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| Ritter |
Rising electric bills that have angered Connecticut voters are a very small tip of a very large iceberg.
In a Hartford Courant story – “Anger over massive CT electric bills will
drive voter choices on Election Day, GOP says” – party honchoes
assessed the anger.
Senate Republican leader Stephen Harding of Brookfield said.
“Every day that I door-knock, every time I go to an event, I can’t speak to
three or four constituents without the electric rates being brought up. People
have had enough … Most voters want to see some effort to do something. We had
an ability in a special session to stop the bleeding. On top of that, we can
provide some immediate relief. At least it’s something. We should not dismiss
it the way the Democrats have dismissed it.”
Hartford Democrat House Speaker Matt Ritter off-handedly
dismissed Harding’s concerns and at the same time gave the neo-progressive game
away when, shrugging his shoulders, he confessed that any attempt to provide a
small relief to Connecticut householders would be too expensive for big
spending legislators who had over the years compiled a massive debt.
“Overall debt across all areas tops $88 billion,” CTMirror tells us. “Connecticut
remains one of the most indebted states, per capita, in the nation, and
required annual payments are expected to put extra pressure on state finances
well into the 2030s or later.”
The state has so many business and residential electric
customers, Ritter said, that it would be highly expensive even to provide a
small amount of relief, according to the Courant story.
Note the import of the word “expensive” here. Tax relief
would be “expensive” for whom?
“It would take hundreds of millions of dollars to save the
average person $5 on their bill, and it would appear as a credit,” Ritter told
The Courant in an interview. “If you need an election issue because you’re
trying to turn attention away from the national stuff, you can certainly
mention this, but it would literally save people five dollars. I don’t think
it’s a smart play.”
The cat Ritter let out of the bag will be squealing soon.
Ritter’s is an argument in favor of abandoning all
tax cuts and all savings realized through spending reductions, the reason
being -- such measures would be too costly for the governing authority. What
Ritter means to say is that tax reductions, regulation reductions and spending
reductions are inadvisable because they would be inconvenient for Ritter and
his Democrat Party associates in the state’s General Assembly and the
governor’s office.
Regulations and taxes in Connecticut, once they go up, must never
come down. In fact, this has been for decades the unofficial and overriding
doctrine of Connecticut’s Democrat Party, which is why the state is staggering
under an unsupportable $88 billion dollar debt, passed on through the decades
to future generations. The future has now become too close for comfort.
Now then, like God, the immutable laws of economics will not
be mocked, nor should they be overridden by political greed, and at some point
Connecticut must bite the debt bullet. It started to do so when Republicans,
for a brief moment at parity with Democrats in one House of the General
Assembly, convinced leading Democrats, Ritter among them, to erect some
spending guardrails. But those guardrails will not survive an attack upon them
by neo-progressive Democrats in the General Assembly devoted to the above
proposition -- that spending and taxation should under no circumstances be
reduced.
Such reductions enriching the middle class would be
inconvenient for a political body addicted to harvesting votes by lavishing
upon supportive political groups tax credits and regulatory relief. If you have
no surplus money in your budget to parcel out to favored groups, you cannot buy
their votes with tax money you do not have.
And here is the bigger problem, the larger iceberg that will
sink the state by making beggars of a once self-sustaining middle class in
Connecticut. Very slowly and craftily, a self-sufficient middle class in
Connecticut is being pushed toward marginal dependence by neo-progressives
standing on deck and, as always, willing to lend a hand to those fleeing the
ship approaching the iceberg.
What our leaders should be doing is moving the ship in a
different direction – towards passenger self-sufficiency. The very first political
matter in order of importance is not “What should be done?” but rather “Who
should decide what should be done?”
Bill Buckley provided us with an answer to that decisive
question when he confesses that he would much rather place his God-given liberties
in the hands of the first hundred people chosen at random from the phone book
than the Harvard Law faculty.
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