Connecticut Commentary: Red Notes from a Blue State

  Union allied Speaker of the State House of Representatives Joe Aresimowicz wants to “save the towns.” From what, some may ask? Answer: from municipal tax hikes necessitated by Big Spenders like Mr. Aresimowicz. Tax hikes, Aresimowicz said, have never been taken off the table. We’ve said it consistently since the beginning of February.” Indeed, big spending Democrats in the General Assembly have not taken revenue increases off the table since the end of the Grasso administration. And even the flight of businesses from Connecticut, Mother Aetna being the most recent to move its corporate offices from the state, has not diminished their persistent hunt for more taxes.

“The future ain’t what it used to be” – Yogi Berra This year, as in other fiscal years, Governor Dannel Malloy’s Budget guru Ben Barnes has overestimated tax receipts. “ Malloy Calls For Hiring Freeze  As Income Tax Collections Nose-Dive $450 Million ” a recent story screams. Such repeated miscalculations are odd, issuing from a man who not so long ago had been hit by a lightning bolt coming out of the blue. Following a painful Damascus Road unhorsing sometime back, Mr. Barnes told us that Connecticut would in the future have to get used to repetitive deficits – because the state’s economy was under-performing. After the fourth murder, even an amateur detective might begin to suspect a pattern had begun to develop and rule out happenstance.

There will be time, there will be time To prepare a face to meet the faces that you meet…  Time for you and time for me,  And time yet for a hundred indecisions,  And for a hundred visions and revisions,  Before the taking of a toast and tea – T.S. Eliot, The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock In 20 months, reporters in the state will be referring to “former Governor Dannel Malloy.” On Thursday, Mr. Malloy announced he would be passing the gubernatorial baton to some other deserving Democrat, so he hopes. In the last few years, Republicans have made inroads into Connecticut’s one-party state. The State Senate is now evenly split between the two parties, and Democratic hegemony in the General Assembly has had one of its wings clipped.

T here is nothing ambiguous in Gail Lavielle’s kickback. This is what the Republican State Representative said about the Democrat’s new attempt to smudge budget figures: “Here it is: documented evidence made available by the respected CTMirror that the governor and the administration are HIDING Connecticut's current deficit until after the election. Remember, the current majority legislature made this possible by voting just a couple of years ago to move the annual autumn pre-election revenue forecast until after the election. There will be more unconscionable tax increases, more service cuts, and more failing infrastructure if that majority remains. And it's all avoidable: the five-year plan we outlined this spring clearly showed how, starting with real state labor cost reforms, bonding reallocations, and implementing the spending cap.” Mrs. Lavielle’s statement was echoed by other distraught Republicans. The CTMirror story noted   that although budget projections fi...

"Th’ newspaper does ivrything f'r us. It runs th' polis foorce an' th' banks, commands th' milishy, controls th' ligislachure, baptizes th' young, marries th' foolish, comforts th' afflicted, afflicts th' comfortable, buries th' dead an' roasts thim aftherward" – Mr. Dooley In Peace And War Dannel Malloy, Chairman of the Democratic Governors Association and the second least popular governor in the United States , has produced, in conjunction with Senate President Martin Looney and Speaker of the House Brendan Sharkey, the third least popular budget in Connecticut.

When Governor Dannel Malloy first came into office in 2011, there were boisterous rejoicings all around. Finally, after two Republican governors and an odd fish, Lowell Weicker, who won the governorship on his own party line, Democrats had a Governor they could call their own. On entering office, Mr. Malloy raised taxes, as had the odd fish before him. Mr. Weicker sired Connecticut’s income tax, after which most editorial pages in the state crowed their hearty approval. Taxes are good, and one can never have too much of a good thing. Whenever a budget deficit appeared on the horizon, Democrats raised their old tattered rhetorical flag: Connecticut does not have a spending problem; it has a revenue problem, the obvious solution to which was and is – tax increases. The Malloy tax boost was the largest in state history. During his second term in office, Mr. Malloy, in concert with dominant Democrats in the General Assembly, repeated his performance. By that time, state union advances...

The headline – “No Tax Increase Expected” – was unintentionally misleading. Plenty of people in Connecticut expect tax increases – or, at the least, revenue enhancers – sometime after elections in Connecticut have been put to bed. In our fair Republic, governors propose and legislatures dispose of budgets. Recurring deficits demonstrate that neither Mr. Malloy, the first Democratic governor since the Bill O’Neill administration, nor the Democratic dominated General Assembly have been adept at writing budgets.  The lede to the story in the Hartford paper was accurate: “Governor Dannel P.  Malloy will not propose tax increases next week during his annual budget speech at the opening of the legislative session, his spokesman said Wednesday.”

If the Devil really is in the details – and He is – it becomes necessary for governing bodies who want to put one over on the general public to hide Him effectively from small “d” democrats. That is why ostensibly democratic governments require a veil of secrecy – to hide the Devil. Democracies do this most effectively by burying the Devil in mountains of misleading data. The general public, busy with other things, rarely notices the horned and hoofed demon until he comes knocking at their own doors. Senate President Martin Looney’s new “tax reform” provides a case in point.

According to Jonathan Pelto ,  who ran out of money in his short-lived gubernatorial bid before he could seriously challenge Governor Dannel Malloy, Governor Dannel Malloy’s promise of a tax reduction was “a hoax.” It’s difficult to disagree with him. Three days prior to Mr. Malloy’s budget address before the General Assembly, the governor appeared on WFSB’s  "Face the State” and told moderator Dennis House he would be cutting the sales tax rate from 6.35 percent to 6.20 percent on Nov. 1, and to 5.95 percent more than two years from now, in April of 2017. The governor who had imposed on Connecticut the largest tax increase in its history had become, in the twinkling of an eye, a tax cutter, a miraculous transformation.

Thanks Jeff Cohen “People never lie so much as after a hunt, during a war, or before an election” – Otto Von Bismarck “I am a porcupine” – Dannel Malloy The endorsements of Governor Dannel Malloy prior to Vote Day (VD) were not full throated. In fact, many Malloy endorsements made by editorial boards the members of which could not bring themselves to recommend as governor a guy who owned a yacht named "Odalisque" were so hedged about with thorns that the rose was barely visible among them. A Hartford paper’s editorial endorsement was typical of most. The paper mentioned some minuses and pluses, added up the sums and endorsed the incumbent governor. Over the years, the paper had fallen into the bad habit of reflexively endorsing incumbents, and in Connecticut all the leading positions in government – the governor’s office, the constitutional offices, the members of the U.S. Congressional delegation and the leadership of the state’s General Assembly – are ...