SEBAC and Lamont Win, State Loses

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.