Connecticut Commentary: Red Notes from a Blue State

If you can hold the line on taxes, you will have created an impetus within the laggard General Assembly for real, long-term cuts in spending, and it is spending, not insufficient revenues, that is driving state debt. The pantry at the Yankee Institute is full of ideas for permanent spending reductions , none of them palatable to progressive Democrats in the General Assembly. To no one’s surprise, rational cuts in spending will upset the status quo apple cart. Most people in Connecticut might be surprised at some of the commuters riding in the cart. Progressives, of course, have their tickets punched, so they think, for the next fifty years. The central tenet of Connecticut progressives in the General Assembly, nearly all of them tied to the iron and inflexible apron strings of the state’s employee unions, is that government is good and more government is better; in order to finance this greater good, additional taxes will be necessary. That has been the operative principle am...

''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.