly
defended his administration, but few Democrats running for office this term
would want to campaign cheek by jowl with a governor whose approval rating is
at sub-basement level.
The large open question is: Will Lamont continue in the way
of Malloy?
On the stump, Lamont has pointed out that he ran for governor
against
Malloy, slyly implying that his administration will depart in important
respects from Malloy’s ruinous policies. But in fact, the similarities between
the Malloy and Lamont programs are startlingly striking. Both are tax-prone
politicians, people whose instinctive reaction to repetitive budget deficits is
to raise taxes and negotiate short-term spending cuts with powerful union
leaders.
Connecticut’s economy has now reached the point of
diminishing returns, a dangerous fork in the road in which increased taxation
yields less revenue for the state. When Lamont ran against Malloy, by far the
better campaigner, he was not agitating for permanent, long term spending cuts,
reductions in broad based taxes, or measures that would alarm the fragile
sensibilities of powerful union leaders. Among Democrats, unionized state
employees have become both the third rail of Connecticut politics and an
unelected fourth branch of government. Lamont, like Malloy and other big
spenders, is tireless in discovering new ways to milk the tax cow without causing
it to fly the fence; for tax cows have wings and are unusually mobile. Lamont
has proposed a toll tax on heavy duty trucks, which will require the
installation of gantries on major highways in the state. Tolls represent a new
mode of taxation, an add-on tax that may be applied in the future to overtaxed
travelers who do not drive heavy trucks.
On the stump, Stefanowski has vowed to eliminate the state
income tax in eight years, provoking incredulity among Democrats, bean counters
in Connecticut’s media and, most tellingly, Klarides, who sniffed that
Stefanowski proposal would die aborning. It was, she said, “silly.”
Among change resistant nutmeggers – not excluding, of course,
the state’s non-partisan media, most of which has been long committed to
progressive governance – the common effort involves erecting barriers that will
prevent ANY net tax reductions. “Fixed costs,” to cite but one example, is such
a barrier. Fixed costs are fixed, pun intended, by making it less likely, if
not impossible, for future legislatures to reduce costs and thereby reclaim,
chiefly from unions, a legislative prerogative that belongs constitutionally to
the General Assembly. Malloy has fixed the contractual terms he negotiated with
union heads out to 2027. A future governor of Connecticut – be he Lamont or
Stefanowski – will not be able to adjust state employee salaries and benefits
until state government is effectively bankrupted or the terms of the
Malloy/SEBAC negotiated contracts run out nine years hence, whichever comes
first. It is not Malloy’s shadow, but the substance of his policies, un-repudiated
by Lamont, that casts a doom over Connecticut.
Stefanowski has effectively repudiated President Donald Trump’s
intemperate rhetoric: “On the social side, I’ve got three daughters; I don’t
like the tone, I don’t like the rhetoric. I don’t think my daughters should be
listening to that. I’m their role model… but I am not going to sit here and
tell you that his economic policy hasn’t worked – because it has, and we could
use some of that in Connecticut.”
Indeed, Trump’s economic policies – reduce marginal taxation,
increase military procurements, which languished during the Obama
administration – have had a pronounced beneficial effect on job creation in
Connecticut.
The great flaw in Trump’s ointment is inattention to spending
increases. Connecticut’s inattention to spending has produced a myriad of
unaddressed and long festering problems. We are six states below the highest taxed states in the nation, the only
state in the nation that has lost population, and the “Great Recession,” which
ended years ago everywhere else in the country, continues to gore us. We are
one recession away from absolute collapse, unless voters in Connecticut, during
the off-year presidential election, send a clear message to the architects of
our discontent – and vote for real change.
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