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Have A Happy Winter


Connecticut has just been bowled over by a bomb cyclone, a rapidly strengthening area of low pressure. In the area where I live, all the houses went dark – for three days and nights. Throughout Connecticut, about 41,000 energy consumers lost power.

And winter is coming.

CTMirror tells us there is a stalemate over long-term transportation funding between legislators and Governor Ned Lamont. The battle of the political egg-heads is “about to create an immediate crisis: With $30 million in promised local aid months overdue, fall tree trimming and winter snow removal are at risk.” The recent outage was caused mostly by falling trees that are singularly uninterested in Lamont and tax hungry legislators. The General Assembly in Connecticut has been controlled for the last three decades by Democrats whose reckless spending proclivities have been responsible for much of the budget outages during this time.

The problem, as usual, is wholly political. According to the CTMirror story, Lamont is “delaying action on a bond package” to municipalities because, should Lamont release the standard bonding funds, “the governor loses leverage that he hopes will help win passage of a 10-year transportation plan he intends to release in coming weeks.” The bonding funds, in other words, are being held hostage until the legislature comes to its senses and approves Lamont’s transportation plan, which relies on tolling. No tolling, no municipal funding for crisis management this winter.

The decision is yours.

During the income tax debate in the early 90s, then Governor Lowell Weicker deployed a similar strategy. He closed public parks in the state. Weicker was an early proponent of Rahm Emanuel’s  often quoted adage “never let a good crisis go to waste,” an adaptation of one of Alinsky’s rules for radicals: “… in the arena of action, a threat or a crisis becomes almost a precondition to communication." And if there is no crisis? Well, dime a dozen crises are easily manufactured by creative radicals. This is, most people will agree, an abuse of power. On the other hand, what is the point of having absolute power if you are not prepared to abuse it?

Lamont, and Democrats in Connecticut’s hegemonic General Assembly, need tolls. And tolls are necessary for a number of reasons. After repeated increases in the state’s income tax, dominant Democrats in Connecticut know that working voters in the state, Connecticut’s true middle class, have been plundered to the max. The last pre-income tax budget in the state was $7.5 billion, and it was the absence of an income tax – strenuously opposed by both former Democrat governors Ella Grasso and Bill O’Neill – that put a lid on spending. The Weicker income tax lifted the lid. Any increase in tax revenue is little more than a permission slip to the state’s dominant political party to increase spending, and Democrats have taken full advantage of the Weicker permission slip. Increases in revenue have not reduced mounting deficits because legislators are unwilling to reduce spending significantly. Why should they, when they can satisfy their spending proclivities by increasing taxes?

Connecticut has received an “F” grade for its financial condition from Truth in Accounting because “Connecticut’s elected officials have made repeated financial decisions that have left the state with a debt burden of $67.8 billion. That burden equates to $51,800 for every state taxpayer. Connecticut has $14.4 billion [in assets} available to pay $82.1 billion worth of bills.” This is the very definition of a sinkhole state.

The truth should hurt. But it has not hurt enough to persuade either voters or legislators to focus on the continuing problem, the ghost in Connecticut’s economic machine that is never mentioned in the halls of state government, not even in whispers --  spending is the problem.

Permanent, long-term reductions in spending are nearly impossible in a state in which civic virtue has been reduced to campaign bumper stickers, written mostly by out-of-state political consultants who are experts in winning elections, or in-state politicians for life who are, in T.S. Elliot’s memorable phrase, not Hamlets torched by the imperious claims of conscience, but rather “an attendant lord, one that will do/To swell a progress, start a scene or two,/ Advise the prince; no doubt, an easy tool,/ Deferential, glad to be of use,/Politic, cautious, and meticulous;/Full of high sentence, but a bit obtuse;/At times, indeed, almost ridiculous—/Almost, at times, the Fool.”

The lack of civic virtue is the crack in the universe through which states, once virtuous and prosperous, disappear down the shoot of history. And Connecticut has much more to lose in its contest between courage and cowardice than its slender assets.

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