Connecticut Commentary: Red Notes from a Blue State

Unhappily for Malloyalists everywhere, at least one reporter was not sound asleep when Governor Dannel Malloy’s administration unveiled a PowerPoint presentation at a recent budget briefing showing that the budget will be in balance in 2012-13 and thereafter reap surpluses in 2013-14 of $226 million and $942 in the final year of Mr. Malloy’s gubernatorial term. “In actuality,” the reporter wrote, “if the administration's estimates for expenditures -- including the conversion to Generally Accepted Accounting Principles -- and revenues are compared, the budget is balanced only in its first year. There's a $424 million shortfall in 2013-14 and a $180 million hole in 2014-15 -- the same year Malloy's budget office projects a nearly $1 billion surplus.” Absent the smoke and mirrors employed by previous Republican governors and Democratic dominated legislatures, future Malloy budgets are not in balance. The budgetary magic that transforms real deficits into imaginary surplus...