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| Lamont |
Governor Ned Lamont’s Democrat Party has been listing left for, some say, 30+ years. Connecticut’s still massive accumulative deficit — the total of all past budget shortfalls as reflected in Connecticut’s Comprehensive Annual Financial Report, now topping $49 billion -- began in the 1930s when the General Assembly, now dominated for decades by Democrats, collectively decided the state could live with deficits.
In a brief story on pension debt published in 2023, CTMirror noted, “Connecticut amassed debt between the 1930s and 2010 by
failing to save adequately for retirement benefits and by liberal use of its
bonding credit card for capital projects… Overall debt across all areas tops
$88 billion. 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’s overall debt was reduced during the Lamont
administration, largely owing to a state Republican inspired bipartisan bill
that capped some spending and bonding, the so called “spending guardrails” that
have in recent days been adjusted, much to the delight of importunate public
employee unions.
John Maynard Keynes’ politically convenient dismissal of
debt -- that a country‘s national debt should not be worrisome because a
national debt is one “we owe to ourselves” -- has been discredited by
responsible economists and unforgiving experience. Nevertheless, politics as
usual, we all know, trumps economics. Progressive politicians are unwilling to
surrender political prerogatives to economic realities. And so, politicians in
Connecticut and elsewhere are willing to suffer the inconveniences of debt if our
accumulative debt allows them to continue lavish spending without raising taxes
to liquidate the debt.
Increasing taxes in a sluggish economy generally is avoided
by politicians hungry for public approval during election seasons.
State taxpayers appear willing to indulge such economic
perversities so long as their own budgets remain manageable, government programs
are not crippled by program cuts, and public employee union heads are not unduly
disturbed by budget realities such as that expressed by Mr. Wilkins Micawber in
Charles Dickens’s David 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.” Misery occurs when spending exceeds income. A
state accumulative deficit of $49 billion will result in misery, some modern
day Micawbers think, if left unattended; hence the “spending guardrails” that
somewhat reduced the poor ratings issued by major investment houses.
When accumulative spending is greater than the state’s
ability to finance spending, accumulative debt must increase this writer noted
last year in a blog titled Spending, Connecticut’s Real Problem, and
the State’s ‘Surplus’
The blog, larded with uncontested data, pointed out: “The
reader may have read often in Connecticut’s media of the state’s burgeoning
surplus. There are three things that may be done with a surplus of tax funds:
1) The surplus, a tax over-charge, may be returned to taxpayers, much in the
way an overpayment may be returned to business customers by non-greedy,
non-felonious capitalists; 2) the surplus may be applied to the liquidation of
current debt; or 3) the surplus may be used to finance new spending. The Democrat progressive community in Connecticut,
operating on the principle that taxes must always increase and never decrease,
generally prefers option 3).”
The so-called state “surpluses”, produced in part by
Republican inspired “guardrails” now being partly dismantled by state
progressive Democrats in Connecticut’s General Assembly, are not surpluses at
all. The guardrails are not permanent fixtures. And the chief problem with the
load of programs and program extensions produced abundantly by Connecticut’s progressive
legislators is that all progressive programs have been oversold and
underfinanced. That includes such valued programs as social security, Medicaid
and Medicare, and others. Continued expansion and underfinancing produces
continuing debt that progressives are unwilling to finance through election crippling
tax increases.
And the sole thin reed that stands between improvident
spending and economically deceitful post-Keynes progressivism in Connecticut is
– Democrat Governor Ned Lamont, a so-called fiscal conservative and social
progressive.
On the Republican side of the political barricades, Ryan
Fazio, who could use battalions of support, has dedicated his campaign for
governor on repeated attempts to reduce spending, the core issue in CT. It rarely
has been foremost in the minds of establishment Connecticut politicians, mostly
Democrats, that affordability can be addressed through spending cuts, leaving
assets in the hands and wallets of the state's principal financers,
hard-pressed middle-class taxpayers. We have a government that first causes
unaffordability through artificially high employee union salaries and program bloat
and then, once elections roll around, weeps crocodile tears over problems they
have caused.
Assuming Lamont is reelected governor in the state’s
upcoming campaign, he will be conducting a losing battle with committed
progressives in his own party for four additional years. Progressives in
Connecticut are awaiting a progressive/socialist deluge. The
anarchist/progressive wing of the Democrat Party, having been invited by party
regulars into their Big Tent, have only to agitate and wait patiently for the
inevitable King Tide.
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