It’s Over – For Now

Lamont rejoicing -- Courant

Governor Ned Lamont breathed a sigh of relief following the conclusion of the 2022 off year elections in Connecticut. Nothing much had changed. The Democrat Party hegemony in the state, unimpaired, remained in control of state government. Lamont rejoiced that ubiquitous partisan ads had at last been put to bed.

So too has the prosecutorial assault on former New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani, according to a brief Associated Press (AP) report.

The report, Prosecutors: No criminal charges expected from Giuliani raid, carried on page 4 in a Hartford paper, tells us, “Former New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani will not face criminal charges over his interactions with Ukrainian figures in the run-up to the 2020 presidential election, federal prosecutors revealed in a letter to a judge Monday.

“Prosecutors with the U.S. attorney’s office in Manhattan said they made the decision after reviewing electronic evidence gathered in raids on Giuliani’s home and law office in April 2021…”

The prosecutors were examining whether Giuliani, Trump’s personal lawyer, committed a criminal offense by failing to register as a foreign agent in dealing with Ukrainians “who wanted his help pressuring then-President Donald Trump’s administration, while he was looking for their help launching an investigation that might hurt Democratic rival Joe Biden,” according to the AP report.

The predicate underlying the Giuliani raid – that the personal lawyer of the President was a “foreign agent” – was absurd, since the foreign agent law requires that the agent under scrutiny must be a foreign agent, that is -- someone in the employ of a county presumably hostile to the U.S. government, such as Iran or China.

You win some, you lose some -- that’s politics.

We do not yet know whether presidential son Hunter Biden, who was willing to share his good fortune with “The Big Guy,” was in the service of China, a country hostile to the interests of the United States. We do know he was lavishly recompensed for his service, mostly self-serving. An investigation is underway.   

The Giuliani raid in late April 2021, a precursor to a later FBI raid on former President Donald Trump’s Florida residence at Mar-a-Lago in mid-August 2022, was, from a prosecutorial point of view, a bust, and some cynics, few of them AP reporters, are beginning to wonder whether the Giuliani prosecution was, from the very first, a Potemkin Village front designed to draw public attention away from the inept policies of President Joe Biden’s hapless administration.

Now that the 2022 elections are over, both the Biden and the Lamont administrations might want to begin addressing our real problems.

Nationally, the U.S. border is a continuing suppurating wound. Energy prices are up ever since the Biden administration had curtailed the production of relatively clean U.S. produced natural gas. The trade sanctions leveled at Putin’s Russia – most especially curtailment of the importation of dirty fossil fuel to Europe – will exacerbate inflation and impact the economic influence of powerhouse nations such as Germany.

Progressive Democrats do not consider excessive taxation and spending to be a spur to inflation, defined by nearly all responsible economists as “too many dollars chasing too few goods.” The Biden administration has recklessly borrowed and printed money to pay for costly political handouts, papering the country with devalued inflation swollen dollars at a time when business growth has been hammered by a politically infused “pandemic.” Too many dollars, too few goods = inflation.

Connecticut has now become a welfare child of the federal government. Media contrarians – there are too few of them in the land of bad steady habits – have pointed out that borrowed prosperity ends when the borrowing ends. It takes Connecticut about ten years to recover from national recessions. Lamont is hauling around in his Santa Sack a mega-surplus, a safeguard and a surety, he has said, against a looming recession. The state’s “Office of Fiscal Analysis projects a FY 22 General Fund operating surplus of $1,048.8 million, which is $108.2 million greater than the most recent projection.”

It is not recessions but excessive spending and accumulated debts that quickly reduce surpluses. Unless spending is brought under control by a progressive Democrat majority in the General Assembly -- What are the chances? -- the inflated money in the sack, generously distributed to special interest groups that help Democrats win elections, is certain to disappear fairly quickly. In the absence of workable solutions, problems remain. And ours are serious long-term problems that cannot be jabbered away by prayerful campaign incantations.

Lamont’s temporary “tax relief” will be of short duration now that the 2022 election has been put to bed. “Business as usual” in Connecticut has always meant more spending, higher taxes, and there is no reason to think the future will hold out to us a mitigating course correction.

“Democracy,” Henry Menken once said “is the theory that the common people know what they want, and deserve to get it -- good and hard.”