April is the cruelest
month, breeding/ Lilacs out of the dead land… T.S. Eliot, The Wasteland
On May 22nd of April, the cruelest month,
Governor Ned Lamont took a bow during his daily Coronavirus briefing, this time
at Gay City State Park in Hebron. Front page headlines in the Hartford Courant
blared: “Extremely Good News: State reports lowest single-day increase in
[Coronavirus] cases since late March; June 20 eyed for phase 2 of reopening.”
The governor advised Connecticut residents desperately in
search of normalcy, “I used to say stay home. Now I say go to a little-used
park. Go to one of the ones that aren’t on the mainstream. Go there with your
family. Keep your distance, if you see a group of people coming up. That’s what
spring is about, and we are going this (sic) all together.”
Tempering the good news lower down in the same story, the
Courant reported, “More than 26,000 jobs lost in April.”
We are living through the first intentional, politically
caused recession in the nation’s history. Coronavirus is the formal not the
efficient cause of the recession. Political decisions made by Lamont under his
emergency powers, in the absence of the advice and consent role played by a
General Assembly in suspended animation, are the efficient cause of the coming,
crushing recession. Despite what everyone has so frequently read or heard in
news reports, Coronavirus did not close Connecticut’s economy, which had for
ten years undergone a slow-burn recovery from the state’s last recession.
The Connecticut Department of Labor has not sugarcoated the
bitter pill. While politicians fiddle with reopening, Connecticut’s economy
burns.
According to Labor Department figures, the New Haven Register reports, “Previous
downturns paled in comparison. The state dropped about 119,000 jobs during its
2008-2010 recession. In the worst month in that span, it lost about 17,000 jobs,
in April 2009.
“’It took 10 years to replace 99,000 of those jobs,’ Kurt
Westby, the state’s labor commissioner, said Thursday in a phone press
conference. ‘Just in April 2020 alone, we lost double that. We’re talking about
job losses of epic proportions.’”
Joe Brennan, the CEO and president of the Connecticut
Business and Industry Association, weighed in: “These numbers are both
devastating and unsurprising, given the number of businesses shut down. And
with businesses that have been allowed to open, many have no business or
volume, so they’ve been letting people go. The main thing is just how quickly
we can get them back to work.”
The New Haven Register story continued, “The damage also far
exceeds that of the 1989-1992 downturn when Connecticut lost about 150,000
positions, Don Klepper-Smith, chief economist and director of research for
DataCore Partners LLC, noted in a report Thursday.
“’Barring an immediate cure or vaccine for the coronavirus,
this one-month job decline for April implies not only a harsh new economic
landscape for Connecticut, but one that is apt to leave scars on the local
economy and its residents for months and years to come, in the same way that
consumer behaviors were abruptly altered back in the 1930s,’ Klepper-Smith
said.
An “immediate cure or a vaccine,” despite President Donald
Trump’s frantic attempts to hustle things along, will not arrive in time to
rescue Connecticut’s faltering economy.
So – Après Coronavirus,
le deluge.
In a Hartford Courant story, Smith, whose good counsel is often sought by economic writers
in the state, plumbs the depths of the coming recession: “Connecticut, he said,
is at a ‘distinct disadvantage heading into the recession’ because its economy
and labor force have grown slowly since the end of the Great Recession.
“By February, the
state recovered fewer than 86% of lost jobs.
“In context, the
April job numbers represent an ‘economic tsunami’ the likes of which the state
has not seen before, and policymakers simply don’t have a playbook for dealing
with a job losses of this magnitude.’”
There is nothing new
in this data. We know one thing for certain: Connecticut’s playbook must not be
a rip-off of the New York or Rhode Island playbook. No one elected Lamont to plagiarize
New York Governor Andrew Cuomo’s Brave New World media conferences
Here’s a playbook: Move
immediately to begin restoring the economic vitality of Connecticut. Shutdown
the shutdown. Wrest control of budgets from heavy breathing union negotiators.
Use gubernatorial emergency powers to redraft prior unaffordable contractual
agreements between union-friendly Democrat governors and helpful feet-on-the-ground
state union employees who continue to hoist Democrats into office. End all
automatic budget increases by adopting zero-based budgeting; unfix all “fixed
costs.” And Republicans, in upcoming campaigns, should not allow the Coronavirus
crisis to go to waste.
Do it now.
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