.jpg) |
| Lamont, Hartford Business. com |
This one has to be the quote of the decade.
Addressing Connecticut reporters on the occasion of Matthew
Brokman’s appointment to Chief of Staff for Democrat Governor Ned Lamont, the
governor mentioned that Brokman would be intimately involved in budget negotiations
with interested parties.
As reported in the Hartford Courant, Lamont said,
“’The era of free money is over,’ … adding that billions of federal COVID
dollars will be coming to an end. The money has been allocated and is still
being spent, even though life has returned to normal following the depths of
the pandemic in 2020.”
The “free money”, of course, had been awarded to Connecticut
and other states by Democrat President Joe Biden.
In the days of Tammany Hall, the dispensing of tax dollars
to states and municipalities prior to elections would have been labeled “walking
around money,” that is, money dispensed by political operatives – for whatever stated
purposes – to secure the votes of appreciative recipients.
Of course, it does not take a Milton Freedman to understand
that there is no such thing as free money. The libertarian
economist is best known for having said, “There is no such thing as a free
lunch.” Diners may be treated to a cost-free lunch by generous patrons, but
someone pays for the “free lunch.”
Even neo-progressive money dealers on the left understand
that federal walking around money, never inexhaustible, comes from one of three
sources: taxpayers, inflation producing money printed in Washington D.C., or
federal borrowing agents unmindful of Pelonious’ advice to his son Laertes, who
is about to depart to a Paris university:
"Neither a
borrower nor a lender be,
For loan oft loses
both itself and friend,
And borrowing dulls
the edge of husbandry.”
Sound advice, in and out of season, that.
Biden, who evidently has not read Shakespeare’s Hamlet, recently found a way around a
U.S. Supreme Court ruling that his forgiveness of student loans was
unconstitutional.
Lamont, a millionaire businessman, certainly knew when he
accepted Biden’s “free money” that the funds, would boost state spending and,
over time, require the imposition of additional taxes to balance Connecticut
gargantuan debt. Connecticut has the highest taxpayer debt in the country,
according to a 2021 Yankee Institute report.
“According to Truth in Accounting’s annual Financial State
of the States 2021 report,” Yankee tells us, “Connecticut’s overall debt
increased in 2020, leaving each taxpayer with an overall state debt burden of
$62,500 per taxpayer. The average debt burden across the country was $9,300
which, as the report notes, is $2000 worse than last year. Using the latest
Comprehensive Annual Financial Report, Truth in Accounting found Connecticut’s
total debt related to retirement costs, bonding and other debt totaled $79.5
billion.”
The easiest way to avoid debt is through prudent policies in
which the state’s annual domestic spending is substantially less over time than
the state’s annual gross domestic product, a sort of economic husbandry
Connecticut has not practiced for decades.
In any case, Lamont has cautioned us that the state’s “free
lunch” – tax money levied by the federal government on some poor states and
given to some wealthier states such as Connecticut, in violation of the central
tenant of Marxist tinged neo-progressivism: “From each according to his
ability, to each according to his needs"
– has sadly come to an end.
With the elimination of “free money,” will spending in Connecticut
be commensurately reduced?
Is anyone listening?
The Courant tells us that “the chief of staff’s job requires
24 hours a day, 7 days a week, serving a key role in a huge, multifaceted
operation with more than 50,000 state employees, an annual budget of $26
billion, and scores of state buildings, public colleges, and prisons.”
That “multifaceted operation” is not cost free. The “more
than 50,000 state employees,” mostly unionized, do not work for nothing. And
union leaders, sometimes in opposition to rank and file members, tend to
support union growth rather than budget husbandry, even though virtually all
state workers are both bill payers and needy state employees.
So then, if Lamont and his budget hawks, including Brokman,
the governor’s “fourth chief of staff in less than six years,” the Courant
tells us, are able collectively to
reduce long term spending and, consequently, the upward spiraling of budgets, a
grateful majority of voters likely would heap glory upon them in the form of
assenting votes. And if not, the government of political inertia will
tyrannically continue its dominion over a helpless public.
Comments