Budget Flimflammery

“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.