Connecticut Commentary: Red Notes from a Blue State

Governor Ned Lamont, we are told by Christine Stewart of CTNewsJunkie , is about to bump heads with SEBAC union heads authorized to form contracts with Connecticut’s executive department. No need to wonder whose head will break first. President Franklin Delano Roosevelt solved the problem of the union organization of federal workers in 1937 when, approached by Luther Stewart, president of the National Federation of Federal Employees, to allow collective bargaining, Roosevelt nixed the idea for the best of reasons. Roosevelt wrote to Stewart , “… the process of collective bargaining, as usually understood, cannot be transplanted into the public service. It has its distinct and insurmountable limitations when applied to public personnel management. The very nature and purposes of Government make it impossible for administrative officials to represent fully or to bind the employer in mutual discussions with Government employee organizations. The employer is the whole people,...

Democrats put off a vote on tolling during the recently concluded legislative session because, plain and simple, they did not have the votes to pass a tolling bill. But hope springs eternal. House Speaker Joe Aresimowicz thought he may have had the votes to pass the measure in the House, but passage was still an iffy proposition. Mark Pazniokas writes in the Hartford Business Journal , “Aresimowicz’s comments reflect a belief among lawmakers that the Lamont administration botched the rollout of tolls in February, giving Republicans, the trucking industry and others an opportunity to frame tolls as just another demand on residents.”

Is Ned Lamont, the Democrat multi-millionaire businessman who prevailed in Connecticut’s governor’s race over Republican multi-millionaire businessman Bob Stefanowski, being pushed to the back of the bus by party regulars? The governor-In-waiting is being cuffed a bit by progressive U.S Senator Chris Murphy, among other ambitious Democrats, according to a news item in a Hartford paper.   The traditional party boss structure ended decades ago, but necessary functions once executed by strong party bosses such as John Bailey of blessed memory must, never-the-less, be performed by someone. And why should the power to shape the future of the State Democrat Party not fall to Murphy rather than Lamont?

Even before he departs the state for Massachusetts, where he will teach courses at his alma mater, Governor Dan Malloy is being mythologized. But the Malloy myth has collided with Red Jahncke, who writes in The Hill that the newly manufactured myth is a tissue of half-truths: “One pre-election newspaper headline read ‘ Malloy myth is dead wrong; he slashed state spending ,’ and  another excoriated Republicans for wrongly accusing Malloy of instituting ‘the top two tax hikes in CT history,’ as if this would absolve him of the several huge increases he imposed… This media revisionism falls apart in math class: ‘slashed’ spending would lead to budget improvements. Logically, reduced spending combined with tax hikes would lead to even greater budget improvements, yet the state is facing  big budget deficits  as far as the eye can see.”

“Lamont says Malloy has "done a lot of thinking about transition…" – WTNH News 8 After lunch, Governor Dannel Malloy and Governor-Elect Ned Lamont have a “frank and honest” conversation with each other. Throughout, Malloy – approval rating 15 -- appears to be carefree, strangely excited. The burden of governing has been lifted from his shoulders. When his term ends, he will kick the dust of Connecticut from his feet, move to Massachusetts and teach courses at his old alma mater. Lamont is restrained, his characteristic ebullience gone, now that he faces the reality of governing a state in the dumps. Malloy:   …  reason to be depressed. According to one analysis, your margin of victory in the race was larger even than mine during my first campaign. Imagine that. You have in your corner the large cities, most of the state’s media and – big surprise – portions of the state that have always gone Republican. Right now, you are very well positioned. You have th...

No one has yet asked Ned Lamont – according to recent polls, Connecticut’s next governor – how he plans to bring the state’s public employee unions to heel. Connecticut’s unionized, tax supported UConn Health Center is now, for all practical purposes, bankrupt. “As a public institution with a large share of unionized physicians and staff,” The Hartford Courant notes in a recent story, the UConn Health Center faces “added challenges. Pension liabilities for its more than 2,300 employees increased from $1.2 billion in 2016 to an anticipated $2.3 billion this year.”

George Orwell said that the most difficult thing for a writer to see were events occurring right under his nose. The same holds true for voters. For many of us, voting is a duty and an obligation, like going to church on Sunday. But how many of us remember the homilies on Tuesday? Perhaps even the minister has forgotten his invocations by then. One should not render oneself unconscious before voting. Look before you leap, think before you vote. We know that it will not do to overlook recent history, because recent history is armed and dangerous. It might be instructive to approach Connecticut’s economic problems from a “can’t do” perspective. What are the reigning “can’t-do’s” in Connecticut just now?

"There ain't no more bottom to this bottom" -- diner wisdom How Did Rich Connecticut Morph Into One Of America's Worst Performing Economies? ” Jim Powell asked in a stunning piece in Forbes magazine more than five years ago. In the often quoted words of former Prime Minister of Britain Maggie Thatcher, the state ran out of other people’s money. Former Governor Lowell Weicker’s 1991 income tax was followed, taxpayers of Connecticut will recall, by two additional massive tax impositions, the largest and the second largest in state history, initiated by present Governor Dannel Malloy – disapproval rating 72 percent, the lowest in the nation, according to Morning Consult . With the additional taxes in hand, spending spiked. The last non-income tax budget in the William O’Neill administration was $7.5 billion, a figure that tripled within the space of four governors. These tax increases relieved the Democrat dominated General Assembly of the necessity of inst...

To compel a man to furnish contributions of money for the propagation of opinions which he disbelieves, is sinful and tyrannical – Thomas Jefferson The sentiment above is to be found in an Act for Establishing Religious Freedom , a bill drawn up by Thomas Jefferson as part of the Revised Code of Virginia laws, but the sentiment might easily apply to Janus vs. AFSCME , a decision rendered recently by the U.S. Supreme Court.

Speaker of the State House of Representatives Joe Aresimowicz has planted his flag. He has announced he will call a vote on instituting a new tax, congestion tolling, in Connecticut. “I’m not willing to walk away from this session with doing nothing to solve this problem. Our job is to rep (sic) the citizens of the state and make very difficult decisions for the betterment of this state. This falls into that category for me.” There is no need to pause here and discuss the touchy question whether Aresimowicz properly understands what Connecticut's real problems are. After two major tax increases, the largest and the second largest in state history, inexorably followed by high and unsupportable deficits, the question – is Connecticut suffering from a revenue or a spending problem? – has now been settled. Even major newspapers that had in the past asserted Connecticut’s budget problems had been caused by insufficient revenue have since repented and now acknowledge the state ha...

Former U.S. Comptroller General and candidate for Governor took some time out of his busy day to answer a couple of questions. See below. Connecticut Commentary :  In your campaign literature, you style yourself a “turnaround specialist,” and your background suggests you have walked the walk. You served as Comptroller General of the United States for 10 years under three different presidents, Reagan, Bush (41) and Clinton, during which time you “led a widely praised transformation of the GAO and spearheaded related efforts for the accountability community both domestically and internationally.” The state of Connecticut certainly could use a CPA governor who can add one and one and get two. Other governors have in the past more or less fudged the numbers through overly optimistic revenue projections and outright thievery – by flitching money from so called “lock boxes” and using the loot to balance chronically out of balance budgets, relieving the pressure, such as it is, on th...

Governor Malloy’s man in Hartford, Mayor Luke Bronin, is close,  we are told by a Hartford paper , “to signing a deal that would require the state to assume Hartford's annual debt payments.” Malloy, who has proven himself more adept at deal making with his political cronies than balancing budgets and warding off debt, previously has made deals with state employee unions that carry debt forward much beyond his term in office. The SEBAC deal Malloy struck with lean and hungry union honchos, ratified by progressive Democrats in the General Assembly, push union favorable contracts forward to 2027 and prevent future governors from deploying layoffs to reduce debt until the contracts elapse. During his first two terms, Malloy has used the threat of layoffs to persuade hard boiled union negotiators to cough up what Malloy has been pleased to call “concessions,” an option the SEBAC-Malloy deal will not provide to Malloy’s successor. Union concessions generally have not involve...

Like U.S. Senators Chris Murphy and Dick Blumenthal before her, Susan Bysiewicz was looking for a sure-thing. Blumenthal replaced U.S. Senator Chris Dodd, with minimal resistance from Republicans, and Murphy replaced U. S. Senator Joe Lieberman.   Both Lieberman and Dodd were passé liberals; Murphy and Blumenthal are hip progressives. The seats were retained by Democrats in a state in which Democrats outnumber Republicans by a two to one margin. Bysiewicz, who has been known to change her mind concerning which post she would like to hold, had been considering a run for the State Senate in District 13, but then the heirs apparent to an open gubernatorial seat that is to be vacated by lame-duck Governor Dannel Malloy began dropping out. Comptroller Kevin Lembo, an early candidate, had second thoughts; lieutenant Governor Nancy Wyman pleaded grandchildren; Middletown Mayor Dan Drew stumbled on route and bowed out.

Ned Lamont, who won a Democrat primary against sitting Democrat U.S. Senator Joe Lieberman in 2006, has entered the gubernatorial contest. There is little reason to believe that Lamont will be able to effect an ideological course correction within the Democrat Party. Lamont will in part be self-financing his campaign. In a preceding election, Lamont self-funded his $12.7 million campaign, having pledged not to accept money from lobbyists. The temptation on the Democrat side to choose a candidate who is not, shall we say, poor will be almost irresistible. The Republican Party fell prey to self-financing candidates several times in the last few elections, and the results were disappointing. Lamont claims he has been “actively involved in this state” and points to his service on the board of selectman and finance board in Greenwich, a background in practical politics much less fulsome than that of Governor Dannel Malloy.

For all practical purposes, Mayor of Hartford Luke Bronin, a Democrat considering running for governor, has abdicated the position to which he was elected on January 1, 2016; this after having plainly said it would take him at least a full term, perhaps longer, to bring Hartford out of the red. It takes at least one political term, possibly two, to raise a sunken aircraft carrier from the depths. In both Hartford and its General Assembly, Democrats have for decades been winking at metastasizing labor costs driven upwards by state employee union demands. How can you tell when union salary and pension costs are extravagant? Easy. They are excessive when labor costs cannot be sustained by a shrinking revenue market.

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.

Writing in National Review ,  Red Jahncke, president of Townsend Group International and a Connecticut political columnist, advises that Republican members of the General Assembly should not sign off on what is being called a compromise budget, because a solution to long-term financial obligations -- AKA “fixed costs” -- has been excised from the only budget to have passed in both Houses of the General Assembly, a Republican production. “There is actually one document,” Jahncke writes, “which provides insight into the fundamentals driving the state’s fiscal deterioration: the Executive Order Resource Allocation Plan for Fiscal Year 2018 by which Malloy has been running the state since July 1 in the absence of a budget.”   The figures Malloy relies upon in this document are stark and brutal—but they are reliable:

Shortly after Democrat and Republican leaders in the General Assembly announced they were close to reaching agreement on a compromise budget, Governor Dannel Malloy offered his fourth budget, Republicanized, some believe, to make it acceptable to the “turncoat Democrat legislators” who had rejected Malloy’s third budget and embraced a Republican offering, the only budget so far accepted by both Houses of the General Assembly. Malloy pitched his fourth getting and spending plan to querulous reporters as a " lean, no-frills, no-nonsense budget ,” inviting comparisons to his previous offerings, which were, one is entitled to presume, fat, union-friendly, and replete with the usual frills and nonsense. Malloy’s third budget factored in a SEBAC deal that assures state union workers raises of 3.5 percent per year, following a temporary 3 year wage freeze, until the expiration of union favorable contracts in 2027. The SEBAC deal also prevents future Governors, Democrat or Republ...

Just a gigolo, everywhere I go People know the part I'm playing Paid for every dance Selling each romance Every night some heart betraying There will come a day Youth will pass away Then what will they say about me When the end comes I know They'll say just a gigolo As life goes on without me Approaching the end of his second term as Connecticut Governor, Dannel Malloy has been bounced from the budget negotiating room. In some quiet corner of the Connecticut political barracks, Republicans must have been murmuring to each other, “How does it feel?”

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...