“Every profession is a conspiracy against the laity,” George Bernard Shaw once said. It would not have served Shaw’s peculiar political ambitions – Shaw was a Fabian Socialist – to emphasize that politics, most especially socialist politics, is a profession.
Keith Phaneuf of CTMirror has been writing about state budgets and budget flimflammery for
many years, but his latest offering – Budget cap workaround draws GOP ire
-- merits public notice.
The lede to his story is especially noteworthy: “State
officials have underfunded key contractual obligations in Connecticut’s budget
by hundreds of millions of dollars for the second consecutive year, knowing the
rest of the plan will generate more than enough surplus to cover the problem.’
There is a purpose, Phaneuf points out, to the budget
flimflammery: “This underfunding allows legislators to assign more dollars to
education, municipal aid and other core programs without violating budget
caps.”
Some years past, when Republicans unexpectedly gained seats
in the General Assembly, certain “spending guard rails” were created that have
consistently produced worrisome budget surpluses. No one at the time or since
professed surprise that the spending guardrails produced continuing state
surpluses. When you reduce the rate of spending, you give birth to a brood of
surpluses. Neo-progressive Democrats in the General Assembly have been chipping
away at the surplus because they believe that a surplus is nothing more than
tax dollars that ought to be spent on favored programs.
Now then, the use of the word “surplus” in connection with
Connecticut’s fiscal year budgets is highly misleading because a surplus
generally connotes savings realized through spending reductions, but
Connecticut’s accumulative debt, as opposed to its fiscal year deficits, is an
astounding $52 billion, nearly the largest state debt in the nation. So the use
of the word “surplus” in connection with Connecticut’s accumulative debt is
what philologists might call a term of art, meaning an artful use of language
to convey a meaning that has little or no relationship to the truth..
A tax surplus is actually a tax overcharge that should be
remitted by an honest government to taxpayers, precisely in the way that a
price overcharge should be remitted by an honest seller to an unjustly
plundered buyer. Connecticut politicians who have produced the tax overcharge
will of course argue that it should not be remitted because Connecticut real
debt is $52 billion, and an honest government must pay its debt. It was George
Orwell who taught is in the 20th century that all corruption begins with a
corruption of the language. Not everyone in our journalistic community has
learned the Orwell lesson, but then our language cops have for years been
inattentive to journalistic corruption.
But the flimflammery only begins --- it does not end – with
this stunning Orwellian deception.
Why, Phaneuf asks, have “state officials,” Governor Ned
Lamont and Democrat legislators in the Democrat dominated General Assembly,
“underfunded key contractual obligations in Connecticut’s budget by hundreds of
millions of dollars for the second consecutive year?” The key contractual
obligations are largely legally binding union contracts arranged between
Connecticut’s so called “fiscally moderate” governor and The State Employees
Bargaining Agent Coalition (SEBAC), routinely underwritten by Connecticut’s
Democrat dominated General Assembly.
To ask the question is to answer it. For every quid in politics there is a
corresponding pro quo. The General
Assembly gives to state worker union leaders a quid, legally binding salary and benefit increases, for which they
receive a pro quo, campaign money and
invaluable feet-on-the-ground support during political campaigns.
Because union contracts are enforceable by courts,
legislators who sign off on the legal terms of the contracts cannot amend them
during the multi-year life of the contract. Bills produced by legislators are
amendable when necessary, but legal contracts cannot be adjusted until they
expire – whether or not they are affordable. Salary and benefit accommodations
afforded unilaterally by state legislators, bypassing SEBAC contracts, would
recover from the courts a constitutionally authorized administrative function
-- the getting and spending of tax money -- that belongs to the legislative
branch of government.
But who in
Connecticut’s government would champion such a reform? Certainly not members of
Connecticut’s ruling one-party state; not Connecticut’s “fiscally conservative”
governor; not a state news media alive to constitutional propriety; not
academic history buffs who remember Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s sharp and
definitive answer to union leader Luther Stewart, president of the National Federation
of Federal Employees. Stewart had pleaded with Roosevelt to allow collective
bargaining among federal workers. Roosevelt firmly nixed the idea for the soundest
of reasons.
Roosevelt wrote to Stewart, “… the process of collective
bargaining, as usually understood, cannot be transplanted into the public
service. It has its distinct and insurmountable limitations when applied to
public personnel management. The very
nature and purposes of Government make it impossible for administrative
officials to represent fully or to bind the employer in mutual discussions with
Government employee organizations [emphasis mine]. The employer is the
whole people, who speak by means of laws enacted by their representatives in
Congress. Accordingly, administrative officials and employees alike are
governed and guided, and in many instances restricted, by laws which establish
policies, procedures, or rules in personnel matters.”
Briefly, a government of, by and for the people, Roosevelt
implied, ought not to be run by union members unelected in a democratic
plebiscite.
Recently, neo-progressives in Connecticut’s left wing
Democrat Party have threatened to primary Lamont, still considered a fiscal
moderate by the state’s legacy media, for having vetoed a measure promoted by
the Democrat caucus in the General Assembly that, had it passed, would have
paid union workers who are on strike. No one on either side of the issue cared
to mention that, should the state of Connecticut pay workers who are on strike,
their real employers – “the whole people,” in Rooseveltian terms -- would be
sanctioning strikes against their own best interests. If you pay people to do
X, X will substantially increase.
The left in Connecticut firmly believes that any surplus
should be devoted to future spending increases – which ought never to diminish
-- and that any attempt to reduce spending is treacherously anti-democratic.
Indeed, that is why Connecticut is now laboring under massive debt.
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