Connecticut Commentary: Red Notes from a Blue State

LAME DUCK MALLOY LARDS PORKY BOND AGENDA :  STATE OF ANGER: GOVERNOR'S RACE GETS PERSONAL ” the banner headlines on Tom Dudchik’s  “Capitol Report” read, in screaming text. “Capitol Report” is an aggregator site much frequented by Connecticut politicians and state political watchers that retails important stories. The lede to the featured Hartford Courant story read, “The state Bond Commission will meet Thursday to vote on borrowing hundreds of millions of dollars to finance projects around the state, and the potential for a bonanza of funding for Hartford.”

Just a gigolo, everywhere I go People know the part I'm playing Paid for every dance Selling each romance Every night some heart betraying There will come a day Youth will pass away Then what will they say about me When the end comes I know They'll say just a gigolo As life goes on without me Approaching the end of his second term as Connecticut Governor, Dannel Malloy has been bounced from the budget negotiating room. In some quiet corner of the Connecticut political barracks, Republicans must have been murmuring to each other, “How does it feel?”

The State is the great fiction through which everyone endeavors to live at the expense of everyone else – Frederic Bastiat Procrustes – literally, “the stretcher who hammers metal” -- was in Greek mythology a rogue smithy and bandit from Attica who cut off the legs of people to fit them to his iron bed. Political narratives as they relate to facts can be procrustean beds. If the facts don’t fit the narrative, you simply cut off their limbs to make them fit. Facts may be stubborn things, but politicians sometimes are more stubborn.

It was Rahm Emanuel, then consigliore to the Obama administration, now mayor of crime infested Chicago, who once reminded us that clever Harvard educated politicians and street organizers should never let a crisis go to waste. Progressives in the General Assembly have wholeheartedly adopted Emanuel’s view. In his most recent budget, likely unbalanced, Malloy will present to the General Assembly a progressive measure that would “shift $407.6 million, nearly one-third of the annual cost of municipal school teachers’ pensions, onto cities and towns — a move that would hit the state’s wealthiest communities the hardest,”  according to CTMirror . So some say. It is worth noting that the “progressive tax by other means” will draw down municipal resources, weaken town government and pave the way to a false solution: the replacement of town governments with a regional structure overseen by a state that, unlike municipal governments, is chronically incapable of balancing its ...

Months ago, budget guru Ben Barnes, asked why he was taxing hospitals, replied “ because that’s where the money is .” It has been left to others to plumb new tax resources. A tax on hospitals would invariably be passed along to the halt, the lame, the blind and the bleeding, and taxing these poor souls might well damage permanently the hard won reputation of the Democratic Party as the champion of the halt, the lame, the blind and the bleeding. But Yale?

Q: President Pro Tem of the State House of Representatives Martin Looney appeared recently on “Face the State” with Dennis House and seemed – though in politics, appearances may be deceiving – to have repudiated progressivism… A: I don’t think he’s ready to give up on progressivism just yet. You cannot have strongman government without progressivism. He did point out a major, perhaps fatal, failing. Q: You quoted what he said in one of your columns.

''Don't tax you, don't tax me, tax that man behind the tree” – Russell Long Appearing on WFSB Channel 3’s Face The State with Dennis House , President Pro Tem of the State Seante Martin Looney made an alarming admission. Mr. House noted that Ben Barnes, Governor Dannel Malloy’s Office of Policy Management chief, had said the state “might be seeing deficits for some time.” Deficits were “the new normal. Do you agree with that?” Mr. Looney drew a deep breath and, his breast expanding to the ball, rode valiantly into the valley of death.

Governor Dannel Malloy’s economic policy does not work. But he is in good company. The nonprofit health-insurance companies set up to help people enroll in Obamacare are now failing. Mr. Malloy’s progressive economic policy may be summed up this way: State government serves as a transformer, collecting money from the real economy and disbursing it according to need, from those who have to those who have not. Karl Marx laid down the law of a socialist economy more than a hundred and fifty years ago: “From each according to his abilities, to each according to his needs.” In enlightened countries, the job is done without destroying either capital or capitalists. “The last capitalist we hang shall be the one who sold us the rope,” Marx said. Progressive ambitions in the United States have been more modest. They proceed from Matthew (19:20-24) rather than Marx, and their adherents in the United States so far have been content to await a final felicity at the final judgment:

Tom Dudchik’s Capitol Report in mid-October was full of portentous headlines: “ Malloy's approval rating at all-time low … Shrug: 'I've never run my life to be popular'... TheDay: Malloy's very bad year... Stevens: Malloy 'toxic'... Record-Journal: Where have Connecticut jobs gone?... ” The single event that precipitated this run of bad news for Governor Dannel Malloy, the most progressive chief executive in Connecticut since Wilber Cross, was  the most recent Quinnipiac University poll .  First elected in 1930, when the progressive era in American politics was in full swing – Yes, Virginia, progressivism is even older than that, though the Cross administration is but a few years older than Bernie Sanders, progressivism’s great white hope for president  -- Mr. Cross abolished child labor and instituted the state’s minimum wage rate. Grateful for superman governors during The Great Depression, Connecticut later would show its appreciation of Mr. Cr...

A recent Yankee Institute study – “Unequal Pay: Public Vs. Private Sector Compensation in Connecticut” – provides a data foundation that supports what everyone writing about budgets in the State of Connecticut has known for many years. The study shows that while the average non-tax supported worker in Connecticut earns a slightly higher salary than his state employee counterpart, benefits received by state employees far outpace those in the private sector by a ratio of about two to one. According to the study , total compensation for state employees, which includes salary and benefits, exceeds similar compensation for non-government workers in the state by at least 25 percent.

"The Future ain't what it used to be"  -- Yogi Berra Ben Barnes, Governor Dannel Malloy’s budget guru, is a late convert to reality. But having overcome the progressive stiffness in his joints, Mr. Barnes, now rising from his knees, has got economic religion. One hopes that Mr. Barnes’ conversion to common sense rubs off on his boss. Last June, pointing to an under-performing economy battered by a quarter century of mounting tax increases and tortuous federal and state regulations, Mr. Barnes explained to an astonished gaggle of news reporters that Connecticut   should get used to frequent deficits . Even this partial confession astounded some members of Connecticut’s media who perhaps had been wondering why nearly all of the “balanced budgets” submitted by Mr. Malloy to a Democratic dominated General Assembly so quickly unbalanced themselves once Election Day had passed.

J, To Dust Thou Shalt Return It was a stroke of luck, or the hand of Providence, that forced you to move from Connecticut to South Carolina. For more than twenty years, you have been out of the way of Connecticut’s inexorable getting-and-spending steam roller. Distance may not make the heart grow fonder, but it does prevent the spirit from being mauled by current events. Here in your former home state, where you reared your family, we are all pretty much clawed by an administrative machine that is at once both solicitous and rapacious.

Governor Dannel Malloy, a righteous dragon, entered office in 2011 shooting flames out of his nostrils. Previous laggard Republican governors, ne’er-do-wells in Mr. Malloy’s considered judgment, had resorted to budget alchemy to balance their books. He would fix that: Open government, balanced budgets and an absence of the usual end of the fiscal year chicanery would usher in a long hoped for prosperity. And, oh yes, having in his first budget imposed on Connecticut one of the largest tax increase in state history, there would be no tax increases in Mr. Malloy’s second term. You can take that to the bank.

“Do I Dare disturb the universe?” – T.S. Elliot, The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock Increasingly, the legacy media chooses not to disturb the universe. Disturbances always are politically inadvisable and inconvenient. In Connecticut, as everyone knows, the political universe is controlled by Democrats confabing in formerly smoke-filled back rooms, where the light of publicity rarely shines. It is the age-old mission of the media to comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable, and Democrats in Connecticut rarely have been as comfortable as in the past few years, following the capture of the governor’s office in 2011 by Dannel Malloy, the first Democratic governor since the administration of Governor William O’Neill, who left office in 1991 as deficit clouds were marshalling on the horizon.

The chief executive proposes, but the legislature disposes; this old chestnut, possibly as ancient as the Republic, has never been truer. Just now, progressive Democrats in the General Assembly are setting about disposing of Governor Dannel Malloy’s no tax increase pledge, iterated numerous times during Mr. Malloy’s late gubernatorial campaign. Of course, the governor himself already has disposed of his George H. W. Bush-like vow – “Read my lips. No new taxes.” Mr. Malloy’s submitted budget boosts tax receipts by about $840 million -- still not enough, apparently, to keep up with chronic budget deficits.

Shortly after Governor Dannel Malloy presented his budget to the Democratic dominated General Assembly, a cataract of critical comments washed over his administration. Noting the governor had passed along to the legislature a highly problematic budget, one commentator sniffed , “If the state budget is a football game, rather than a tragi-comic version of naked beer pong, then Gov. Dan Malloy admitted the other day to punting on third down at the bank robbery.” No compliment was intended.

Most of us are living in the land of Déjà Vu All Over Again.  Every fiscal year, we keep crashing into the same icebergs. Ben Barnes, who heads Governor Dannel Malloy’s Office of Policy Management, has said the state may be facing chronic deficits. The last time Mr. Malloy faced a deficit, he disposed of it through tax increases. But the largest tax increase in Connecticut history failed to solve the problem because Connecticut does not have a revenue problem; it has a spending problem. Mr. Malloy said during his campaign that further tax increases were off the table, at which happy news overtaxed citizens and businesses, their eyes fixed on the exit signs, breathed a sigh of relief. Then he began to tug the veil from his second administration. There is not a hint of spending reduction in any post-election remarks made by Mr. Malloy thus far. But there is plenty of chatter about spending: Education must be reformed; vanishing businesses in Connecticut depend upon an ...

"The esthete stands in the same relation to beauty as the pornographer stands to love, and the politician stands to life” – Karl Kraus. It’s a great puzzle for those who think seriously about getting and spending. During his second winning campaign for governor, Dannel Malloy took tax increases – but not increases in borrowing, the last refuge of spending scoundrels -- off the table. Echoing George H.W. Bush’s boast at the 1988 Republican National Convention, Mr. Malloy invited Connecticut voters in so many words to read his lips: NO NEW TAXES. And yet, even Mr. Malloy’s own Office of Policy Management guru, Ben Barnes, has told us that we shall have to get used to sluggish tax receipts, at least for the foreseeable future. Mr. Malloy has pledged to hold Connecticut’s Municipalities harmless, and so it will be difficult for him to pass the state’s budget woes to towns by reducing their revenue allotments. He has pledged not to renegotiate state ...

The deficit is back. Like an aging coquette, it appears and disappears around corners, smiling fetchingly at us: Here today, gone tomorrow, back again the next day. It appears that the skeletons came out of the closet a few days after Governor Dannel Malloy, the seven members of  Connecticut’s all Democratic U.S. Congressional Delegation, members of the all-Democratic State Constitutional Offices and Democrat legislators who dominate the General Assembly were returned to office. Faced with an “unexpected” state deficit, Ben Barnes, the Head of Governor Malloy's Office of Policy Management, said that Connecticut should perhaps expect chronic deficits in the future, a thunderclap that caught the notice of some papers. Mr. Barnes may have been mistaken by some, if only for a moment, for Jonathan Gruber, an MIT Don dripping with ivy and one of the architects of President Barack Obama’s Health Care initiative. Mr. Gruber is on record as having said in various venues that Ob...

Jonathan Pelto, who is to the Malloy administration what Inspector Javert was to Jean Valjean, demonstrates how Malloyalists help a city – Will anyone be surprised to discover that it is Bridgeport? – circumvent its statutory obligations, not to mention its moral obligations to taxpayers living outside the confines of Bridgeport: “Apparently without the approval of the State Board of Education or the approval of the Connecticut General Assembly, the Malloy administration is planning to provide Malloy ally, Mayor [of Bridgeport] Bill Finch, with a special deal so that he doesn’t have to have the City Bridgeport meet the state law concerning their minimum budget expenditures for local education. The law is called the Minimum Budget Requirement (MBR).” http://jonathanpelto.com/2013/11/24/news-flash-secret-deal-malloy-political-ally-turns-education-funding-formula-joke/