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| Orwell |
In a time of universal deceit, telling the truth is a revolutionary act – George Orwell
The state of
Connecticut – read: Governor Ned Lamont, a multi-millionaire Democrat, and the
state General Assembly, controlled for the past half century by a Democrat
majority – have concluded a “deal” with Connecticut’s State Employees
Bargaining Agent Coalition (SEBAC), a consortium of public employee unions.
“The Senate gave
final approval Friday to a four-year package of raises for state employees that
includes $3,500 in bonuses to help stem a surge in worker retirements,” CTMirror
reported as a sodden April was giving way to
May flowers. “The Democratic-controlled Senate voted 22-13 along party lines to approve
the contracts, which cover about 46,000 workers — the bulk of the state’s
workforce.”
Speaking for
Democrats in the General Assembly, co-chairwoman of the Appropriations
Committee Sen. Cathy Osten of Sprague said, intending no irony, “Today we’re
living in a post-COVID world, where employees — and not employers — are ruling
the job market,” a sentiment that certainly rings true with respect to public
employee/General Assembly relations.
So intimate is the
decade-long relationship between the dominant Democrat Party in Connecticut
and SEBAC, that one commentator – no need to guess who that might be – has described SEBAC as Connecticut’s fourth
branch of government.
The rule among
ruling state Democrats is: Whatever SEBAC wants, SEBAC gets.
Generally, SEBAC wants
higher taxes to finance ever increasing salary and benefit boosts. And the
boosting continues without reference to the state of Connecticut’s economy --
that is to say, without reference to taxpayer’s ability to pay.
It is very much the
fashion these days to attribute Connecticut’s foundering economy to COVID,
former President Donald Trump, the nation’s dark angel of death and
destruction, the Ukrainian war, a struggle that pits an independent Western-reliant
country against the remorseless attacks of once and future Soviet leader
Vladimir Putin, or any other convenient scapegoat that has made its way onto
the political stage.
But the truth is
that Connecticut’s economy is the way it is because the state’s political
structure is the way it is. Putin did not twist progressive arms in the state’s
General Assembly to convince that august body to accumulate a total debt related
to retirement costs, bonding and other debt of $79.5 billion. “Connecticut
has highest taxpayer debt in the country, according to report,” Connecticut’s Yankee Institute declared in a September 29, 2021
story. The debt leaves each Connecticut taxpayer with an “overall state debt
burden of $62,500.”
It is a burden that
majority Democrats, in state and nationally, have been content to pass along to
future generations who will not be voting in the upcoming 2022 mid-term
elections.
Connecticut is full
of “lockboxes” that have been unlocked and emptied by spendthrift politicians content to pass their bills along
to the state’s already overburdened progeny, many of whom are choosing to leave
the state rather than shoulder an ever-mounting debt.
Some of the escapees,
it should surprise no one, are members of SEBAC.
Chris Powell of the
Journal Enquirer rightly suspects that behind the inflation producing federal
tax hikes and the money “shared” with states lurks a “political racket” that
ought to be obvious to those in Connecticut’s media who have not yet fallen
prey to political propaganda. It was George Orwell who reminded us that the
most difficult chore in journalism is “to see the thing that lies right under our
noses.”
“First,” columnist
Powell writes in the Journal
Inquirer, “the federal government creates vast new amounts of money to
enable spending far beyond anything the national economy and even the world
economy produce. This devalues the dollar against goods and services, a
devaluation people are seeing as record inflation.
“Then the federal
government gives some of this new money to the states, which increase their
spending and distribute some of the money to their people, as Connecticut has
been doing. In their turn people spend the new money but, amid the record
inflation, they will be lucky to come close to maintaining their living
standards, even as their politicians claim credit for all this largesse as they
campaign.”
Powell calls this
obvious imposture “bribing the public with their own money.”
If voters in
Connecticut are determined to die the good death by tolerating the obvious
imposture rather than yielding to the truth that is now bellowing in their
ears, the phrase “They were bribed with their own money” might make a fitting collective
epitaph.
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