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| Lamont, Biden and Hayes |
On some issues – the speculative impact of fossil fuels on the environment, for instance – Connecticut Governor Ned Lamont is sitting in the same ideological pew as Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, the Leon Trotsky of progressives in New England, and socialists bawling from the rooftops such as Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders, who has not had an original thought since his college days in the silly sixties, when it was considered cool politically to brush cheeks with the Ortega brothers in Nicaragua (Pronounced on college campuses of the day Knee-Ka-RRRRAG-WA) or the Castro brothers in Cuba (Pronounced KU-BA).
Lamont is a wealthy millionaire, with a well-appointed family
homestead in Maine to which he might retire from a state in the process of
conforming to the now possible impossible dreams of quixotic, memory defective progressives.
Lamont, like all good Democrats, is also a faithful camp
follower; so is Dick Blumenthal, husband of the daughter of a rich New York
landlord who owns, among other properties, the Empire State building. It helps,
when you are in politics, to marry well.
Lamont has resisted taxes levied on the rich and some
business taxes. But, fearful of progressive kick-back, he has not cleared his
throat on the more important question of state spending. Most of us in the
middle and lower orders know that spending and taxation are two faces of the
same coin. And the two faces are casually connected. The more you
get, the more you spend; the more you spend the better you feel; so eat
entrepreneurial capital at every meal. And never mind that small and midsized entrepreneurs,
whose profit line falls short of that of Warren Buffet or Lowell Weicker,
father of Connecticut’s income tax, or Dick Blumenthal, who married well, need
their capital more than rich politicians living the good life with second and
third homes and, in Weicker’s case, second and third wives.
State spending is, quite literally, the pink elephant in
Connecticut’s Democrat dominated political house. Progressives in the state’s
General Assembly have managed over the years to redefine taxation and spending
– the same coin, remember – as “investments.” Progressives regard all
investments by the state as unquestionably good, even when they are bad
investments. Lamont’s wife, a hedge fund investor, knows a good money deal when
she sees one, unlike most politicians. And deep-pocket capitalist investors who
continue to support a new-model progressive Democrat Party through generous
campaign donations rather hope that the Governor is attentive to her pillow
talk.
Faced with a resurgent progressivism, Lamont finds himself
walking barefoot on a razor’s edge. Progressives want to remake Connecticut’s tax structure so that the rich will finally pay their “fair
share,” before moving abruptly to other more tax friendly states.
Facing a recession caused in part by autocratic governors
who have closed businesses in response to a now disappearing Coronavirus infestation,
President Joe Biden, the nominal head of the national Democrat Party, put the kibosh
on a Keystone pipeline that might have safely delivered low cost, natural gas
to the country’s breadbasket. At the same time, the increasingly progressive Biden
administration has, through a wrong-headed foreign policy borrowed from the
Obama administration, given the nod to a Russian pipeline that now will deliver
energy to much of central Europe.
The Biden administration opened a semipermeable border to
illegal immigrants, and is now in the process of sharing hordes of border
busters with other than Border States. Connecticut signaled some months ago it
would be willing to accept its “fair share” of illegal immigrants.
While Border States wince under the lash of illegal
immigration, Vice-President-In-Charge-Of-Borders Kamala Harris has just
returned from a good will tour of Honduras, (Guatemala and Mexico), where she likely
discussed with the chief executives of all three countries, behind doors closed
to an inquisitive media, how many dollars in foreign aid they would need to
contain the overflow of illegal immigrants to the United States caused by her
boss.
And, oh yes, when Biden decided to complete former President
Donald Trump’s ambitious goal of bringing all American troops home from
Afghanistan, Mayor of Hartford Luke Bronin cheerfully offered to make room in Connecticut’s
Capital City for Afghan troops, friends of the departing Americans, now candidates
for extermination by the Taliban.
Somewhere in these messy political non-solutions to pressing
problems there are themes that might be exploited by campaign savvy Republicans
to change the political configuration of both national and state governments.
Now that both Trump and Coronavirus are disappearing from the front pages of
most newspapers, the empty news space has to be filled with something – perhaps
nonpartisan news. Presidential honeymoons, we know, do not last forever.
Lamont and leftists in his party are divided on a perilous economic
point. Democrat Party leftists, both nationally and in Connecticut are extreme Keynesians
who believe that government need never confront its debt because the
national debt is, as Keynes noted, “a debt we owe to ourselves.”
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