While Connecticut Democrats were busying themselves thumping
President Donald Trump during the recently concluded elections – the state’s
all Democrat US Congressional Delegation would not shed a tear if U.S. Senator
Dick Blumenthal, Speaker of the US House Nancy Pelosi and US Senator Chuck
Schumer were to succeed in impeaching him – Trump has delivered the goods to
The Provision State.
The state’s underperforming economy may finally join the
rest of the nation, much of which had recovered from the Great Recession many
moons ago, in a splendid recovery – just in time too. Economists in Connecticut
have not titled the coming jobs boom The Trump Bump, although a recent Hartford
Business Journal (HBJ) report, “UTC’s 4Q profits jump 73%; CEO Hayes airs
separation plans HBJ” comes dangerously close.
Here is the good news: “Farmington conglomerate United
Technologies Corp., which plans to split into three separate companies, on
Wednesday said its fourth-quarter profits soared 72.7 percent on booming
aerospace sales and a favorable U.S. corporate tax rate.”
UTC CEO Gregory Hayes, a smile lighting his face, noted that
profits were up and "2018 was a transformational year for United Technologies."
HBJ reported, “The thriving aviation market drove UTC's
fourth-quarter surge, Hayes said in a conference call Wednesday morning, with
newly acquired Rockwell Collins leading sales growth with $4.9 billion in
revenues during the quarter, up 29 percent year-over-year. East Hartford's
Pratt & Whitney posted $5.5 billion in sales, up 24.2 percent.”
A rising economic tide, President John Kennedy once said,
lifts all the boats. And this rising tide, the result chiefly of Trump’s new
military procurements, will re-water Connecticut's parched treasury. A larger
employment pie allows state government to engorge itself with new revenue –
without raising taxes. It is a win-win for both anti-Trump Democrats in
Connecticut like US Representative John Larson and tax-weary citizens of the state still reeling from
former Governor Dan Malloy’s crippling tax increases.
Republicans already are ringing the tocsin: Maybe if we wait a bit, we won’t need those
tolls after all. Also, is it possible we may be fondling too often the third
rail of New England’s social issues?
Prior to the progressive take-over of Connecticut, the state
was prepared to go its own way, luxuriating in its own unique character. Connecticut
was for much of its history a refuge from New York’s predatory politics and
brutal taxation. All this changed with the advent of former Senator Lowell
Weicker’s successful gubernatorial bid in 1991. Weicker forced an income tax
through the General Assembly; the playing field having been leveled, the state
found itself in competition with New York City and Boson, Massachusetts.
It was no contest, and Connecticut “got its clock cleaned,”
a favorite expression of Weicker’s. How, for instance, can Connecticut compete
with New York in job poaching?
Connecticut is now in a race to the bottom on so called
“social issues.” Bad political models make for bad cultural dives to the bottom.
New York’s Governor Andrew Cuomo, a nominal Catholic, has now begun a scuffle with
his wounded Catholic Church. “Andrew Cuomo,” Fox News reports, “is under fire
from faith leaders after he signed a bill into law that legalizes
abortion up until birth in many cases.”
Cuomo will have no problem in a fisticuffs contest with his
church’s faith leaders. In much of New England, it pays politically to scuff up
Catholic doctrine. His real problem will be with pregnant mothers – they are
women too – who have consulted ultrasound images and found that late term
fetuses bear a striking resemblance to born babies. But New York, in any case,
has taken a great social leap forward, and Connecticut, a national leader on
progressive social issues, has a bit of catching up to do. Progressives do not
believe in definitional lines – fetus or baby? -- whatever science and common
sense suggests.
Connecticut’s own Senator from Planned Parenthood, Dick
Blumenthal, has yet to tell us, perhaps because no one has put the question to
him publicly during one of his frequent highly scripted media availabilities,
why his most cherished industry should be the only one in the United States
that remains unregulated. The suit-prone Blumenthal was, for more than two
decades as Connecticut’s Attorney General, the state regulator-in-chief.
Connecticut’s cultural re-invention is well underway, and
the political map has changed as well, mostly owing to the inattention of
Republicans and the approval of the state’s left of center media. Culture is an
Archimedean lever: Give me a place outside the world where I can place my
lever, said Archimedes, and I will move the world. This is the progressive
order of business; first change the culture and politics will meekly follow in
its train.
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