Connecticut's Administrative State Is Not The Real State

Thomas Hooker

After Governor Ned Lamont had signed a budget that Republican leaders in the state House and Senate insist is woefully out of balance and therefore unconstitutional, a eupeptic Lamont said this: “For years, instability in the state’s finances has resulted in slow growth and volatility in our economy — and this budget was adopted with a focus on providing the foundation from which our state can grow,” Lamont said. “When the fiscal year closes, Connecticut will have the largest rainy day fund in history and this budget maintains and grows our reserves, providing reliability and predictability for our taxpayers, businesses, and those looking to invest in our state well into the future.”

Republicans Len Fasano and Themis Klarides are likely right. The Lamont-Looney-Aresimowicz budget depends upon tax receipt projections that are, to put it mildly, fanciful. The budget hawks at CTMirror tell us, “The new $43.4 billion, two-year plan “ recently signed by Lamont “assumes $180 million in income tax receipts that neither Lamont’s analysts — nor the legislature’s — projected in their last joint forecast.”
               

Fasano was not amused by the prospect of a fanciful budget out of balance at the starting gate, because the state of Connecticut is constitutionally obliged to produce a balanced budget. And a budget that is not in balance is, therefore, unconstitutional.

“I think it’s dangerous,” Fasano commented, “and it puts this state in fiscal jeopardy. I think what really happened here was they [Democratic legislators and Lamont] were short $180 million and they created false additional income to balance the budget.”

If we examine closely Lamont’s self-celebratory statement quoted above, we may find that an out of balance budget is the least lethal of Connecticut tortuous problems.

Mary McCarthy once said of Lillian Hellman that every word she wrote was a lie, including “and” and “the,” a bit of literary hyperbole for which she was sued.

To avoid the inconvenience of a suit, this writer wishes to make it plain that not every word of Lamont’s statement above is a lie. But the whole of it is rooted in a dangerous and undemocratic false premise; namely, that state government IS the state. The notion that the king is the state – “L'etat c’est moi,” said King Louis XIV – cost the monarchy its head during the bloody French Revolution. Here in the land of the country’s first constitution, the Fundamental Orders of 1639, citizens of Connecticut are still willing to entertain the possibility that constitutions should serve as a breakwater to the ambitions of an executive branch of government allied with the legislative branch in an unholy hegemonic embrace. The architecture of the Fundamental Orders was set by Thomas Hooker in a 1638 sermon in which he proclaimed, “The foundation of authority is laid firstly in the free consent of people.”

Ponder Lamont’s assertion: “For years, instability in the state’s finances has resulted in slow growth and volatility in our economy.” That notion is nearly an inversion of the truth. It is not the instability of budgets that has slowed the growth of the real state. Balancing a budget is the work of a day. To balance a budget, you simply raise taxes. State government has consistently raised taxes ever since Lowell Weicker falsely pointed the way to economic recovery by instituting a Connecticut income tax, thus removing all restraints on spending. Taxes and spending have increased threefold since 1991, the year in which Weicker poured gas on the embers of a national recession – prolonging Connecticut’s own recessions, each one of which has lasted more than a decade. Connecticut is one of only three high taxed, high regulatory states that have not yet emerged from the last recession.

The growth of Connecticut's real state has been “slowed” by the frequent tax and regulatory impositions put upon it by its administrative state. That is the truth. Progressive state Democrats have learned nothing and forgotten everything over the years; they believe, more as a matter of faith than reason, that growth in the real state’s economy can be accelerated by higher taxes and more burdensome regulations. This is how state government has balanced its budgets since 1991.

The interests and prosperity of the people and those of the administrative state have been throughout history inversely related: the richer the state, the poorer the people; the more powerful the state, the less powerful the people. It is not possible to strengthen the foundations of the real state by taking from it the resources and energy it needs to prosper, and those who do so by creating artificial “necessities” should revisit Hooker. The foundation of their authority “is laid firstly in the free consent of people” – then and now.