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| Lamont, Biden, Hayes |
There is a modest residue of “moderate Democrats” in the State General Assembly, according to the indispensable Yankee Institute. The moderate Democrat caucus – everyone these days has a caucus – numbers about 28 souls.
The term “moderate”, particularly as it relates to
economics, an art rather than a science, is not merely a meaningless point
between extremes.
Until the Democrat Party was dropped into the fiery furnace
of Keynesian economics, most Democrats were responsible moderates. Bill
Clinton, for example, was the last President, Republican or Democrat, who gave the
nation a balanced budget. He was, to be sure, a big spender – and so were all
other Keynesians who supposed that deficits were worry-proof because the
national debt was “a debt we owed to ourselves.”
This mode of thinking, which demolished spending barriers,
has now left us with a national debt currently tipping the scales at an ever
increasing $28 trillion, so rapidly has the debt we owe to ourselves
metastasized. Actually, the national debt, future generations of Americans will
be disappointed to learn, is a charge on the future which, as Yogi Berra once
said, “ain’t what it used to be.”
In Connecticut, the residue of moderate Democrats are
skittish about ever expanding budgets.
Their beef is
displayed in a recent media release: ““Moderate House Democrats applaud
Governor Lamont’s stance on No Tax Increases for the current biennial budget.
The State of Connecticut should take advantage of higher than expected
consensus revenue, a healthy rainy day fund, and its strong financial position
to pass a budget that does not include tax increases.”
Lamont appears to be fighting a rearguard action on tax
increases, but he is losing footing on stony ground. The White Knight of
progressivism in Connecticut, Martin Looney, a cagy President Pro Tem of the
State Senate, and progressive numbers in the General Assembly, tell against
him.
The central and controlling Democrat Party ideological
imperative – tax more, spend more, tax more – what some would regard as a cycle
vicious to the taxpaying working class in Connecticut, now has a receptive
audience in much of the state.
This imperative has for decades leapt over any and every rational
proposal to cut spending, long term and permanently, so as to broaden the
constricting borders of what has been called "dedicated spending" – that is, automatic
spending that needs no biennial budget affirmation by the General Assembly, supposedly in charge
of getting and spending in Connecticut.
There are, in other words, two taxing tails and no spending-cut
head on the Democrat Party coin, so that whenever it is flipped, the coin always
comes up tails, a confidence trickster’s swindle.
When Chris Powell, formerly Managing Editor of the Journal Inquirer,
now a regular political columnist for the paper, was told that some
appropriated funding could not be touched in budget negotiations because they
were “dedicated funds,” his response was both lucid and revolutionary: Well, undedicate them!
Republicans in the General Assembly, their numbers much reduced,
seemed to have settled on at least one campaign platform plank – resolved: there
shall be no net increase in taxes – and Lamont appears to be sitting in the
same pew. Naturally, appearances in politics, a house of mirrors, are sometimes
deceiving.
The upcoming non-presidential election should be brutally
lucid.
During the last non-presidential election, Democrats in the
state successfully ran against President Donald Trump, who was not even on the
ballot. Republicans could not move during the anti-Trump, non-presidential election
without interrogations concerning Trump’s fitness to serve as
President.
President Joe Biden, who may become the Donald Trump of the next
non-presidential election, has been seriously wounded by his political actions
-- which always speak louder than words -- on the now permeable US southern
border, the closure of the nearly completed US-Canadian XL energy pipeline, a
servile bow to the environmental lobby, the Presidential sprint to plunge the
nation into its next post-Coronavirus recession, and most recently Biden's loss of
Afghanistan to untrustworthy Taliban pirates.
The President's approval ratings have tumbled since he began waving the
white flag of surrender in Afghanistan, and the mud side is beginning to take
its toll on frayed Democrat nerves. Real
Clear Politics polling on the “direction of the country” shows Biden
falling headlong off an approval cliff.
In coming campaigns, when Biden Democrats are up for
re-election, we will know whether the Taliban tiger has changed its stripes –
not likely. For the moment, the prospect of an American President leaving behind Taliban lines American civilians and/or Afghanis who had helped the United States
to keep the peace in the country for 20 years is causing sweat beads to form on
the placid brows of the seven all-Democrat members of Connecticut’s U.S. Congressional
Delegation.
U.S. Senator Dick Blumenthal, for one, has said he favors a non-withdrawal of American troops in Afghanistan until it is certain all Americans have left the sole airbase Biden has not yet surrendered to the Taliban. But Blumenthal, alas, is not Biden, who intends to satisfy the Taliban non-negotiable demands that remaining American troops must leave Afghanistan by Biden’s withdrawal date.
Neither Blumenthal, nor Biden, nor reporters at the New York Times, know how many Americans and Afghan military helpers are now present in the country; therefore, Blumenthal cannot know whether all such people will escape murderous Taliban land pirates before the Taliban guillotine falls on the country’s neck after August 31.
Blumenthal does know that Taliban spokespersons, less proficient
in double-talk than Pentagon chatterboxes or Democrat political operatives associated
with Biden, have said that NO Afghans will be permitted to leave the Taliban stronghold
after August 31.
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