Connecticut Commentary: Red Notes from a Blue State

Twain The reason we hold truth in such respect is because we have so little opportunity to get familiar with it – Mark Twain I’m going to try and say some non-twitter-like, intelligent things about progressivism, Connecticut’s media and what Karl Marx, were he alive today, might call the “correlation of forces” in our own state. By the way, I’m not sure how many people reading this know that for about four years in the 1850s, Marx, then living in London, was the European correspondent for the New-York Daily Tribune. He even exchanged letters with President Abraham Lincoln. Marx and Friedrich Engels wrote for a European, not an American audience. Their articles on the Civil War were later collected into a 325 page book, “ The Civil War in the United States.” It might be well to start this discussion with some undisputed claims.

Bysiewicz   “’All of us are in public service to do the right thing, to do the difficult thing, and the right thing isn’t always easy,’ Bysiewicz said Thursday,” Hearst media tells us. “’I think that people want to support elected officials in public office who stand up, who speak out and who do things that are difficult and fight for things they believe in.’” Bysiewicz believes in toll taxing. So do Governor of Connecticut Ned Lamont and virtually all progressive Democrats in the state’s General Assembly. True, the governor has had some difficulty deciding precisely whom to tax: first truckers, then anyone who presumes to drive cars to work, then, as opposition to tolling the state began to mount, big rigs again. At least one published newspaper columnist thought theses wild and imprudent gyrations signaled a fatal political inexperience on behalf of Lamont, and there are of course numberless Democrat gubernatorial wannabes who would heartily agree.

Some Republicans with a sense of humor are questioning whether the Democrat leaders of the General Assembly, President Pro Tem of the Senate Martin Looney and Speaker of the House Joe Arsimowicz really need a Pretorian Guard to protect them from their constituents, the majority of whom have been bitten numerous times by tax fleas.

Ever since former Editorial Page Editor of the Hartford Courant Carol Lumsden left her position at the paper, the Hartford Courant has been renting out its editorial page to other left of center newspapers. At the beginning of February, the paper, summoning up courage, displayed a Courant editorial on tolling. It was, as one might expect, left of left of center. “The time for half-measures is over,” the Courant bravely announced. “Connecticut residents spend way too much time alone in their cars and we’re destroying the planet in the process.” Cars and their owners are now planet destroyers, don't ya know. Perhaps Connecticut’s environmentally woke General Assembly can be convinced to outlaw the use of cars by these murderers, a measure that would “vastly expand mass transit, provide green options like bike paths in cities and work to actualize a future where cars play less of a role in our daily lives.” For nutmeggers who have not yet jumped the hedge and moved to, ...

It is nearly a forgone conclusion that tolls will be erected in Connecticut, and it is worth explaining why. Taxation in Connecticut is a matter of numbers, just as the impeachment of President Donald Trump in the House was a matter of numbers and his exoneration in the Senate will be a matter of numbers. Rationales will be offered in both chambers, but the reasons offered pro and contra are purely decorative, not compelling. It is the votes that are compelling. The same is true of Connecticut’s state budget. Democrats have commanding leads in both chambers, therefore there will be tolls. And the tolls, to be imposed only on trucks in Governor Lamont’s latest toll legislation, will metastasize in the future. That too is inevitable.

Themis Klarides "Nice guy Lamont" – Malloy without the porcupine quills, some say – is now taking hostages until January, after which his temporary “trucks only” toll proposal, with the assistance of the two gatekeepers of the General Assembly, President of the Senate Martin Looney and Speaker of the House Joe Arsimowicz, will have been forced through the Democrat dominated General Assembly in a proposal packed session that, some think, may last through Christmas. The Christmas calendar, it is hoped, will weaken the resistance of the toll opposition in the General Assembly, mostly Republicans with a scattering of Democrats holding politically shaky seats in both chambers. Republicans are stoutly opposed to tolls for all the right reasons but, in the end, it is numbers, not right reason, that will win the day, and Democrats, easily herdable, have larger numbers than Republicans.

Lowell Weicker CTMirror has put to bed – “debunked” – one hopes forever, the notion that the 1991 Weicker income tax was intended to be temporary. No doubt most people, when the tax was enacted, knew in their bones that nothing is so permanent as a temporary tax.

Martin Looney There is no indication that any of the various toll plans offered during the past year were ever palatable to a majority of Connecticut voters. During the second week of November, Senate President Pro Tem Martin M. Looney at long last took the hint. “I think we need to find something that is broadly palatable in the General Assembly and also to the public,” he said. The shelving of tolls – for now – does not mean that some other toll plan may not be advanced after the upcoming elections by a Democrat dominated General Assembly always hungry for new revenue streams. A new revenue source would relieve the General Assembly, responsible for all getting and spending in Connecticut, of the necessity, ever more apparent, of cutting spending, the alternative to raising taxes. Senate Majority Leader Bob Duff noted, “I think we all want to move forward on a [transportation improvement] plan, we just have got to figure out how to fund it.”

Like a quiescent vampire snoozing by night in his coffin, the prospect of tolls, which the No Tolls CT group thought it had slain, is now showing signs of new life. This may be Governor Ned Lamont’s third or fourth – one loses count – toll proposal iteration. According to a story in a Hartford paper, Lamont is proposing tolls only on bridges “ as low as 40 to 80 cents under revised plan .” What a bargain, as compared with his previous proposals. Lamont, during his campaign for governor, first proposed a trucks only toll on numerous gantries – one loses count. The No Tolls CT movement -- perhaps the first real populist, in the sense of popular, movement in Connecticut since the much abused Tea Party movement a decade past – pretty much slayed the toll dragon after Lamont, now elected governor, expanded his proposal to include pretty much anyone in the state traveling on   a major highway. The Tea Party movement was more or less buried under an avalanche of spending and cor...

Connecticut has just been bowled over by a bomb cyclone, a rapidly strengthening area of low pressure. In the area where I live, all the houses went dark – for three days and nights. Throughout Connecticut, about 41,000 energy consumers lost power. And winter is coming. CTMirror tells us there is a stalemate over long-term transportation funding between legislators and Governor Ned Lamont. The battle of the political egg-heads is “about to create an immediate crisis: With $30 million in promised local aid months overdue, fall tree trimming and winter snow removal are at risk.” The recent outage was caused mostly by falling trees that are singularly uninterested in Lamont and tax hungry legislators. The General Assembly in Connecticut has been controlled for the last three decades by Democrats whose reckless spending proclivities have been responsible for much of the budget outages during this time.

Lowell Weicker “If ever a time should come, when vain and aspiring men shall possess the highest seats in Government, our country will stand in need of its experienced patriots to prevent its ruin” -- Samuel Adams A surprisingly honest Otto von Bismarck is reported to have said of the politics of his own day, “Never believe anything in politics until it has been officially denied.” Ironically, the attribution itself has been called into question.   In any case, the apothem applies with special force to egotistic politicians who garland themselves in glowing personal fantasies. We should believe their own accounts of their own heroic actions, they vainly suppose, because they fervently believe their own accounts of their own heroic actions, which many times are so mixed with fantasies as to be laughably improbable.

'Sentence first -- verdict afterwards '   -- The Queen to Alice in Lewis Carroll's Through the Looking Glass It’s difficult to know where to begin with the story “ Blumenthal optimistic about GOP support in Senate for impeachment .” Perhaps one should begin by noting that no Republican in the U.S. Senate is Speaker of the U.S. House Nancy Pelosi or U.S. Senator Dick Blumenthal. Reversing a sustained determination to leave impeachment on the shelf, Pelosi last week announced that the House, now in Democrat hands, has begun an “impeachment inquiry.” There are crucial differences between an impeachment inquiry and impeachment. Impeachment involves 1) the passing of a bill of impeachment in the House, and 2) garnering enough votes in a Senate trial to convict and remove from office the offender, in this case President Trump. Removal from office is the only sanction that applies to impeachment. Honest number runners would rate #2 at zero.

W hen Ned Lamont was elected Governor of Connecticut last November, many businessmen in the state breathed a sigh of relieve. Finally, one imagines them imagining, one of us is at the helm. Possibly Lamont was a businessman who understood a principle some trace back to Alexander Hamilton --- the business of politics is business.

“When the fiscal year closes,"Governor Ned Lamont said after he had dotted the “i’s” and crossed the “t’s” of his budget, "Connecticut will have the largest rainy day fund in history and this budget maintains and grows our reserves, providing reliability and predictability for our taxpayers, businesses, and those looking to invest in our state well into the future.” Lamont did not bother to pause and ask, “Why does the state need such large reserves, the largest in state history?”

The reader will find below three self-interviews that are meant to serve as a prologue to a longer piece – “Connecticut Down.”  The first is set a little more than a month after Governor Ned Lamont had been sworn into office; the second is set just before Lamont presented his budget to the General Assembly; and the last is set a day after the Lamont/Looney/Aresimowicz budget was passed by the state Senate.

Governor Ned Lamont’s slippage in the polls is not surprising. Former Governor Dan Malloy, now gainfully employed reforming education in Maine, casts a long shadow, and Lamont’s policy prescriptions – including his budget, now on its way to approval by the Democrat dominated General Assembly – do not differ much from Malloy’s in matters of getting and spending. Some may notice that a new expression, “modernize” and its variants, has made its way into Democrat oratory. Lamont said of his massive sales tax increases, “Look, we’re gonna try and modernize our sales tax structure… In fact, wanna know why sales tax revenues are already up compared to what we had expected” That’s cause of sales tax applying to e-commerce.” Lamont is a graduate of high-priced colleges. So what’s all this business about “gonna” and “wanna”? Do Harvard and Yale lack speech teachers? The use of the word “modernize” is gonna become an Orwellian catch phrase for “increasing and broadening sales taxes....

Occhiogrosso and Malloy Tolling in Connecticut is what the advertising men would call a tough sell, and it helps in circumstances such as these to bring in some political spin doctors to assist in the delivery. Many people in Connecticut, almost certainly a majority, do not want tolls. On May 9, No Tolls Connecticut delivered to the governor’s office a “No Tolls” petition signed by 100,000 people. Candidate for governor Ned Lamont said during his campaign he would favor tolls only if people outside the state, truck drivers mostly, would be depositing their mites in Connecticut’s revenue collection basket. He said this several times while the TV cameras were rolling. Later Lamont changed his mind, always the prerogative of pretty women and ambitious politicians. But Lamont’s reversal – which came shortly after he had won his gubernatorial campaign – could not be justified as a “misspeak.” He could have used the services of a good narrative builder right there, but Ro...

Ned Lamont Six years ago, Jim Powell wrote what many in Connecticut considered at the time a stunning piece in Forbes Magazine titled “ How Did Rich Connecticut Morph Into One Of America's Worst Performing Economies? ” The piece was mentioned in Connecticut Commentary and columns two months after it had been published in August 2013. This is what was said about it at the time: “All the red flags fluttering in the Powell piece “point to an economically diminished and bleak future – unless and until the grown-ups take charge of Connecticut’s tax grubbing, high spending, crony capitalist government… Far from being a solution to our economic woes, crony capitalism – in which [then Governor Dannel] Malloy and leaders in the General Assembly plunder the private economy of entrepreneurial capital they then bestow on favored companies – encourages polite bribery between tax dispensers and large corporations, while introducing toxic levels of moral uncertainty into a business-gover...

The Democrat plan to “to have cities and towns share in the cost of public school teachers’ pensions,” as the Hartford Courant put it in a recent story, continues to be “controversial,” perhaps the understatement of the year. The plan would “cost municipalities a combined $73 million a year and would lead to property tax increases across the state.” The principal spokesman for the Connecticut Conference of Municipalities, Kevin Maloney, has characterized the plan to shift to towns some cost of pensions without giving the towns the opportunity to cut spending by reducing teacher salaries and benefits  as “the largest unfunded state mandate in recent memory,” and the executive director of the Connecticut Council of Small Towns Betsy Gara has said, “Shifting $73 million in pension costs onto the backs of already overburdened homeowners and other property taxpayers will diminish housing values, undermining our state and local economies." Local government relies on prop...

Well, that didn’t take long. Morning Consult   tracks the favorable and unfavorable ratings of governors across the United States. According to the rating service, Governor Ned Lamont’s favorability rating is hovering around 33 percent 100 days into the new administration. The bulk of the discontent can only be attributed to disappointed expectations. Former Governor Dannel Malloy , who high-tailed it to his old alma mater, Boston Law, following his not unexpected decision to abandon thoughts of a third term in office, absconded with an approval rating of about 29 percent. Shortly before he threw in the towel, Malloy was the most unpopular governor in the United States. Ironists – if there are any such creatures among Connecticut political watchers – will dwell on the   as yet unexamined ironies. How did it happen that an electorate that had registered such profound disappointment with Malloy never-the-less elected as his successor another Democrat who managed to...