Connecticut Commentary: Red Notes from a Blue State

The Great Compromise will compromise everyone but Connecticut’s lame-duck Governor and an insensate Democrat dominated General Assembly. A front page, top of the fold headline in a Hartford paper blares, “ Time For Compromise ,” and a sub-heading trumpets, “Malloy Offers Plan With New Tax Hikes, Republicans Scoff.” Unsurprisingly – because Democrats are up to their old hat tricks – the Malloy plan includes onerous tax increases, the sort of whips and scorns that have made of Connecticut a no-man’s-land for companies that in the past have moved from high to low tax states. The “no tax increase,” lame duck Governor has, right on cue, called for “compromise.”  Said Malloy, after having successfully rebuffed during his entire two term administration Republican reforms targeting the state’s permanent, long-term spending problems, “The time for compromise is now” – now that dissenting voices have been rendered mute. “This,” Malloy said of his current budget iteration, “is the ...

Is there yet another tax hike in our near future? Thinking people think so. Republican leaders in the General Assembly hit the tax increase chord repeatedly in the recently concluded elections, and apparently voters responded to it. The Republicans picked up seats in the Senate, which is now a fifty-fifty proposition, 18 Democrats and 18 Republicans. The GOP also gained seats in the House. In a recent TV interview, Governor Dannel Malloy said he would not rule out another tax hike, more budget cuts were in the offing, and recurring deficits were the fault of his predecessors. Parsing Mr. Malloy at this point should not be difficult. During his first campaign, Mr. Malloy said Connecticut shoulders would have to lift the weight of deficits caused by other governors, but the burden would be fairly distributed between cuts and tax increases. Two tax increases, the largest and the second largest in state history, demonstrate beyond doubt that taxpayers have shouldered the...

Projected revenue figures from Connecticut’s usually non-partisan Office of Fiscal Analysis (OFA) have been fairly accurate. The accuracy of figures produced by agencies used in assembling budgets is generally proportionate to the political independence of the number crunchers. And of course all figures utilized by partisans – especially during elections, which bend hard truths to suit the ambitions of the reigning power – should be viewed with a great deal of suspicion. The figures most recently released by the OFA are balled fists. This year’s budget could be in the red by as much as $266 million, a too frequent occurrence during the entire administration of Governor Dannel Malloy.

Almost immediately after Governor Dannel Malloy and Democrats in the General Assembly had put their budget to bed, a Hartford paper noted that however much lipstick Democrats put on the budget porker it was in many important respects still a pig. Another media resource noted that while the governor had indicated he had been faithful to his earlier promise to hold the line on taxes – but not, tellingly, on spending – the new budget, Mr. Malloy’s second, placed new limits on tax credits, extended expiring taxes, boosted the gasoline tax 4 cents per gallon, drained from the transportation fund $120 million collected at the pumps during the last two years, depositing the money targeted for transportation needs into the general fund, resorted to $550 million worth of fund raids to plug holes in the budget, borrowed about two thirds of the $1.2 billion necessary to convert to a GAAP accounting system and shifted a little more than $6 billion of Medicaid spending from a constitutional c...

Below is an excerpt from the Office of Fiscal Analysis’ Overview of Governor Malloy’s Fiscal Year 2013 budget. Spending is increased, taxes are increased, the surplus all but disappears, consolidations produce no real savings, savings decrease and there is some confusing motion in the bottom line of the budget – none of which is good. Here’s hoping the relevant legislative committees read the report. Highlights of OFA Synopsis of FY 13 Revised Budget Appropriations Synopsis of Governor s FY 13 Revised Budget Appropriations Committee Hearing February 9, 2012 1:00 PM OFFICE OF FISCAL ANALYSIS The following is intended to provide information on the Governor’s FY 13 Revised Budget for the Appropriations Committee as background for the OPM presentation. Since the budget was released only recently, we have tried to highlight the major areas of interest rather than provide a comprehensive analysis of the budget and revenue plan. Such analysis will be undertaken by the Committee ...

The guys and gals who work at the Office of Fiscal Analysis (OFA) are the “go to” people for legislators who do not carry an Encyclopedia Britannica around in their heads. Throw some number on the floor before them and they can tell you if the numbers are accurate or fictional. Even on a bad day, they can tell you how many angels fit on the head of a pin. And in our statistical age, when every “non-partisan” agency is connected at the hip to fiercely partisan politicians, the OFA is genuinely non-partisan -- in the way that math or water is non-partisan. Having examined the estimated savings in the Governor Dannel Malloy-SEBAC budget, the OFA has found that 60% of the savings claims made therein are UNVERIFIABLE. The bad news was brought to the attention of the general public by Keith Phaneuf of CTMirror : “Nonpartisan legislative analysts say they can vouch for less than 40 percent of the $1.6 billion in labor savings figured into the next biennial budget, and are unable to asse...