That formulation, the reader should be warned, is imprecise.
Economically, the state is suffering from an acute business slowdown –
actually, a recession – caused by decisions made by Governor Ned Lamont, not
the pandemic itself, an unelected Coronavirus panic that has made no political
decisions.
Connecticut is not doing that great really. Fewer people are buying newspapers. They’re too expensive and too thin. But anyone can glean at
no charge more than a fistful of distressing headlines from Capitol
Report, an aggregator site not yet operating under a firewall.
We all knew the bill for Lamont’s gubernatorial edict-caused
business shutdowns would come due at some point. The bill collector now is
banging on our doors, and the state predictably is running out of funds. No
surprise there; labor costs in Connecticut have long exceeded the state’s
ability to pay, and the shutdown has naturally clipped revenues.
Some cynics, growing more numerous by the day, suppose that
the shutdown itself -- punishing sequesters, and the state’s accelerating spin
into impoverishment -- will convince a battered public to accept the dismal
prospect of further future taxes. The Democrats’ toll proposals died on the
vine, but that was before Coronavirus seeped from Wuhan, China, through
Governor Andrew Cuomo’s New York, into what used to be called, before the
Lamont shutdowns, Connecticut’s Gold Coast.
Since that time, stubborn New Englanders, softened by
possible unconstitutional gubernatorial edicts that direct their every
movement, may have become more pliant. They are told go and they go, come and
they come, sequester and they sequester. Their nerves and confidence shattered,
they are now putty in the hands of reigning New England Caligulas, Governors
Cuomo of New York, Lamont of Connecticut, and Phil Murphy of New Jersey.
Two branches of the country’s vaunted separation of powers,
the useful constitutional arrangement that is supposed to temper the unbridled
power of the chief executive, have been sawed off. And so there is no check on
the arrogance of Lamont here in the once revolutionary state of Connecticut.
The state’s motto, “The Constitution State”, has been put into a museum, closed
of course, along with slaughtered Christopher Columbus statutes. The second
branch of Connecticut’s government, the General Assembly, is still in a state
of Coronavirus shutdown, and its third branch of government, the state’s
courts, also are suffering from Coronavirus anemia.
Here is a story plucked from today’s (7/17/2020) thin,
firewalled Hartford Courant: “Connecticut
added 73,300 jobs in June, repairing some of the damage to the labor force
caused by the coronavirus,” an uplifting headline. But the good news is soon dashed in the first three
paragraphs:
“Connecticut
employers filled 73,300 jobs in June, the biggest employment gain ever as the
state’s labor force, badly damaged by the coronavirus, begins to mend, the
state Department of Labor reported Thursday.
“’Connecticut saw
the largest single month gain in jobs on record in June,’ said Andy Condon, the
Labor Department’s research director. ‘However, this gain has to be viewed from
the perspective of the unprecedented job losses caused by the COVID-19
pandemic.’
“The labor force is
still down nearly 173,000 jobs since June 2019. In the first two weeks of June,
the Department of Labor reported processing more than 19,000 claims for
unemployment insurance.”
And remarks in the
story made by Economist Don Klepper-Smith of DataCore Partners, an expert often
cited in Courant business reports, further deflated limping spirits.
Klepper-Smith indicated
that “Connecticut will not exit the downturn easily. Data show a ‘formidable
recession’ over the next year with losses and periodic gains, he said in an
email.
“'Recessions don’t
unfold over days or weeks, but months and years,’ Klepper-Smith said.”
Indeed, the average
length of a Connecticut recession is about ten years, at which point our
anti-business-businessman governor may have retired to “Lamont’s 2nd home far off the beaten path”
in North Haven, Maine.
The proprietor of Connecticut
Commentary, yours truly, sent up his flagpole the selfsame warning earlier
in July: “It is perhaps unpragmatic at this point to hope that businessman
Lamont and the Democrat leaders in the General Assembly will realize that
Connecticut’s economy, artificially sustained by President Donald Trump’s
military hardware acquisitions and the Wall Street casino, is weak at its core
and will be further weakened by unnecessary shutdowns. Businesses lost to the
Lamont shutdowns are irrecoverable, and there is yet another ten year recession
grinning evilly at the state from the political wings,” pearls of wisdom wasted
on unhearing progressive politicians.
Comments