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| CT's debts and assets |
The general public is the last group of people to fully understand that the Obama revolution has reached an endpoint. The neo-progressive Democrat Party revolution began with the presidency of Barack Obama in 2009-2017 and ended with President Joe Biden’s catastrophic exit from politics, the longest and unintentionally comic third act in post-modern American politics.
The neo-progressive revolution is rooted in Keynesian
economic theory, the central pillar of which is that cautious spending is
unnecessary; the sky’s the limit on improvident spending because the national
debt is a debt we owe to ourselves. In actual fact, governments approach
economic calamity when accumulative expenditures in a nation exceed gross
domestic product (GDP), the monetary value of everything produced. State debt
occurs when expenditures exceed assets (see chart above). For the last 16
years and more, Connecticut’s ascendant neo-progressive Democrat Party has been
engaged in an effort to repeal foundational economic laws. Both businesses and
taxpayers are beginning to catch on to the fruitless effort to make the world
over anew politically, economically and socially.
Here and there in Connecticut, there are hopeful signs that some
in the state will no longer permit themselves to become the victims of pious
rhetorical flourishes. Neo-progressive Democrats have become the victims of
their own past successes. If you promise voters everything but the kitchen sink
– and then thrown in a Marxian kitchen sink,
as New York’s leading contestant in the
city’s mayoral race has promised to do – you will acquire votes. However, at
some point economic laws veto imprudent behavior. Never in the history of the world have people
or states been able to spend themselves out of debt. Noticing that spending and
debt are causally related is an economically healthy preoccupation. For more
than thirty years, Connecticut has not acted on this vital connection, and that
is why the state is now nursing an accumulative debt of roughly $68 billion.
Marc Fitch of the Yankee Institute tells us,
“Connecticut ranked second to last among all the states for its outstanding
debts, which amount to $50,700 per taxpayer, according to an annual accounting
of state debt by Truth in Accounting [TIA], a Chicago-based nonprofit
organization… In their 2021 annual report, TIA found Connecticut’s total
taxpayer burden to be $79.5 billion, amounting to $62,500 per taxpayer, meaning
Connecticut has shaved more than $10 billion from its total debt in two years…
Much of that is attributable to the fiscal guardrails established by the 2017
budget, which filled Connecticut’s rainy day fund, transferred billions to pay
down Connecticut’s pension debts and capped bonding. Connecticut has also been
contributing more toward retiree healthcare that, combined with some accounting
changes, resulted in a decrease of $4 billion between 2021 and 2022.”
All well and good, but the fiscal guardrails that served to
cap deficit spending have now come under attack from Connecticut’s
neo-progressives, the most prominent of whom are Senate President Pro Tem
Martin Looney and Senate Majority Leader Bob Duff, along with economically (wall-eyed)
media “experts” who, like their ideological cousins, think that a long-term
reduction in debt can be effected without major structural changes in spending
reduction.
Looney
is the author of a bill that, had it passed, would have provided tax money to
striking Connecticut union workers, people who have been buttering Looney’s
reelection bread for dusty decades. Fortunately, Governor Ned Lamont vetoed
Looney’s loopy bill, thus incurring the wrath of Connecticut’s far left
neo-progressives, some of whom have joined in an effort to challenge
Lamont in a Democrat primary. The braggadocio may be little more than a
bid for votes from Keynesian fantasists.
Truth be told, neo-progressives cannot abide spending cuts
because such cuts deprive them of their coin of the realm. The easiest way to
acquire a reelection vote is to buy one. These purchases are made with excess
spending, always an expensive proposition born by a distracted middle class,
the workhorse of debt reduction. The bill for improvident spending will come
due, Democrats hope, at some point in the far, far distant future. Public
employee unions have for decades been the most favored beneficiaries of this
largess.
State Democrats have now entered a political cul-de-sac.
They want to reduce costs through political regulations that do little more
than distort what is still amusingly called the free market. But a regulation,
like a tariff, is a tax, and Democrats, considering the many crises pressing us
down, do not wish to be tagged as enemies of a shrinking middle class. What to
do?
You invite the private sector to swallow what amounts to tax
increases by hiding the taxes in the costs of their products and services – and
then, a stroke of political genius, pretend to regulate those costs. This is
what the head autocrat of Connecticut’s Public Utilities Regulatory Authority
(PURA), the resourceful Marisa
Gillett, is in the process of doing, cheered on by Lamont, deeply
concerned with the cost of living in the state over which he presides, labeled
by TIA as a tax and regulatory “sinkhole state.”
People -- not including paid economic “experts,” flighty
academics and cul de sac neo-progressive reactionaries – are slowly catching on
to the fraud for reasons stated long ago by Abe Lincoln: “You can fool some of
the people all of the time, and all of the people some of the time. But you
can’t fool all of the people all of the time.”
In both murder and politics, the truth will out.
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