In Charles Dickens’ David Copperfield, Mr. Micawber finds himself headed to a debtor’s prison. Before it was abolished Dickens’ own father found himself in similar straights.
Micawber, chronically unable to take his own advice, tells Copperfield,
“Annual income twenty pounds, annual expenditure nineteen, nineteen and six,
result happiness. Annual income twenty
pounds, annual expenditure twenty pounds ought and six, result misery.” The
difference between economic misery and happiness may turn on a penny. Debt – or
rather inattention to debt – accumulates, and cumulative debt is always
painful.
The state Office of Legislative Research (OLR) reported in 2024,
“You [perhaps one of our tax-thirsty legislators] asked for a 50-state
comparison of state debt as a percent of state gross domestic product (GDP) and
how Connecticut’s debt burden based on these measures has changed in the past
10 years.
“Connecticut had the highest NTSD [Net Tax Supported Debt] as
a percent of own-source revenue at 103.8%, greater than the median of 24.5% for
all states. Two other New England states ranked in the top 10 based on this
metric: Massachusetts (90.2%) and Rhode Island (55%).”
Debtor's prisons in England have long been abolished, but
habit and inclination live on. Modern economists might put it this way: When
the gross national or state product exceeds expenditures, the result is
happiness; when expenditures exceed either the gross national or state product,
the result is misery. To put it in plain common-sense terms, when your income
dips below your expenses, you will find yourself in a world of hurt.
That rule apparently does not apply to federal or state
governments. The federal government may borrow money or print dollars to cover
its debt. Both “solutions” cause inflation. The classic definition of inflation
is “too many dollars chasing too few goods.” Inflation is a hidden consumption
tax that reduces the purchasing power of the dollar. Because the devaluated
dollar is worth less, the purchaser will need more of them to buy inflated
goods, a substantial part of the increase in the price of goods being the
result of dollar devaluation.
Connecticut’s long term debt means, among other things, that
our continuing budget debt is a Micawber debt. Connecticut has for decades
spent more than the state has paid out to discharge its continuing debt. If
there were a debtor's prison awaiting spendthrift legislators, more than half of
state legislators would be cooling their heels in prison and exclaiming, along
with Micawber, “Annual income twenty pounds, annual expenditure nineteen,
nineteen and six, result happiness.
Annual income twenty pounds, annual expenditure twenty pounds ought and
six, result misery.”
According to the 2024 OLR report, “Connecticut’s rank among
other states,” the second poorest of the 50 states, “remained relatively
unchanged from 2012 to 2022. Across all states, the median NTSD as a percent of
state GDP decreased from 2.47% in 2012 to 2.18% in 2017 and 2.00% in 2022. Over
the same period, Connecticut’s increased from 8.09% in 2012 to 9.11% in 2017
and then decreased to 9.00% in 2022.”
These depressing figures were not prominently presented
during Governor Ned Lamont’s 2026 State of the State message to Connecticut’s
General Assembly. The governor, naturally, could not be expected to rain on his
own parade.
In his State of the State address opening the new
legislative success, Lamont quoted Thomas Paine, author of Common Sense to this
effect: “These are the times that try men’s souls.” And once again, Lamont intimated,
the nation has fallen into the iron, merciless grip of a petty tyrant,
President Donald Trump, who has become a stock figure in Democrat Party
campaign literature.
Lamont, thought by many to be a right of center moderate on
tax and spending issues, touched lightly on what has been called deficit
spending: “It is bad for any budget – your family budget, the budget for your
small business, our state budget – to grow faster than your income can support.
We have been down that deficit road before, but our strong economic growth
allows us to do more without compromising our honestly balanced budget.”
Lamont did not quote Paine on freedom, poverty and taxes:
“To say that any people are not fit for freedom, is to make poverty their
choice, and to say they had rather be loaded with taxes than not.”
Lamont did not notice, even in passing, the connection
between state tyranny and the suppression of the free market. Paine noticed:
“Heaven knows how to put a proper price upon its goods. It would be strange
indeed if so celestial an article as Freedom should not be highly rated.
Britain, with an army to enforce her tyranny, has declared that she has a right
(not only to tax) but ‘to bind us in all cases whatsoever, and if being bound
in that manner, is not slavery, then is there not such a thing as slavery upon
earth. Even the expression is impious, for so unlimited a power can belong only
to God.”
Paine -- even today, as the nation approaches the 250th
celebration of its declaration of liberty and freedom – is still too hot to
handle by statists who fail to understand the connection between the liberties
of a free market, in which consumers make consumption and political decisions,
and an impious state power that regards people, loaded with taxes, as slaves of
a command economy.
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