Governor Ned Lamont
has two serious problems. The first is his inexperience in Connecticut
politics, which makes him the plaything of lean and hungry Democrat leaders who
have a wealth of experience in Connecticut politics. And the second is Red Jahncke.
“First, it was diversion. Now it’s ‘interception,’” Jahncke writes in the Connecticut Post. His article should have been titled “What a wicked web we weave when first we practice to deceive.”
Pretty much all
“woke” journalists in Connecticut should know by now that every “special fund”
in the state is a potential slush fund brimming over with tax dollars that can
be moved from one walnut shell to the next with lightning speed. These walnut
shells are boisterously and falsely labeled “lockboxes.” The trick is to move
the pea from one or another shell operation to the General Fund without being
noticed by plundered taxpayers, and the switch does not register in the public
mind until the tax dollars have been assigned to various slush fund pots, no
one being the wiser.
Jahncke spoils the
trick at the expense of state budget magicians. He begins on a hopeful note.
Former Governor Dannel Malloy had diverted car sales tax revenue to the Special
Transportation Fund (STF). These funds have now been “diverted” from the easily
plundered STF lockbox by Lamont and backstage hands, experienced magicians –
almost certainly Speaker of the House Joe Aresimowicz and President Pro Tem of
the Senate Martin Looney -- and the sleight of hand “completely undermined
public confidence in the ‘lockbox’ that is supposed to protect transportation
funds in the STF and destroyed any possibility for tolls.”
At the start of his
own budget process, Lamont announced he intended to divert Malloy’s “$1.2
billion of car sales taxes over five years.” There followed a public outcry.
How dare Lamont propose tolling, an additional tax weight on the sagging
shoulders of already overburdened taxpayers, while at the same time robbing a fund
designed to pay for transportation improvements! Lamont quickly
moved the walnuts. He “backed down, diverted only $58 million in the current
budget and promised not to divert funds from the STF in future budgets, Scout’s
Honor.” If you want half a loaf of tax receipts, make a grab for the full loaf
first.
The imposture is
obvious from afar, Connecticut reporters and commentators suffering from
shortsightedness. The Reason Foundation has pointed out that
Connecticut “ranked 44th in the nation for overall transportation spending but
dead last for the amount of money it reportedly spends on administrative
costs,” a datum picked up by Connecticut’s indispensable Yankee
Institute. The grossly inflated labor cost evidently ruffled some feathers
in the Land of Nod, because number crunchers in the Lamont
administration have now redefined “administrative costs.”
“Starting this
year,” Yankee reports, “CT DOT [Department of Transportation] will no longer
report $250 million in transportation spending as ‘administrative costs’ to the
federal government and instead report it as ‘Expenditures for
Non-Transportation Services.’” That should do it. Costs will not be reduced,
but the meaning of “costs” will be changed so that the pea will land under the
right walnut shell. And in the absence of a critical media, the state, loathed
to reduce any of its labor costs, will have, once again, fooled most of the
media most of the time. Will the suckers ever tire of being suckered?
There are no locks
on Connecticut lockboxes. Leaders in the General Assembly slumber in the
pockets of powerful unions; indeed, Speaker of the House Joe Aresimowicz is
employed by a union. Funds slated for transportation
expenditures are moved into the state’s General Fund so that the
governor and Democrat whips in the General Assembly will be able more
persuasively to argue that tolls are necessary to replenish funds diverted by
Democrat magicians from the Transportation funding pot into the General Slush
Fund, where they then may be dispensed to special interest groups that aid in
the reelection of the pilferers. This is grand theft on a scale that dwarfs
Mafia operations during the prohibition era.
Not for nothing did
Henry Mencken say “Every election is a sort of advance auction sale of stolen
goods.”
One wonders what a
comic talent such as Lucian would have made of it all. Lucian once
wrote a comedy called “The Sale Of Philosophers.” In the golden age of both
Greek and Roman comedy, philosophers were the equivalent of modern day Harvard
professors and politicians selling themselves on slave blocks every election
period. Lucian used his theater to poke holes in the more absurd pretensions of
his targets. The modern media is in a perfect position to do the same.
But while there are
many cynics about, many of them collaborationists with self-selling
politicians, there is no Lucian in the crew.
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