Connecticut Commentary: Red Notes from a Blue State

Democrats, the ruling party in the General Assembly for the past thirty years, have been very hard on Connecticut. Most economists worth consulting agree that the state is under water, blowing bubbles, and all the usual stratagems to which Democrats have in the past resorted to pull the near corpse aboard – tax increases, more regulations, moving budget money from one or another “lockbox” in order to cover deficits, plundering the rich – have only made festering problems worse. The General Assembly now has produced a compromise budget, and some  thoughtful analysts   have argued that this compromise will compromise a winning Republican campaign in 2018.

Q: You believe the state of Connecticut is in crisis. A: Yes, and I’m not alone. There are two crises; the state itself, by which I mean its people and businesses, is in crisis; and state government, sometimes mistaken for the state, also is in crisis. To a certain extent, the first crisis is driven by the second. Q: These two are not the same? A: They are never the same. Lincoln spoke of a government of, by and for the people, but if you pause over that formulation and think about it, you will discover the two are not the same. In a perfect representative system, differences between the two are slight; state government and the larger, real state are close cousins. But that can never be the case in a republic in which government operates by force. This is the present condition in Connecticut, and the state has been in this mode for a long while. We have had single party government in the General Assembly, Connecticut’s lawmaking body, for almost half a century. When the...

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.

Governor Dannel Malloy, the Record Journal reports , is not anti-gun. He has proposed raising pistol permit fees by $230; presently, fees are hovering around $50. He is pro-fee.  “I’m not anti-gun,’ Malloy said. “I have lots of friends who are hunters and I know lots of people who have guns.” Following the slaughter of the innocents at Sandy Hook Elementary School, Malloy succeeded in passing a bill through Connecticut’s General Assembly rather quickly. The National Rifle Association (NRA), the bete noir of Malloy and Connecticut’s two U.S. Senators, Dick Blumenthal and Chris Murphy, protested as expected. Following passage of an “assault weapons” ban among the most restrictive in the nation, Malloy appeared on CNN’s show “State of the Union” and fragged both the gun industry , some of it still operating in Connecticut, and the NRA. “What this is about,” said Malloy, “is the ability of the gun industry to sell as many guns to as many people as possible—even if they ar...

“A budget deal that closely resembles the 2011 budget agreement,” will be good for what ails Connecticut, said Martin Looney, the President Pro Tem in the Connecticut Senate, according to an NBC Connecticut story . “A budget deal that closely resembles the 2011 budget agreement might be needed in 2017,” said Mr. Looney. What ails Connecticut is excessive spending, pretty much everyone in the state now agrees – even Governor Dannel Malloy, who is responsible for both the largest and the second largest tax increases in state history. The first of Mr. Malloy’s tax increases was a not inconsiderable part of the 2011 budget deal that Mr. Looney would apply as a curative to Connecticut’s continuing ailments. Connecticut’s three major tax increases, the first promulgated during the administration of Governor Lowell Weicker, father of Connecticut’s income tax, served as political balm to union friendly governors and legislators. The tax increases relieved politicians of the necessity of...

"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.

Governor Dannel Malloy’s brief flirtation with Republican leaders in the Democrat dominated General Assembly is now officially over. The engagement ring has been repossessed, and we are back to square one; or, as Yogi Berry might put it, “It’s déjà vu all over again.” Shortly after Mr. Malloy agreed to accept the most recent budget presented to him by chastened leaders in the General Assembly, Republican House Minority Leader Themis Klarides expressed her dismay in a Facebook posting: “Despite what they claim, the final budget proposed by the Democrat majority does not include real structural changes necessary to change the course of business in Connecticut. It simply sets us up for tax increases after the elections in November.”

U.S. Senator Bernie Sanders of the People’s Republic of Vermont -- the nation’s first socialist presidential candidate since Eugene Debs (1855-1926), five times candidate for president and Norman Thomas, a presidential candidate six times from 1928-1948 -- has a hearty dislike, people will have noticed, for “greedy” companies larger than a mom-and-pop-deli. “Greed” is the mud-ball leftist extremists throw at business enterprises that are successful. There are two kinds of businesses: successful ones that make a profit and unsuccessful ones that go out of business. “Greed” is excessive profit-taking, the “excess” to be determined by socialists and progressives who historically have been much in the habit of transferring funds from obscenely greedy “haves” to the importunate and much more numerous “have-nots.” A Hartford newspaper  made Connecticut history when it called unions “greedy” in an editorial. Stubborn union leaders, the editorial pronounced, were perversely refu...

The relationship between Republicans on the one hand and Governor Dannel Malloy and Democratic leaders in the General Assembly, Speaker of the House Brendan Sharkey and President Pro Tem of the Senate Martin Looney, on the other has been frosty from the beginning of Mr. Malloy’s tenure in office. “Frosty” may be a considerable understatement: On budgetary matters, Democrats and Republicans were not on speaking terms at all. Mr. Malloy, quite consciously, pushed Republican leaders out of the room during all his budget negotiations, which made budget formation easier for the Governor, even as it signaled a certain audacious and dismissive attitude towards Republicans. In fact, Mr. Malloy had diagnosed Connecticut’s ills before he presented his first budget to the General Assembly. He knew what he had to do and proceeded to plow an unobstructed path for himself.

A few Days ago, Greece collapsed under a load of debt regularly passed forward by spendthrift and cowardly politicians to future bill-payers. Now at the mercy of international loan sharks, the final comeuppance will not be pretty. Among all the states in the United States, Connecticut most closely resembles Greece at the tipping point. Consider: The state is groaning under a load of pension debt, about $44 billion, that hangs by a slender thread over its head like a Damoclean sword. Fearful – but not too fearful – of hiking taxes to absorb repeated spending shocks, Connecticut’s progressive government has resorted to other tricks of the budget trade to discharge its debt.

 Mother Aetna Heaves A Sigh Connecticut’s House on Monday withdrew its tax infused budget shortly after three large companies – Aetna, General Electric and Travelers– hinted ever so gently they might move some operations out of state if lawmakers did not reconsider the Malloy-Sharkey-Looney budget. Reconsideration followed almost immediately, as legislators knees began to buckle.

Connecticut’s budget, though not yet set in stone was hammered out Sunday, on the last Day of May, following a closed door meeting between Governor Dannel Malloy and Democratic General Assembly leaders Senate President Pro Tem Martin Looney and House Speaker Brendan Sharkey. A handshake between the three on the budget signals strongly there will be no veto. Republicans, as usual, were crowded out of the deliberations by Mr. Malloy , the new Chairman of the Democratic Governors Association. In a one-party progressive state, bi-party inclusion is a political mistake.

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.