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Lamont’s New Math “Investment”

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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