Is Lamont A Fiscal Conservative?

Annie Lamont and family

Be bold, be bold, but not too bold, lest the marrow of your bones run cold – From an English Fairy Tale 

It may be too soon to assert that Governor Ned Lamont is a fiscal conservative, but his posture on Connecticut’s budget puts him in company with people who are not progressives.

The old saying “If it quacks like a duck, walks like a duck and swims in ponds, it must be a duck” may, or may not, apply in Lamont’s case. Budgets, as President Pro Tem of the State Senate Martin Looney has reminded us repeatedly, are subject to change until a minute after the state legislature has officially adjourned, and governors can only propose budgets that are often changed, sometimes radically, by legislators.

In the next few years, Lamont and majority Democrats will be sitting pretty on a swollen budget surplus, the result of positive activity in a post-pandemic financial sector and a massive influx of federal dollars, considered by some Republicans excessive, that will be dumped by national majority Democrats into Connecticut’s treasury.

The surest way to garner a vote, a post-modern Machiavelli might say, is to buy one. These votes, naturally, are prohibitively expensive – the national debt presently is cresting at $26.9 trillion – but this debt will be passed on to yet unborn citizens who have no voice in current profligate spending.

We do not know at this point, and will not know before the General Assembly adjourns on June 9, 2021, whether the “tension” reported by Connecticut newspapers between Lamont and heedless progressives within his own party, is real or for show only.

But Lamont has been unusually insistent on several points.

Connecticut is due to receive $2.65 billion over the next three fiscal years in post- coronavirus federal stimulus money; spending in the state is projected to increase by 18% next year; and Lamont has drawn “a line in the sand,” as one paper puts it, in support of a bi-partisan spending cap approved in 2017, when Republicans were a force to be reckoned with in budget deliberations – no longer the case.

Connecticut politicians have in the past agilely escaped such spending cap nooses. A Constitutional spending cap approved as part of a state income tax measure that passed with great difficulty during Governor Lowell Weicker’s administration in 1991 was never operative. Many years later, Attorney General George Jepsen, a former Democrat Party Chairman, pronounced the cap inoperative because the General Assembly had not provided the definitions necessary to constitutionally enact the cap. And generally, Connecticut legislators have treated caps on spending as inconveniences to be overcome by clever legislators.

“I want an honestly balanced budget. You can’t play games, you can’t do gimmicks. That’s what’s gotten us into trouble the last generation or two,” Lamont said in a recent press conference.

“Without using the word ‘veto,’ Lamont drew a line in the sand,” one paper noted, “that he will support the bipartisan spending cap that was approved in 2017.”

Seeming to be swimming in a fiscal conservative pond, Lamont further noted, “I’m not going to rush into a bad deal. I’m not going to support some budget that’s out of whack. ... This is money that is being invested, that can make a difference not just for the next two years, but for the next 20 years.”

Of course, budget negotiations so far have been held “behind closed doors” in Democrat caucus deliberations from which minority Republicans have been excluded. It holds true, in both houses of ill repute and political House and Senatorial caucuses, that secrets whispered into the pillows shall remain undisclosed, purely as a matter of practical politics and political honor.

On the point of pillow talk, it should be noted that Connecticut’s First Lady, Annie Lamont, has been for 30 years an extremely successful, forward looking venture capitalist. “Annie is known as a leading healthcare and FinTech investor, appearing on the Forbes Midas List, Institutional Investor’s FinTech Finance 40 list, and the Top 100 Venture Capitalist rankings published by CB Insights and The New York Times,” her brief biography on Lamont’s Official Office of the Governor page notes, with obvious pride. And, incidentally, “She previously served on the Stanford Board of Trustees and the Executive Committee of the National Venture Capital Association. Annie received her bachelor’s degree in political science from Stanford University.”

The First Lady behind the throne, it may confidently be asserted, is fiscally conservative. Like most people in Connecticut who have made money from Wall Street, she is likely socially liberal. The Lamonts are redundantly wealthy, Annie contributing much more than her husband to household upkeep.

In the next few days, we shall see what stuff Lamont is made of, and whether he is on fiscal issues as ardent as his political patron, Governor Weicker, was in pushing through a resistant General Assembly his income tax, responsible for swelling an increase in state spending threefold from those halcyon days when an income tax was but a consummation devoutly wished by progressive Democrats.

In politics, pillow talk, even when it is in earnest, does not always carry the day.