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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