Connecticut Commentary: Red Notes from a Blue State

Governor Ned Lamont delivered his second State of the State on the first Wednesday in February to a General Assembly bulging with eupeptic progressives. Democrats have been in charge of the budget writing General Assembly for the last few decades. It is true in Connecticut, as elsewhere in the nation, that the governor proposes budgets to the legislature, but it is the legislature that disposes of budgets, usually in close consultation with governors of the same party. Lamont’s State of the State address was launched two days after President Donald Trump delivered before a bitterly divided U.S. Congress his State of the Nation address. Trump failed to shake Speaker of the U.S. House’s proffered hand at the beginning of the hostilities, and Nancy Pelosi ripped up the presidential signed State of the Union address at the end of the hostilities, which show no sign of abating.

Connecticut Governor Ned Lamont traveled to New York the other day to convince Wall Street Journal editorial writers that his state is in the grip of a turn-around, thanks to the Lamont administration. The business oriented WSJ is not at all the same media gang that covers the Lamont administration at home. Most Connecticut news outlets are willing to allow Lamont a loose tether; not so the WSJ, which has been critical of the direction of the state for the past few decades.

As Governor Dannel Malloy sets off into the sunset, The Wall Street Journal   reviews, in as economical a manner as possible, the real state of the state of Connecticut, once the diamond in the crown of New England. “The federal Bureau of Economic Analysis recently rolled out its annual report on personal income growth in the 50 states, and for 2017 the Nutmeg State came in a miserable 44th.” That’s the good news.

From this point forward, most of the media releases from the Malloy administration will be in the form of a hidden confession, followed by an unintentionally amusing uptick. After an announcement by Mother Aetna that the company is moving its headquarters from Connecticut to another state, possibly New York, CTMirror unfurled its headline: “ Aetna CEO: HQ move to have ‘minimal impact’ on most Hartford employees ." The headline over a Wall Street Journal editorial was somewhat darker: “ Connecticut’s Tax Comeuppance: With the rich tapped out, the state may resort to Puerto Rico bonds .

“If you don’t know where you are, how can you get to where you’re going? That’s why you’ve got to take stock of yourself every so often” – a waitress to a customer in a diner. Q: You’re getting on in years; isn’t it time for some sort of summing up? A: I don’t see any pressing need. Q: You’ve written a great deal about politics in Connecticut… A: … most of it lying dead in newspaper morgues… Q: Maybe so, but a record has been established in Connecticut Commentary for those who wish to consult it. Has anything changed because of your writing?

The more corrupt the state, the more laws -- Tacitus “ What’s the Matter With Connecticut ?” the Wall Street Journal, a publication read by some business investors, asks in a recent editorial. Of course, the editors, businesses that have been fleeing the state, young college graduates who have been kicking the dirt of Connecticut from their feet and moving to less predatory states, all know the answer to the question: If you’re sitting on a bed of nails – you move. It’s the nails – or us! That is the central message young college graduates are sending to state government. Here is the lede to the editorial: “Connecticut’s progressive tax experiment has hit a wall. Tens of thousands of residents are fleeing for lower tax climes, which has prompted Democrats to propose—get this—paying new college grads a thousand bucks to stick around. Maybe they’re afraid an exodus of young people will turn the state Republican.”

Connecticut, still in a recession and plagued by crippling deficits and job losses -- 14,900 positions over the last four months, according to  Department of Labor figures  --  cannot recover its economic standing among neighboring states without enacting major reforms that entail permanent long term cuts in spending. Any reform that reduces state employee salaries and benefits in Connecticut is a tall hill to climb, because the state of Connecticut and unions are bound by contract law and not, as is the case in Rhode Island, by statutory law. To put it another way,  union and state disputes in Rhode Island are settled by the legislature; in Connecticut, such disputes are settled by the courts. Unlike Connecticut, the Rhode Island legislature controls the destiny of the state through democratic rather than judicial means. Bound by contract law, Connecticut has surrendered to its courts final decisions that should rest with the General Assembl...

The state of Israel must survive, and this is not a walk in the park. Israel is surrounded by noxious Arab powers that long for its utter destruction, the most ambitious of which is Iran, now on the path to becoming a nuclear tipped hegemonic power in the Middle East. Once the enemy of the United States, Iran is a fierce and energetic enemy of both Israel and the United States, which it regards as “The Great Satan.” Since the fall of the Shah of Iran, Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, the country has become both more Islamic and belligerent. These two, a puritanical reform of Islam and an increase in theologically inspired violence, seem to walk arm and arm together in this sorry veil of tears.

In February 2011, Aetna Insurance Company’s CEO, Mark Bertolini told a Middlesex County Chamber of Commerce breakfast group that Connecticut was not a profitable place to do business . “Connecticut,” said Mr. Bertolini, “falls very, very low on the list as an environment to locate employees . . . in large part because of the tax structure, the cost of living, which is now approaching, all in, the cost of locating an employee in New York City.” The Malloy administration quickly moved to shower Aetna with preferments, and Aetna’s honcho offered a weak apology, promising Mr. Malloy on a stack of bibles that his company would not hightail it to another state but continue to maintain its headquarters in Connecticut. He was grateful that Mr. Malloy, agitated by the possible loss of tax revenue, had opened Connecticut’s treasury to Aetna. Mr. Malloy in turn was grateful that Aetna would continue to remain in the spot, here to be plundered by tax starved government officials.

Private health-insurance companies, to be raising premiums by 39%? Kathleen Sebelius, Secretary of Health and Human Services, gave the breaking news that WellPoint, which owns the Anthem Blue Cross of California, was rich. It made $2.7 billion in the last quarter of 2009, which could not, she asserted, “justify massive increases,” and she announced a hearing. Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid declared it was “greedy insurance companies that care more about profits than people.” Representative Henry Waxman announced his own additional Federal investigation. President Obama expanded. It’s a “portrait of the future if we don’t do something now.” (Or is it a portrait of the future if they pass ObamaCare?) The President’s proposal, revealed a few days later, would add a new bureaucracy to his administration, the Health Insurance Rate Agency (HIRE), to wrestle with corporate greed and stifle premiums. This was a welcome opportunity to control the insurance industry. “The WellPoint Mugg...

Not only will the new program become the default coverage for the uninsured, but Democrats intend to game the system to precipitate—or if need be, coerce—an exodus . . . of private insurance. Soon enough, that will be the only “option” left. -- The Wall Street Journal, April 13, 2009 A new report from the President’s Council of Economic Advisers warns that the increasing cost of health care is not sustainable. The Congressional Budget Office estimates that individual and corporate income taxes would have to rise through 2050 by 90 percent even without “public option,” the new middle-class entitlement. The CEA Report, titled, The Economic Case for Health Care Reform, mentions among its solution: People should get used to less medical care. Betsy McCaughey, long-time critic, argues that a superior way is to reduce government’s share of the costs, which will not be done by ousting the private health-care insurers through the new radical public option. President Obama wants the hea...

The authoritative Hartford Courant reports:“ Obama set a cap of $50,000 on individual contributions and has refused to accept money from unions, corporations and lobbyists, although bundlers with ties to corporate America have kicked in $5.7 million of the $27 million raised thus far, according to a review by the nonpartisan group Public Citizen commissioned by The Wall Street Journal.” That reference to the Wall Street Journal report is incomplete. Although President-elect Barack Obama has banned corporations and big donors from contributing to his campaign, the Wall Street Journal , citing a report from Public Citizen, reported that fund raisers have collected $24.8 million of the $27.3 million reported by Obama through Jan 8. “But 90% of donations received so far,” the paper reported, “have been raised by well-heeled fund-raisers, including Wall Street executives whose companies have received billions of dollars in federal bailout money.’ Wall Street Journal employees as a group, t...

Without the ability to filibuster, the Senate would become like the House, able to pass whatever the majority wants. The threat of 41 committed Senators can cause the House to modify its desires even before legislation comes to a vote. Without that restraining power, all of the following have very good chances of becoming law in 2009 or 2010. Medicare for all -- Wall Street J., “A Liberal Supermajority,” October 17, 2008 If Obama wins with veto-proof majorities in both Senate and House, doubts and discussions about health-care will be ended. We will have "Hillary Health Care" with minor revisions to mold it to Obama health-care. That means universal health-care with a single payer as in Canada , where it is widely recognized as a failure but never changed. Obama wants employers to provide health-care insurance -- many now do -- for all their employees, or pay a fine. A parallel system, probably government-run, would arise for workers in firms that do not provide insura...

A troubled taxpayer once put up on his lawn a sign that read: “Death, there’s a loophole. Taxes, never.” That man may have been one of a vanishing breed; he certainly was not a post Wall Street crash Democrat. Democrat presidential aspirant Sen. Barack Obama’s views on taxes have trickled down through the campaign grapevine to Connecticut from Washington DC, the spending machine that, in the words of one early libertarian , “[eats] out the substance of the people”; call it the trickle down theory of ruinous economic ideas. These ideas now have found a home in the breast and the campaign literature of Jim Himes, who is running this year against Rep. Chris Shays, the last Republican US Rep. standing in New England. When another Democrat, President John Kennedy, said that “a rising tide lifts all the boats,” he meant this: Economic prosperity puts dollars in everyone’s pockets. It helps workers, whose salaries increase in proportion to swelling profits made by their employers, because emp...

In the wake of the collapse of Fannie Mae and Freddy Mac, not to mention derivate failures such as Wall Street and Main Street, the conflict of interest prize of the decade must go to New York US Rep. Barney Frank. “It’s absolutely a conflict,” said Dan Gainor, vice president of the Business & Media Institute. “He was voting on Fannie Mae at a time when he was involved with a Fannie Mae executive. How is that not germane?” The Fannie Mae executive was Frank’s domestic partner Herb Moses. Frank met Moses in 1987, the year Frank uncloseted himself as a gay, and the two lived together in a Washington home until they broke up in 1998. Moses was not without a sense of humor. In 1991 he wrote in the Washington Post, “I am the only member of the congressional gay spouse caucus. On Capitol Hill, Barney always introduces me as his lover.” Both Frank and Moses assured the Wall Street Journal in 1992 that there was no funny business going on, conflict of interest wise, but skeptics were doub...

We know the places where Senator Obama lived as a child, and we know his white grandfather wanted Frank Marshall Davis to be his mentor. We know Davis mentored him from approximately age 14 to 18. We know Davis was a black communist writer and poet. We don’t know the details of what Senator Obama did in Chicago.* We could know more but the University of Illinois, apparently at the instance of Bill Ayers who stored the Annenberg Challenge Project files there, has denied investigator Stanley Kurtz access to those 132 boxes containing 947 files. Obama says he was a “community organizer” in Chicago. The organization for which he community-organized was. The years were probably 1985 to 1988, when he left to attend Harvard Law School. About his relations with Bill Ayers, “domestic terrorist”—the FBI’s characterization—Senator Obama reveals only that he’s that “guy who lives in my neighborhood.” These, then, are the themes of his pre-U.S. Senate experience: community organizin...

“Here in the U.S.,” writes Dan Henninger of the Wall Street Journal, “our politics has spent much of the year unable to vote into law the wiretap bill, which is bogged down, incredibly, over giving retrospective legal immunity to telecom companies that helped the government monitor calls originating overseas. Even granting there are Fourth Amendment issues in play here, how is it that Speaker Nancy Pelosi, Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama cannot at least say that class-action lawsuits against these companies are simply wrong right now?” Henninger is concerned that our politics, which seems to go forward in a time warp, will not be able to adjust to the modern reality in which several British citizens plotted to blow up seven air lines carrying American passengers. The seven are on trial in Britain . “Philip Bobbitt,” Henninger writes, “author of the just released and thought-provoking book, 'Terror and Consent,' has written that court warrants are 'a useful standard for sur...

“Schip was created in 1997 to help insure children from low-income families, but it has since become a stealth vehicle to expand government control of health care. . . . House and Senate negotiators [have hashed] out a ‘compromise’ that would expand the program by about $35 billion over the next five years (plus a budget gimmick concealing at least $30 billion),” according to a Wall Street Journal editorial of September 24. The President’s Saturday message was to explain the necessity of his veto of the State Children’s Health Insurance Program bill. Said he, “Unfortunately, 500,000 poor children who are eligible are not enrolled in the program. Several states including Massachusetts , Illinois , New Jersey , Michigan , Rhode Island , and New Mexico spend more SCHIIP money on adults than they do on children. And that is not the purpose of the program. (Federal funds are given as block grants to the states that are free to spend them as they wish.) “I think the Children’s Heal...

Karl Rove is expected to resign at the end of August, according to a Wall Street Journal piece, at which point the Bush regime will deflate, for the Frankensteinian monster cannot continue without a brain. That should be the view of most progressives, who have always insisted that Bush was towed forward by Rove, Bush’s brain. It very likely was the other way round, but then the truth was never a stumbling block to ideologues on the left. Rove himself has a different opinion. “In the interview, Mr. Rove said he expects Democrats to give the 2008 presidential nomination to Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton, whom he described as "a tough, tenacious, fatally flawed candidate." He also said Republicans have "a very good chance" to hold onto the White House in next year's elections. “Mr. Rove also said he expects the president's approval rating to rise again, and that conditions in Iraq will improve as the U.S. military surge continues. He said he expects Democrats to...