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| Pelosi and DeLauro |
U.S. Representative Rosa DeLauro, bosom pals with Speaker of the U.S. House Nancy Pelosi, is hankering to become the next chairwoman of the Appropriations Committee, and just in time too.
Connecticut, among the most wealthy states in the nation and
in the top tier of high spending, high taxed states, is broke, the result of
years pushing the spending envelope. Among the bluest of Northeast states,
members of the state’s all-Democrat U.S. Congressional Delegation will be
sending DeLauro back to Washington D.C. with a tin cup in her hand.
The very mention of permanent, long-term spending cuts is a third rail, highly charged and rarely touched, among Democrats who control by nearly veto proof margins the state’s General Assembly and the governor’s office,.
Even the state’s left of center media, which consistently
during the past 40 years has winked at spending and tax increases, is loathed
to mention the words “employee union driven debt.”
Governor Ned Lamont has so far rebuffed notions of tax
increases to cover the state’s $68 billion in bonded debt and
unfunded state employee retirement costs, but now that the election season is
nearly concluded, the minds of profligate spenders in the state’s General
Assembly, which has not assembled to do the public’s business for the last eight months -- will as usual turn to tax increases as a means of discharging
Connecticut’s crippling debt.
For spendthrift Democrat politicians joined at the hip to
thirsty state employee unions, tax bailouts began in 1991 with the imposition
of Maverick Governor Lowell Weicker’s income tax. The non-income tax budget
Weicker vetoed three times in pursuit of an income tax was a modest $7.5
billion; the state’s current embarrassingly distended biennial budget is
cresting at $43.3 billion.
There was, some woke journalists will remember, a spending
cap attached to the Weicker income tax bill, but that cap was easily skirted
and, a few years ago, state Attorney General George Jepsen knocked the cap on
its head with a hammer, dispatching it. Jepsen declared that the constitutional
cap had never been operative because the legislature that wrote the income tax
into law neglected to provide definitions necessary to implement the cap. Definitions
having been recently supplied, the cap has been restored – for now.
Connecticut’s total debt, according to a Truth in Accounting report, amounts
to about $50,700 per Connecticut taxpayer. This unsupportable tax load suggests that one more tax revenue straw may very well break taxpayers’ backs, and that is
why general opposition to tolling in the state was so ferocious -- and
ultimately successful -- in killing tolling prospects.
Ordinarily, a legislature deprived of a means of increasing
taxation would seek to contain costs by adjusting the spending side of the
ledger. But there is among dominant Democrats not a hint of a resolute
determination to clip spending. And so – we are sending Pelosi’s pal DeLauro to
Washington D.C., tin cup in hand, to persuade a national legislature deeply in
debt to send tax dollars to one of the wealthiest states in the union so that
relatively poor states may bail out One-Percenter states such as Connecticut
and New York.
If DeLauro is successful, she will have repealed the central
doctrine of the progressive movement as it has existed in the United States
from 1912, when Teddy Roosevelt ran for president on his Progressive Party
ticket. Early progressives drew their inspiration from Luke 24/48: “From everyone
who has been given much, much will be required; and to whom they entrusted
much, of him they will ask all the more.” Post-modern politics draws its
inspiration from Karl Marx’s 1875 Critique
of the Gotha Program: “From each according to their ability, to each
according to their needs” and, under Marx, it is the totalitarian state, not
the charitable heart or a condign punishment from a just God, that will enforce
compliance.
Can DeLauro do it? Is political friendship enough to turn
progressive tables during an era of tax depletion and massive debt?
Speaking for Governor Ned Lamont, self-quarantined after having tested positive for Coronavirus, Max Reiss, also self-quarantined for having tested positive for Coronavirus, looks to DeLauro as Simon and Garfunkle once looked to Jolting Joe: “Where have you gone, Joe DiMagio, a nation turns its lonely eyes to you?”
Said the cloistered Reiss: “Rep. DeLauro has always been a fighter in Congress on behalf of all the
citizens of Connecticut. If her colleagues in Congress have the good sense to
select her as chair, working families across the country will have a true
champion ensuring that their voices are heard over the special interests
and that they have a seat at the table as we all work together with
President-elect Biden and his administration to build back better from this
pandemic.”
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