By Chris Powell
What’s most remarkable about the state budget being devised by the Democratic majority in the General Assembly isn’t the scrambling to dismantle or evade the constitutional spending cap — the “fiscal guardrails” that have kept state government more or less solvent in recent years — though there is plenty of desperation about the scramble.
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According to the Connecticut Mirror’s Keith Phaneuf, while Governor Lamont anticipates spending about $470 million in another two-year round of generous raises for unionized state employees, Democratic legislators want to delay payment of the raises by a year and then pay them retroactively. No money would be saved but the Democratic legislators could pretend not to be violating the spending cap as much.
The Democratic legislators would divert to the General Fund $300 million that was to be deposited in state pension funds. Since the pension funds remain sorely underfunded despite Democratic claims of having bolstered them dramatically, as a practical matter all state budgeting is still based on diverting pension fund money and pushing deeper into the future the full payment of the retirement promises made to state employees many years ago, costs that will fall on taxpayers who never got any benefit from the work of the pensioners.
The Democratic legislators and the governor concur on establishing an endowment fund of hundreds of millions of dollars for free day care for young children and putting the fund outside the budget so they can pretend that this too is not really an expense.
They also are said to agree on underfunding by $230 million the medical benefits guaranteed for retired state employees, the money presumably to be located some other time.
All this stuff is dishonest accounting, which got Connecticut into deep financial trouble under previous administrations. But the Democrats rationalize it amid their fear that the Trump administration will slash federal aid to the state to bolster the federal government’s own disintegrating financial position, which is sinking the value of the dollar on international exchanges and risking the return of high inflation.
What is most remarkable about the Democrats’ budgeting is what they are not doing: trying to identify and eliminate inessential spending. The presumption is that all current state government spending — and municipal spending, much of it funded by the state — is essential and more important even than increasing rate reimbursements to the practitioners who care for the poor through the state’s Medicaid program, HUSKY.
The Mirror reports: “The last broad-based rate adjustment plan took effect in early 2008, and critics say many children and adults enrolled in Connecticut’s HUSKY program effectively are uninsured, unable to find doctors willing to accept more Medicaid patients” because payment is too low.
But who really cares if hospital emergency rooms are overwhelmed as long as state employees get nice raises again?
The governor and Democratic and Republican legislators alike are agreed on a special $40 million appropriation for municipal school systems to improve “special education,” education for students with learning and other disabilities. State government should have assumed all “special education” costs many years ago, as they fall most heavily on cities, where the poorest people live. But still no one in authority asks what is causing the increase in profoundly disadvantaged children and the expense of educating them, or pretending to.
Meanwhile practically every week the governor and legislators cheerfully announce state grants to municipalities and other organizations, grants that no one besides the recipients themselves would describe as essential. But since nearly every legislative district gets some of these goodies, no one questions them in favor of the more compelling statewide interests.
Of course while members of the Republican minority in the legislature and a few Democratic legislators warn that lifting the spending cap will ensure tax increases eventually, even those legislators seldom specify any spending that Connecticut could do without. The clamor of people seeking more money from state government seems irresistible, especially since they are usually the only people who show up.
Chris Powell has written about Connecticut government and politics for many years. (CPowell@cox.net)
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Chris Powell column 
“But since nearly every legislative district gets some of these goodies, no one questions them in favor of the more compelling statewide interests.”
That is the nub of the problem. You seem to be the only one able and willing to speak out.
On the national scene, Peggy Noonan was a voice of reason but even she is quiescent these days.
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