Connecticut Commentary: Red Notes from a Blue State

  In 1991, then Governor Lowell Weicker was facing a stubborn billion dollar deficit that had been left on his doorstep by retiring Democratic Governor William O’Neill, an opponent of a state income tax that had first been publically proposed by Bill Cibes in a Democratic Party primary. Running for the Democratic Party nod against Bruce Morrison, Mr. Cibes argued that the deficit and Connecticut’s parlous economic climate made it impossible for the state to raise the sales tax, then among the highest in the nation, or business taxes. An income tax was inevitable. ''The public,” Mr. Morrison retorted, “should beware of people who want to increase their taxes and call it reform.”

Governor Dannel Malloy’s budget staff and the General Assembly’s non-partisan Office of Fiscal Analysis are now on the same budget gap page. All the green eyeshade folk have agreed in a consensus report that Connecticut has entered the sinkhole. Only a few weeks ago during a special session of the General Assembly, Mr. Malloy and Republican legislative leaders came together – in the spirit of Sandy Hook, as one of them put it – to wrestle to the ground a budget deficit of nearly a half billion dollars.