Connecticut Commentary: Red Notes from a Blue State

At about the same time that Democratic Governor Andrew Cuomo had declared his state “functionally bankrupt" and warned public-employee unions not to expect any pay hikes over the next three years, Governor Dannel Malloy showed up in New York at the annual gathering of the Regional Plan Association -- a research and planning advocacy group focused on New Jersey, New York and Connecticut – to lament the want of investment in infrastructure. Mr. Malloy, whose approach to state deficits is the obverse of Mr. Cuomo’s, chastised "governor after governor, legislature after legislature," for their short-sided indifference to infrastructure needs and confessed he was “more than happy, even as I decry what's happening in our nation, to put in my bid to get any dollars Florida or New Jersey or any other state wants to send back to Washington." On the same day Mr. Malloy was dilating on “Malloy’s Way” in New York, some 750 concerned citizens in Connecticut were gather...

Ex-Governor and Senator Lowell Weicker appeared at the UConn Law School and gave a talk that touched on a number of subjects: health care, beltway manners, and bill paying averse legislators at the state capitol among them. Weicker on his reluctance to run for governor, as reported by Jeff Cohen of WNPR : "Somebody asked me, when I came on campus, wouldn't you like to be governor....Helloooo????" This as our tax belabored state is poised to celebrate the upcoming 20th anniversary of the Axe The Tax rally in Hartford. It seems like only yesterday, except for the many UConn students too young to have a personal memory of the event. All the spirits that hovered around Weicker on that grand day are very much in the air we breathe. Joe Markley -- who, along with Tom Scott, was responsible for the anti-tax rally in Hartford – is once again running for his old seat in the state senate, and he has a righteous wind at his back. The Weicker tax, as it was designed to do, ...

Every newspaper in the state should be challenging every elected official to cite four ways to reduce spending. It is no longer possible, or even advisable, to think about these matters inside the usual spending box. Connecticut has for so long thought exclusively in terms of increasing revenue that the state has lost the virtue of prudence in spending. What is needed is a method that will force legislators to curb a habit that threatens to bury the state in debt. A way to reverse the state’s decline has been offered by the Yankee Institute , the best libertarian-conservative think tank in Connecticut. Two economists for the YI, J. Scott Moody and Wendy P. Warcholik, have suggested the adoption of a “ Taxpayer’s Bill of Rights .” The bill the two have in mind will set statutory limits on spending, “which would grow no faster than the increase in inflation and population. Since spending drives taxes, the speed limit is meant to ensure that growth in government does not exceed taxpayers’...