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Connecticut’s Incontinent Government

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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