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St. Agustine -- Communo
“Give me chastity and continence, only not
yet” – St Augustine
CTMirror, a Connecticut publication, reports, “With
inflation topping 7%, energy prices surging and many
municipalities and businesses not recovered from the pandemic-induced woes of
2020, the desire to tap the state’s swollen coffers is great. But the
Democratic governor will ask lawmakers to balance those needs against massive
debt problems that likely will require belt-tightening for many years to come.”
Inflation,
accurately defined as too many dollars chasing too few goods, will likely be
with us in “the land of steady habits” for some time, and there are indications
that unabated inflation will produce a recession in the near future.
These prospects have
caused Connecticut Governor Ned Lamont to tighten the state’s belt, sort of.
Politicians do tend
to oversell both themselves and their policies, and Lamont is no stranger to
selling products and ideas, nor is his very successful partner in arms, wife
Annie Lamont, a venture capitalist investing in transformative companies and
entrepreneurs and apparently the bread winner in a family that has over the
past few years hauled in more than $50 million yearly. “Gov. Ned Lamont’s
adjusted gross income was $54 million in 2021, a nearly seven-fold increase
over the previous year,” CTMirror
has reported, “driven by $52.7
million in capital gains, according to tax records released Friday.
Lamont, who lives in
tony Greenwich, Connecticut, along with other notable political millionaires
such as U.S. Senator Dick Blumenthal, wears his millions well. Old money does
not brag or boast. If Connecticut’s previous governor, the bristly Dannel
Malloy, was a porcupine, as Malloy once characterized himself, Lamont is a
mink, smooth and silken to the touch. His relationships with his accountants,
the increasingly progressive General Assembly, and Connecticut’s left of center
media, have been cordial, profitable and mutually beneficial.
During the past two
years of the Biden administration, Connecticut and other states have received
huge gobs of inflated federal tax money, a temporary infusion of funds that has
created a temporary appearance of prosperity.
Owing to measures
adopted a few years back that really did curb state spending, state government
is now flush with a super-surplus of $4 billion.
A bipartisan budget
enacted in 2017, when Democrat and Republican numbers in the state House were roughly
equivalent, “created new, more stringent caps on spending and borrowing,”
according to CTMirror. “More importantly, it included two new programs that
force the state to save a significant portion of its revenues. One in
particular, dubbed the ‘volatility adjustment,’ controls lawmakers’ ability to
spend tax receipts from investment income, which traditionally has surged or
plunged at the whim of financial markets.”
In his recent
address to the General Assembly
and in remarks later made to reporters, Lamont made oblique references to the Republican inspired 2017
“stringent caps on spending and borrowing” as legislative “guardrails.” The
correlation of forces in the state has changed considerably since 2017. The
General Assembly now turns on a progressive pivot and threatens to overturn the
state’s surplus producing spending guardrails, and progressives in the state
legislature have numbers enough to overturn not only the guardrails but also
any of Lamont’s peevish vetoes.
When in 1991 then Governor
Lowell Weicker forced a state
income tax through a semi-resistant legislature, the new tax produced large
surpluses that astonishingly disappeared because the relatively flat Weicker
income tax was not accompanied by sharp decreases in spending.
In succeeding years,
the “flat” Weicker tax was made progressive by increasingly progressive
Democrat state legislators, and the surpluses disappeared in short order,
leaving Weicker, then retired from politics, moaning at a later media event,
“Where did it [the surplus) all go?”
A businessman in the
crowd leaned over to me and whispered, “They spent it. What did he suppose
would happen to it?”
Spending guardrails
in Connecticut are fragile, false borders. A surplus is nothing but the amount
of money that a government has overtaxed its citizens. At some point in a
functioning republic, the citizenry will recognize the overreach and demand
from an incontinent government a return on their so called “political
investment.”
But not yet.
The whole business
reminds us of St. Augustine’s struggle with concupiscence. In book eight,
chapter seven of his Confessions, Augustine prays God to rid him of habits that
have ensnared him, but he fears to be heard too soon. A teacher of rhetoric,
Augustine tells us, “All arguments were spent and confuted; there remained a
mute shrinking; and she [his soul] feared, as she would death, to be restrained
from the flux of that custom, whereby she was wasting to death.”
Such is the imperiousness of destructive but pleasant bad habits, political
and otherwise.
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