Connecticut Commentary: Red Notes from a Blue State

Lamont -- Hartford Business. com

“The Hearst Connecticut editorial, ‘Caution on the budget can go too far,” the Governor wrote, “suggests that our balanced budgets and budget surpluses are shortchanging spending on important needs. Respectfully, I disagree.

“On the contrary, the fiscal guard rails established by the legislature in 2017, and recently reconfirmed on a bipartisan basis for another five to 10 years, have served as the foundation for our state’s fiscal turnaround, stability and economic growth. Higher growth is more than GDP — it means more families moving into the state, more new businesses, more job opportunities and more tax revenue (not more taxes, but more taxpayers). All of which have allowed us to increase investments in core services while proposing the biggest middle-class tax cut in our history.”

Neo- progressives in the General Assembly appear to be moving towards dismantling by degrees the spending guard rails supported by Lamont and a majority of Republicans in the General Assembly, now that Democrats have achieved a near veto-proof majority in the state legislature. Connecticut’s taxpayers and reporters may recall that the guard rails – essentially limits on spending – were installed after Republicans had achieved numerical parity in the state House. That parity, and with it an opportunity to press responsible budgetary restraints on profligate spenders, has long since gone by the wayside. The neo-progressive mutineers who invariably favor unlimited spending are now in charge of the General Assembly.

Why don’t we just spend the state’s mouthwatering surplus on necessary expenditures, the Hearst editorial asks?

“The surplus,” Lamont answers, “is invaluable in a state with some of the biggest debt per capita in the country, with the costs of carrying that debt eating into the resources we need to maintain and expand key services. But what the editorial fails to articulate is the volatility associated with the surplus. What is ‘here today’ can just as easily be ‘gone tomorrow,’ as they say.”

The Governor is a bit too polite to put the matter more boldly. In fact, surpluses have in the past disappeared in the blink of an eye because they have been used by vote thirsty Democrats in the General Assembly to permanently increase long term spending. That is to say: Past surpluses have been folded into future increases in spending in budgets affirmed by neo-progressive Democrats who believe that if spending is a good thing, more spending is always better. It is this ruinous idea that has swollen all past budgets. The last annual pre-Lowell Weicker income tax budget was $8.5 billion. The current biannual budget is $51 billion, a more than fourfold increase in spending.

“The problem with socialism” – i.e. unrestrained, autocratic spending – Maggie Thatcher reminds us, “is that, sooner or later, you run out of other people’s money.” There are some indications that voters in Connecticut are running out of patience with heedless neo-progressive legislators who cavalierly run out of other people’s money.

The single line in Lamont’s challenging answer to the initial Hearst editorial that drives neo-progressives batty is this one: ‘Funding future programs via a current surplus is irresponsible” and, Lamont might have added, costly in the long run to a state that hopes to liquidate part of its gargantuan debt of some $68 billion by poaching businesses from more predatory eastern seaboard states and increasing business productivity in Connecticut.

By trimming Lamont’s tax cuts and agitating for increases in spending, neo-progressives in the General Assembly are sending a message to the governor that the dominant left in the state has no intention of seriously cutting net-spending. The easiest way to corner a vote in Connecticut is to use surplus money to buy votes, and the purchasing of votes cannot be done in the absence of budget surpluses, either real or imaginary.

“Getting and spending, we know, are conjoined twins. Years after [former Governor Lowell] Weicker had left politics,” this writer noted four years ago, “he appeared with a panel of businessmen at the Hartford Club. Asked to reflect on Connecticut’s then burgeoning debt, Weicker groaned, “Where did it all go?” But he knew where it went. Politicians spent it and, by raising taxes, relieved themselves of cutting governmental costs, always a painful ordeal for those who have pledged their political troth to state employee unions, Connecticut’s fourth branch of government.”

The neo-progressive wing of Connecticut’s Democrat Party simply waited Weicker out. It is infinitely patient.