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| Lamont |
It would seem that the Lamont administration is having difficulty adding one and one and arriving at two? But then, the state of Connecticut has for the past three decades been fearlessly math deficient.
Governor Ned Lamont tells us “Maybe I’m mad as
hell (sic) that this is going from $150 [million] to $250 [million]. But I do
think about the nature of this public-private investment in New London, and
what this could mean for this round of wind power, and the next five rounds
that come after it, and the possibility that southeast Connecticut can be a
major hub for what we think is an important new industry going forward.”
The dockworker expression “mad as Hell” fits millionaire
Lamont like a roomy set of oversized clothes. Note to AP: Shouldn’t the AP
Style Book instruct all journalists to capitalize “Hell,” which is a place name
of a real place suited especially for politicians who cannot add one and one
and arrive at two?
Would a dockworker ambush a perfectly useful slang
expression – “I’m mad as Hell” – with a diffident “maybe”?
Maybe, if he was a millionaire politician pretending to be a
dockworker.
The massive overcharge concerns a New London pier, and
windmills. The pier had to be upgraded, so that Connecticut could transport
planet-saving windmills far and wide, Connecticut’s “investment” in the Green
Revolution.
Lamont’s “Mad as Hell maybe” figures, however, are millions short
of the mark. The present projected cost of the New London Pier project is $250
million. Initially, the projected cost in 2019, the price at which a project of
dubious merit was sold to cost-unconscious suckers in the General Assembly, was
$93 million. Therefore, according to Old Math, the present cost overrun is $157
million, not $100 million.
A piece in CTMirror --
Port
Authority chair: Officials knew State Pier would cost more than $93M --answers the questions, “Who knew what
when?”
But really, why quibble over a paltry $57 million when the
state presently is swimming in tax dollars?
Connecticut’s current tax overload – its surplus – is about
$2.74 billion, CTMirror reported at the end of March. And the generous Biden
administration, state Democrat politicians running for election in 2022 have
told us numerous times, has aspersed Connecticut with federal tax dollars, money that is supposed
to be spent improving the state’s infrastructure – piers? -- not in providing
incumbent politicians with “walking
around campaign money” to boost their campaign prospects.
So then, why aren’t the federal funds used to pay for New
London pier overruns rather than “walking around money” lavished on the state’s
fourth branch of government, Connecticut’s teacher unions, far more powerful
and politically influential than the Nation Rifle Association (NRA) that gives
the state’s two U.S. Senators, Dick Blumenthal and Chris Murphy, night cramps?
Connecticut Democrats have an answer to this question, but
only people who can deduce Shakespeare from lamb chops will understand it.
Nearly everyone in the state understands that Connecticut is
famous for under-projecting “investment” costs, the better to convince a
dominant Democrat General Assembly and overburdened tax payers to sign off on
projects that, in the very, very long run, if ever, are touted as planet-saving,
money making “investments.”
Will the state’s “investment” in the New London Pier flood
Connecticut coffers with money, in the long or short run? Has the state’s
“investment” in the UConn Heath Center in Farmington, a tax dollar black-hole,
yielded sufficient returns, in the long run? That was former Governor Dannel
Malloy’s investment before he became Chancellor of Maine’s higher education
system. Poor Malloy, whose approval rating as Governor of Connecticut was
comparable upon his leaving the state to that of present Democrat President Joe
(Lunch-Pail) Biden, has now been besieged by college professors, progressives,
conservatives and Maine’s journalistic establishment.
No one knows whether an investment in a pier in New London
will save the earth. It certainly will not save taxpayers money. Connecticut
continues to increase spending, which will increase taxes, which, at some point
in the near or far future, will beggar the state.
Come to think of it, a state that has accumulated a massive
debt of some $58 billion is already on its
knees, begging for succor, little different than the state’s homeless in its
large cities, or victims of urban crime, the result of a communal anarchism
that has turned Hartford, Connecticut’s Capital, into a shooting gallery in
which 14-year-old boys, who cannot shoot straight, kill innocent grandmothers
washing their dishes.
There is in all this a razor sharp ironic simile between politicians who cannot
add straight and illegally armed underage murderers who cannot shoot straight
that has not yet been exploited – for profit, of course – by Connecticut’s up
and coming rap artists, or its journalists.
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