By Chris Powell
Has Connecticut state government been turned around, going from huge deficits to huge surpluses, because of Governor Lamont’s great leadership, as the commercials for his re-election campaign claim?
The state has had worse governors but its much improved financial position has little to do with anything state government has done.
The improvement is almost entirely a matter of the billions of dollars in emergency money recently given to Connecticut by the federal government. The Lamont administration did not achieve its budget surplus with changes in policy or practice that produced big savings.
To the contrary, nearly every group with a selfish interest in government appropriations is happy and supporting re-election of the governor, the Democratic nominee. Nearly everything involving great expense in government goes on just as before, and the governor can merrily traverse the state distributing expensive goodies even as the price of food, fuel, and most other necessities has been driven up by inflation caused by the creation of the federal money financing the goodies.
Of course most people notice and resent the inflation. But few understand where it comes from. Most think it’s like the weather, beyond control. Connecticut Republicans haven’t tried to explain it, though it is explained by an old Republican principle:
Nothing in government is free except the posturing.
At least Connecticut’s Republicans have a small remedy for inflation: to use much of state government’s surplus to reduce gasoline, property, and sales taxes.
With a belated platform, their “Contract with Connecticut,” Republican candidates for the General Assembly have joined their candidate for governor, Bob Stefanowski, with a wonderfully mischievous idea for property tax relief.
This is the objective Democrats always are claiming to pursue but never achieve, since, by design, municipal spending rises to absorb whatever extra aid municipalities receive from state government in the name of property tax relief, the money being used not to reduce taxes but to increase compensation for government employees — the Democratic Party’s army.
That is, the Republicans would let people deduct from their taxable income as much as $10,000 of their municipal property taxes. In effect for many people this would be a big cut in the state income tax, which Stefanowski implausibly proposed to eliminate during his first campaign for governor four years ago. Under the Republican plan, the more municipalities raised property taxes, the more income tax relief property taxpayers would get — real tax relief at last even as state government’s spending might be restrained by falling revenue from the income tax.
In reducing state government’s revenue, the Republican platform is only the most indirect program for economizing.
It is not a plan to audit the expensive policies that long have failed to achieve their nominal objectives.
But then any serious review of education, welfare, urban, and economic policies would be terrifying, what with education’s costs, wokeness, and pomposity rising as learning collapses, the dependence and alienation of the underclass worsening, the cities sinking deeper in poverty and crime, and Connecticut lagging most states in economic and population growth.
Comprehensive policy auditing might be too much for most voters to take. Faced with such audits, most voters might retreat to watch more of the governor’s campaign commercials assuring them that everything in Connecticut is suddenly wonderful, and most might strive to believe it even if, through an open window, they could hear more gunshots, sirens, and sawing of catalytic converters.
When the emergency federal money runs out Connecticut will face the challenges and choices it now desperately postpones. This may happen sooner if the state surplus is spent through tax cuts as the Republicans propose and if the Federal Reserve, by raising interest rates, induces a severe recession in the name of curbing the inflation that has been caused not by low rates but by the creation and spending of vast sums unbacked by taxes or production.
Reality will be a terrible hangover — but for the time being that’s OK, since it won’t arrive until after the election.
Chris Powell has written about Connecticut government and politics for many years.
Chris Powell column 