More Shared Sacrifice Is In The Cards

A Connecticut paper that has never met a tax increase in did not approve breaks the news gently. So gimmicky is Governor Dannel Malloy’s budget that it puts the editorial board in mind of Mr. Malloy’s predecessor, former Governor Jodi Rell, whose budgets – all of them passed by the Democratic dominated General Assembly – relied heavily on such gimmicks as moving red ink into future budgets, excessive borrowing to balance ordinary expenditures, and other sleights of hand that, Mr. Malloy said in his first campaign for governor, were exceedingly dishonest.

This year, the paper chides, “Now, pushed into a corner by a lag in tax revenues, Mr. Malloy and the majority Democrats in the General Assembly are using gimmicks of their own in passing what they say is a balanced budget for the fiscal year that begins July .”

The post-election year will open with a bang of a deficit -- $1.3 billion or more. That is the amount Mr. Malloy and the Democratic dominated General Assembly must wring out of the first year of Connecticut’s biennial budget if Mr. Malloy hopes to keep his “no new taxes” pledge, or …

Or what?

There are only two ways to discharge a deficit, if one abjures the usual gimmicks used in the past to balance Connecticut’s books: Either you raise taxes, or you cut spending.

For purposes of re-election, Mr. Malloy has several times insisted he would not balance the books through tax increases. Funny how all politicians turn into former President George H. W. Bush – “Read my lips. No new taxes” – when the middle class, heavily burdened with the largest broad based tax increase in Connecticut’s history, is about to march to the polls.

Mr. Malloy already has played his “shared sacrifice” card. To be sure, the shared sacrifice of unionized state workers was not quite as burdensome to unions as was Mr. Malloy’s “shared sacrifice” tax increases to taxpayers, which is why, come to think of it, former state Senator Edith Prague chastised union leaders for balking at the deal -- a very good one for unionized state employees -- Mr. Malloy held out to SEBAC during negotiations prior to the signing of his first budget. Mrs. Prague said at the time that union leaders would be nuts not to have accepted Mr. Malloy’s best offer, which included salary increases of three percent nine years out. After some knuckle biting, the unions supinely accepted Mr. Malloy offer. They would have been nuts to reject it.

The tax increase card already having been overplayed, Mr. Malloy was under pressure this time around to promise, several times, that he was done increasing taxes. He had strained himself boosting taxes on nail salon owners during his first year in office. Taxpayers had sacrificed enough. This leaves Mr. Malloy with only one card remaining in his hand – multi-billion dollar spending for each of the next two years. Projected deficit figures are brought to us by the same Malloyalists who had recently calculated a surplus of half a billion dollars, a figure quickly whittled down by reality to a little over fifty million.

Recent polls do not indicate a sunny re-election effort by Mr. Malloy. A Quinnipiac poll conducted between February and March found 29 percent of voters approving Mr. Malloy’s handling of taxes while 63 percent disapproved. On his handling of the economy and jobs, 33 percent approved while 60 percent disapproved, while on his handling of the budget, 37 percent approved while 53 percent disapproved.

A week before the Republican nominating convention, Mr. Malloy unfurled his “no new taxes pledge” once again: "I do not believe we will do anything but cut taxes for the foreseeable future."

The “foreseeable future” will pass by Connecticut ears like a shot.  If there is in Connecticut one editorial writer, one political commentator, one union leader or one much plucked taxpayer who sincerely believes that Mr. Malloy will wring out of the hides of state workers the entire future multi-billion dollar state deficits, that person, now carefully concealed behind then flower pot, has yet to show his head. Nearly everyone in the state who thinks seriously about budget deficits “gets” the gubernatorial wink: “No new taxes” -- until the big spenders have all been re-elected.

The rational for raising new taxes in the foreseeable future will be what it has ever been: Despite years of throwing tax dollars in their direction, the poor are poorer. And besides, Connecticut’s huge and ungovernable dispensary of tax dollars cannot afford to lift the debt burden all by its lonesome self.

Those who have not already left the state for greener pastures elsewhere would be wise to hit the bunkers and prepare for SHARED SACRIFICE II.

Who Killed Cock Robin? Connecticut’s Disappearing Surplus

This campaign year Governor Dannel Malloy had hoped to present voters with a tax rebate drawn from a budget surplus. The rebate, a slender $55 per person, disappeared because the budget surplus disappeared. On Tuesday, the bad news filtered down from the legislature’s nonpartisan Office of Fiscal Analysis; state income tax receipts for the current budget ending June 30 will fall $357 million short of what had been budgeted. The crystal ball gazers in the Malloy administration affected surprise; the governor was disappointed. He wanted everyone to know, however, that in the event Connecticut produces a future surplus, some of the over-taxation would be remitted to taxpayers by Mr. Malloy, assuming the governor is returned to office in the next election cycle.

A number of economists, the usual culprits, were trotted out to explain who killed Cock Robin.

The explanations were lucid and nuanced. One economist connected with UConn explained why “less than three months after the administration touted a $213 million surge in income tax receipts, on Wednesday, it likely will report a revenue loss close to twice that size,” according to a story in CTMirror.

“We are in a very, very different kind of world,” said Professor Fred V. Carstensen, who heads the University of Connecticut’s economic think-tank. Yes indeed, “Graduate assistants at The University of Connecticut, “according to the piece in CTMirror, “have voted to unionize -- making them the school's largest union, with 2,135 members.”

The brave new world has arrived, even at Connecticut’s most pampered university. Mr. Malloy has consistently thrown tax dollars in UConn’s direction. The governor could well afford to be generous after having imposed on struggling workers in the state the largest tax increase in Connecticut’s history. Alas, it was not enough and, shortly after arriving at UConn, the university’s new president, Susan Herbst, raised tuition. UConn has become the prodigal son of Connecticut’s progressive governor. The disappearing state surplus, Mr. Carstensen was careful not to mention in his remarks to CTMirror, was to be carved out of that massive tax increase. But somewhere on the road to prosperity, the tax increase was offset by a decline in business activity.

From Economics 101, possibly still taught at UConn, we know this: Raising taxes during the state’s longest and most crippling recession is not likely to increase business activity. That was the message delivered by then President John Kennedy in 1962 to the New York Economic Club. And it is growth in business that floods national and state treasuries with surplus wealth.

In his eye-popping speech, Mr. Kennedy reasoned: 1) increasing taxes to finance future federal programs was no longer possible because there are rational limits to all good things, and successive tax increases had outstripped the tolerance levels of taxpayers, a situation remarkably similar to present conditions in Connecticut following two massive tax increases; 2) therefore, it would be prudent to increase future revenues by decreasing marginal tax rates, which in turn would increase business activity, thereby flooding federal and state treasuries with a net increase in taxes that later might be used to finance Great Society programs. Mr. Kennedy was right on all counts.

According to Don Klepper-Smith, once chief economic adviser to former Gov. M. Jodi Rell and presently an analyst with DataCore Partners in New Haven who is often cited in Connecticut news accounts, Connecticut is facing a “non-traditional business cycle,” and traditional tools previously used “for fixing the state budget in the two decades before the Great Recession” -- most notably a boost in the income tax – are no longer effective. In times past, Connecticut’s “heavy reliance on Wall Street and investment-related income taxes” brought the state budget from red to black.

Not anymore.

Following the CTMirror report, the Hartford Courant noted that all of Connecticut’s revenue streams were down. Projected Revenue was down $461.5 million since January. The state income tax, Connecticut’s largest revenue generator was down from $9.021 billion in January to $8.632 billion. The income, sales, corporate profits, inheritance and estate, and cigarettes taxes were all down.

The way to recovery for Connecticut – a long and painful road – was sketched out by Mr. Kennedy way back in 1962: Reduce taxes and excessive regulation; cut spending every year until Connecticut’s economy shows positive signs of recovery; extend the retirement period for state workers; de-unionize government operations wherever possible; end practices such as binding arbitration that drive up municipal costs; reduce municipal mandates and vote out anyone who has sacrificed the long term health of the state for temporary political advantages.

That would be a start along a path to recovery.

Malloy On The Stump, An Orwellian Perspective

A few weeks after announcing he would not officially begin his campaign until the General Assembly had shut down its short three month session in May, Governor Dannel Malloy officially opened his gubernatorial campaign in Stamford, his old political stomping grounds. Mr. Malloy had been mayor of Stamford for four four-year terms before becoming governor.

In Stamford, Mr. Malloy explained his “early” announcement to reporters who long ago had exploded the absurdity that he was not running for governor. He had in fact been campaigning behind the veil for some time; like his counterpart in the beltway, President Barack Obama, Mr. Malloy is a perpetual campaigner. And like most politicians, he is given to telling what Mark Twain used to call “stretchers.”

The Stamford Advocate reported on the switcheroo:

“Malloy said that, in part, his rationale for waiting to make his re-election effort official was to avoid distractions during his recent successful effort to get the General Assembly to enact legislation to raise the minimum wage to $10.10 an hour.

"’I didn't want to politicize that issue unduly,’ Malloy said. ‘I talked to Lt. Gov. Nancy Wyman several times about when is the right time to start the campaign, and this seemed like the right time.’"

The General Assembly, some reporters know, is Mr. Malloy’s Pomeranian, the Connecticut legislature having been dominated by Democrats ages ago, long before some of the state’s younger reporters were wetting their diapers. Perhaps one of them is keeping a record of Mr. Malloy’s politically opportune fantasies. If so, he or she will understand the full import of George Orwell’s remark that “To see what is in front of one's nose needs a constant struggle.”

In an essay that ought to be required reading in all journalism schools titled “Under Your Nose,” Mr. Orwell wrote:

“The point is that we are all capable of believing things which we know to be untrue, and then, when we are finally proved wrong, impudently twisting the facts so as to show that we were right. Intellectually, it is possible to carry on this process for an indefinite time: The only check on it is that sooner or later a false belief bumps up against solid reality, usually on a battlefield.”

Mr. Malloy’s official Stamford announcement gave Mr. Malloy the opportunity to stop road testing his campaign and launch his vehicle.

Mr. Malloy’s 2014 campaign appears to be a replication of President Barack Obama 2012 presidential campaign. Connecticut has been battered by a rough economic climate, Mr. Malloy told the Democratic in Stamford. He was careful not to draw the connection between Connecticut’s sluggish economy and Obamanomics. Hey, sluggish economies happen. The national recession ended in 2009. However, about three in five jobs added since the recession’s end pay less than $13.83 per hour. Lower-wage occupations were 21 percent of recession losses and 58 percent of recovery growth, while mid-wage occupations were 60 percent of recession losses and only 22 percent of recovery growth. Connecticut still lags behind the nation in job growth. As of August 2013, the New England Economic Partnership (NEEP) reported, “Connecticut had regained 62,200 jobs, or 51.3% of those lost. By comparison, the U.S. economy had recovered 78.2% of the 8.6 million recession jobs that it lost.”

During his first term as president, Mr. Obama commanded the heights: The presidency and both houses of Congress had fallen to Democrats. Instead of focusing the energies of his office on repairing the collapsed housing market – which would have been a painful ordeal for the progressive president – Mr. Obama reached for the stars and pulled Obamacare out of his hat. He also engaged in corporate cronyism on a massive scale and managed to pull off a win against moderate Republican Mitt Romney by capturing the “social issues” battleground from which Republicans had retreated with their tails between their legs.

Mr. Malloy’s campaign strategy may be deduced from the remarks he made in Stamford. The Malloy program no doubt has been laboratory tested by one of the many strategy groups in the business of winning campaigns. Global Strategy, whose Vice President Roy Occhiogrosso continued to speak in news reports in favor of Mr. Malloy long after he had disassociated himself from the Malloy administration, likely will play some behind the curtain role in Mr. Malloy’s re-election effort. But as governor of a northeast progressive state, Mr. Malloy will be able to draw upon a vast reservoir of political magicians, some tied by progressive political umbilical cords to the Obama administration, many of which are not formally associated with political parties.

In Stamford, Mr. Malloy said that Connecticut’s economy was on the mend, largely owing to his programs. Connecticut’s pre-Malloy “$3.6 billion deficit, the greatest deficit in the nation on a per-capita basis," has been liquidated. In fact, the deficit has been resilient to Mr. Malloy’s ministrations.

Connecticut’s non-partisan Office of Fiscal Analysis (OFA) and the Governor's budget office, the Office of Policy and Management (OPM), have both projected a deficit of about $1 billion in the next 2016 biennial budget. 

Mr. Malloy reduced a major portion of his “inherited deficit” through the imposition of the largest tax increase in state history, a $1.5 billion tax on entrepreneurs and business people who might have used the dollars appropriated by a Democratic Governor and a Democratic dominated General Assembly to invigorate Connecticut’s painfully slow, nearly jobless recovery.

Mr. Malloy’s tax increase was not mentioned during his re-election stump speech in Stamford, which is on a par with offering a history of the Elizabethan period in Britain that does not mention Queen Elizabeth. Neither did Mr. Malloy mention that Republican Governors Jodi Rell and John Rowland did not have at their command a Republican dominated General Assembly. Although it is the legislature that shapes and affirms budgets presented to it by the executive office, Mr. Malloy was content in his Stamford re-election announcement to lay at Mrs. Rell’s feet the debt he inherited. Mrs. Rell is likely to play in Mr. Malloy’s coming campaign the same opéra bouff role played by outgoing President George Bush in Mr. Obama’s first – and second – presidential campaigns.

Mr. Orwell noted in his “Under Your Nose” essay that political fantasies eventually bump into reality, at which point, usually too late, those who have been lulled to sleep awaken with truth-blistered eyes:

“In private life most people are fairly realistic. When one is making out one's weekly budget, two and two invariably make four. Politics, on the other hand, is a sort of sub-atomic or non-Euclidean world where it is quite easy for the part to be greater than the whole or for two objects to be in the same place simultaneously. Hence the contradictions and absurdities I have chronicled above, all finally traceable to a secret belief that one's political opinions, unlike the weekly budget, will not have to be tested against solid reality.”

An Irrelevant Republican Warns That His Former Party May Become Irrelevant

This may be the first time in Connecticut history that an irrelevant former Republican U.S. Senator of long standing has warned his former party that it faces irrelevancy.

The new crop of Republicans in Connecticut – young, brash, conservative and determined to remember but overcome their past – may have trouble recalling who former U.S. Senator and Governor Lowell Weicker was. The past tense is important because Mr. Weicker, who once dubbed himself “the turd in the Republican Party punchbowl,” scooted out the political door after he had, as an independent governor, imposed the second largest tax increases on young Republicans he now seductively courts in the op-ed pages of the Hartford Courant.

The First Prize in tax increases belongs to current Democratic Governor Dannel Malloy. When Mr. Malloy put the tax yoke around the shoulders of young Democrats, Republicans and Independents in Connecticut, someone, probably a left of center former Weickerite, corralled Mr. Weicker and pumped an opinion from him. Mr. Weicker said he quite understood the necessity of such a tax increase. The Democratic Party, after a long pregnancy, had finally given birth to a Weicker clone in Mr. Malloy: The two progressives were simpatico.

Throughout his career, both in the Senate and as Governor, Mr. Weicker has shown himself to be constitutionally unable of making a proper distinction between the state – i.e. all the people in Connecticut – and the state apparatus, or state government, which sometimes does and sometimes does not serve the interests of the people. The megalomaniacal politician will assume he is the state; it should not surprise serious students of history that democracy on occasion may produce a “Sun King” whose operative principle is "L'etat, c'est moi (I am the state)."

Mr. Weicker continues to defend his income tax as a boon to the state. And here lies the root of his confusion. The income tax was a boon to progressive politicians who would rather cut their own throats than cut taxes or trim spending. But such politicians are NOT the state.

Since the imposition of the Weicker tax, spending in Connecticut has increased threefold -- within the short space of four governors: Governor Weicker, an Independent, Republican Governors John Rowland and Jodi Rell, both moderate and far less vitriolic towards their own party than “Sun King” Weicker, and Dannel Malloy, a progressive.

The arc in Connecticut politics since Mr. Weicker was “booted from the GOP in 1988, when I lost my Senate election,” Mr. Weicker’s formulation in his Courant Op-Ed, has been from centrist politics to progressivism. Former Governor Ella Grasso, a moderate Democrat, fought tooth and claw against an income tax. The line of Democratic succession from Mrs. Grasso to Mr. Malloy is a movement from the kind of fiscal conservatism favored by William Buckley, Mr. Wicker’s nemeses, to the kind of progressivism once lauded by prairie populists and Woodrow Wilson progressives.

Where in Connecticut politics is the breaker that will prevent Connecticut from sliding absent-mindedly back – not forward – into the progressive era? Progressivism is the old, tried and failed thing; conservatism, at least that brand of it recommended by Mr. Buckley, is the new thing, and Mr. Weicker, who professes in his Op-Ed that he once took a lesson from Barry Goldwater, the Storm Petrel of the modern conservative party, HATES it, absolutely HATES it.

The reference to Mr. Goldwater in Mr. Weicker’s Op-Ed is precious: “I remember chatting with Barry Goldwater, R-Arizona, one day in the Senate cloakroom as he commented on a photograph in The Washington Post of my friend Sen. Bill Proxmire, D-Wisconsin, with his new hair transplant. In Barry's conservative words, ‘I don't mind what's on his head. I worry about what's in it!’ Well, so do I when it comes to the Republican hierarchy in Connecticut.”

One hardly knows where to begin in commenting upon Mr. Weicker’s comment on Mr. Goldwater, historically the red carpet to President Ronald Reagan and the author of “The Conscience of a Conservative,” said to be ghostwritten, at least in part, by Mr. Weicker’s chief Connecticut nemeses, Bill Buckley, who was partly responsible for booting Mr. Weicker from the GOP in 1988.

Mr. Goldwater, it will be recalled, was the guy who said about Mr. Weicker’s brand of left of center Republicanism as practiced in New England, “If you cut off New England and California, you’ve got a pretty good country.” But here in his Op-Ed, Mr. Weicker is appropriating Mr. Goldwater’s NAME only to give unction to Mr. Weicker’s deathless dream – the utter and absolute destruction of the Connecticut Republican Party that in 1988 gave Mr. Weicker the boot. In point of fact, it was Mr. Weicker who, during his long senatorial run in office, continually gave his state party the boot.

And in his latest advice to his cast off party in the current Courant Op-Ed, Mr. Weicker offers what he perceives to be a dying party a final and deadly sip of hemlock: The Republican Party should open its primaries to Independents. That proposal was first made by Mr. Weicker’s now diseased dear friend, Tom D’Amore, at a time when Mr. Weicker, the self-professed “turd in the Republican Party punchbowl” saw, if only in his imagination, the approach of a Democratic Party opponent who might spoil his game and succeed in booting him out of office. Enter Attorney General Joe Lieberman, and the rest, as the historians say, is history.

It may help the Connecticut Republican Party to remember that Mr. Weicker also is history, and that those who do not remember their history correctly are doomed to repeat its errors.

Politics In The Ruins

When 10-term Mayor of New Haven John DeStefano announced he was calling it quits, a queue of Democrats quickly formed, each aspirant anxious to step into Mr. DeStefano’s outsized shoes.  Among Democrats hoping to succeed DeStefano are Toni Harp, a state senator for the past 20 years, Yale Law School graduate Henry Fernandez, Hillhouse High School Principal Kermit Carolina and Alderman Justin Elicker.

As is the case with other large cities in Connecticut, New Haven is a one party town. This means that no Republican need apply for mayor. The urban redoubts of decaying political party machines are still important to Democrats who run for state-wide offices. Votes in Bridgeport and New Haven were largely responsible for Governor Dannel Malloy’s successful run for governor, and it will not do to ignore those who butter your political bread. A perception of this kind may have drawn Mr. Malloy to New Haven to endorse Mrs. Harp.

At least one of Mrs. Harp’s Democratic opponents, Mr. Fernandez, was unimpressed by the endorsement, “a rare endorsement” from Mr. Malloy, according to one reporter. Mr. Malloy’s political endorsements are not nearly as rare as those of his predecessor, former Governor Jodi Rell, who steadfastly refused to play politics while in office. Mr. Malloy is free of that political impediment. It is true, however, that Mr. Malloy has not been in the habit of praising politicians who are not Mr. Malloy, and his endorsement in New Haven is likely to help him much more than Mrs. Harp.

Prior to Mr. Malloy’s endorsement of Mrs. Harp, Mr. Fernandez released a statement:

“If Governor Malloy was really concerned about what is best for New Haven, he’d be coming here today to ask Senator Harp to pay the million dollars her family owes in delinquent state sales tax.  Instead, he is here to endorse a candidate who lives tax free in a mansion and has a history of failing to pay her own taxes, all while working in Hartford to write state budgets that raise taxes on New Haven families. Clearly, the governor is more concerned about re-election and keeping special interests happy than supporting a candidate who will fight for New Haven families and taxpayers.”

In introducing Mr. Malloy, Mrs. Harp mentioned that the governor had in his budgets implemented substantial savings without harming either students or the poor, and she promised to do the same if elected mayor. The author of the largest tax increase in Connecticut history was equally complimentary to Mrs. Harp

Following his endorsement of Mrs. Harp at Nica’s Gourmet Market and Deli, Mr. Malloy was unsuccessful in his repeated attempts to brush by Wendy Hamilton, possibly an aggrieved taxpayer, who was determined to give the governor a piece of her mind on the subject of tax scofflaws.  Mrs. Harp’s late husband owes the state over $1 million in unpaid taxes.

In defense of her failure over the years to prod her husband to pay his taxes, Mrs. Harp claimed ignorance, rarely an unassailable position for a politician who has spent 20 years in Connecticut’s General Assembly, a dozen of them on the budget writing Appropriations Committee. Mrs. Harp protested that she and her late husband had been living different lives together.

Mr. Elicker said Mr. Malloy’s endorsement of Mrs. Harp was at the behest of Yale’s unions, UNITE HERE Local 34 and Local 35:

“Malloy is in a tough spot. He depended on UNITE HERE to get him elected in 2010. He’s going to need them in 2014. So I can understand the position he’s in.”

Watching from afar is the self-sidelined DeStefano.  The soon to be former mayor and Mr. Malloy are old political antagonists. In 2006, Mr. DeStefano defeated then Mayor of Stamford Malloy in a hotly contested primary for Governor, losing in the general election to popular Republican Governor Jodi Rell.

Thus far, Mr. DeStefano, every bit as progressive as Mr. Malloy, has made no endorsement in the New Haven mayoralty race. But it is not possible to quell altogether the chattering and wondering among those in the city who have for more than 20 years benefited from the DeStefano regime. Will the former mayor pull a Rell and decline to endorse; more importantly, what are his plans for the future? Is it too soon to begin speculation concerning a re-run of the 2006 Democratic gubernatorial primary?  

Malloy’s Responsibilities

The Headline on the story was “New State Laws Take Effect:Gas Taxes, Gun Restrictions, Pool Safety” and, in the body of the story, Governor Dannel Malloy was quoted to this effect after he had been questioned on his increase of Connecticut’s gas tax, already the highest in the nation: “I wasn't governor in 2005. I wasn't the minority leader of the House or the minority leader of the Senate in 2005.''

In 2005, during the administration of Governor Jodi Rell, the Republican governor and the Democratic dominated General Assembly had decided to increase the tax as part of a long term plan. Mr. Malloy, a Democrat, and the Democratic dominated General Assembly this year decided to play the role of bystanders and let the tax increase happen.

Since Mr. Malloy had assumed his responsibilities as governor, Republicans had been more or less sequestered by the Malloy administration; Republicans leaders were not permitted to leave their fingerprints on either of Mr. Malloy’s two budgets, one of which, the first, imposed on the state the largest tax increase in its history.

This tax increase was a part of what might be called Mr. Malloy’s “Shared Sacrifice” plan, according to which those who provide state revenues, taxpayers, and those who consume taxes, state workers, were to share equally the awful burdens that fell to Mr. Malloy when he became governor. Mr. Malloy’s savings were negligible; his revenue increases were deep and permanent. Tax payers crushed the grapes; tax consumers drank the wine.

Mr. Malloy had a plan. He executed the plan with a great deal of assistance from Democratic leaders in the General Assembly who were able successfully to elbow Republicans out of the budget negotiating room. 

Mr. Malloy’s two budgets, then, are not the responsibility of any previous governor, even though his two budgets were crafted, some would say wrongheadedly, to address problems he “inherited” when he came into office.  Mr. Malloy’s patrimony as governor, it should be noted, is not solely a bag of woe. New governors inherit both the wins and losses of their predecessors, and every governor either builds upon or destroys the work of politicians that preceded him. Governors are the sum of the choices they make.

In his most recent budget, Mr. Malloy raids the state’s transportation fund to the tune of $91 million, while at the same time imposing the largest fuel tax increase in state history. On the matter of taxes and “revenue enhancements,” this governor always thinks large. So depleted is the state’s transportation fund that there may not be enough in the kitty to sustain current transportation expenditures.

Now then, Mr. Malloy chose to cut Republicans out of budget negotiations; he chose to impose on the state the largest tax increase in its history; he chose to raid the already depleted transportation fund, so that he might dump the revenue into the state’s deficit ridden general fund, where most targeted funds and broken political promises end up. The general fund is little more than a trash heap of good intentions.

Heath Fahle, Policy Director of the Yankee Institute for Public Policy, hit several nails on the head when he wrote in a column printed in CTNewsJunkie, “As a small geographic space located directly between two of the nation’s biggest metropolitan areas, one might think that a modern transportation system would be a top priority. But with one in five Connecticut residents on Medicaid, unfunded pension liabilities that under the most optimistic of outlooks are underfunded by billions of dollars, and the worst performing economy in the nation, it isn’t hard to figure out how infrastructure investments were crowded out of the budget.”

The infrastructure investment fund raid occurred around the same time as the publication of “The American Society of Civil Engineers’ 2013 Report Card” on the Nation’s Infrastructure. "Driving on roads in need of repair costs Connecticut motorists $847 million a year in extra vehicle repairs and operating costs,” which works out to $294 per motorist, according to the report. It’s not just the roads; the state’s bridges are in disrepair.

At some point, people in the state  must decide whether they want a governor and a legislature focused on re-inventing Connecticut or, more modestly, one that will repair roads and bridges. The lesson of Daedalus hangs like a threat of doom over the haloed heads of most world saviors: Wax wings, the ego driven flights of fancy of the usual politician on the make, are never a match for the reality of truth in all its fiery splendor.

The Democrats’ 10 Percent Solution With Malloy as Firewall

The split between Connecticut’s two major parties is most dramatic on the question of spending.

Governor Dannel Malloy took a pledge early in his administration, after he had imposed upon the state the largest tax increase in its history, reminiscent of a pledge made by former President H.W. Bush: No new tax increases. Internal pressures were such during the Bush administration that the president reneged on his pledge.

The pressures are always there, especially in tax prone Connecticut. It was the fashion during the administration of Republican Maverick turned Independent Lowell Weicker to regard deficits as revenue rather than spending problems; and, of course, the solution to a revenue problem is to boost revenue.

This misperception – always encouraged by politicians uncomfortable with spending cuts – had tripled the bottom line of Connecticut’s budgets within the space of three governors. Focused on revenue boosts, Mr. Weicker and succeeding Republican Governors John Rowland and Jodi Rell rarely were put in the uncomfortable position of having to disappoint powerful union interests. Spending inched inexorably up.

When Mr. Malloy was installed as governor, it was generally supposed that the spending tap would be turned wide open. The so called“firewalls,” Republican governors who had offered a mild resistance to spending increases, were gone: Laissez les bons temps rouler, as they say during Marti Gras in New Orleans that precedes an abstemious Lent .

Democratic leaders in the General Assembly, impatient with the snail’s pace progress of a self-proclaimed progressive governor, have now proposed changes in the Malloy budget that increase spending by 10 percent. There is every reason to believe that Democrats stuck on stupid are still in a “let the good times roll” frame of mind.

And why not? Moderate Republican office holders in Connecticut have been washed away by the onrushing progressive high tide. Consider the number of Republican moderates who have fallen in recent years under the boots of the progressive hordes in Connecticut. Within Connecticut’s all Democratic U.S. Congressional delegation alone, three moderate Republicans– Nancy Johnson, Rob Simmons and Chris Shays, the last moderate Republican in New England before he surrendered his seat to current Democratic U.S. Representative Jim Himes -- had been replaced by ambitious progressives. Mr. Malloy and his Lieutenant Governor Nancy Wyman proudly march cheek by jowl with striking union workers, and no one winces. The largest tax increase in Connecticut history was accompanied with a union deal that assured salary and benefit increases to state workers of 3 percent nine years out, an arrangement at first rejected by union representatives, which rejection was characterized by Edith Prague, a longtime supporter of Connecticut unions, as a form of unthinking madness.

Despite a stalled economy, the progressive parade in Connecticut marches merrily and heedlessly on. Occasional disputes with leaders in the opposition party are imperiously brushed aside by Democrats who outnumber Republicans in the state by a commanding two to one majority. The difference in sheer numbers relieves Democrats of the necessity of quibbling over crucial economic points imperfectly grasped by an easily distractible media in the grip of an economic vise that has considerably reduced its own numbers.

What all this really means is that Mr. Malloy has now become Connecticut’s spending “firewall.”And the governor is surrounded by progressive Democrats quite certain that more spending will hasten the arrival of better times, a philosophy of governance to which Mr. Malloy also subscribes. On matters upon which there are some discernible differences between Mr. Malloy and the Democrat dominated General Assembly –say, education reform – Mr. Malloy’s programs have been refined by progressive leaders in the legislature. Both President Pro Tem of the Senate Don Williams and Speaker of the House Brendan Sharkey have had a good deal of practice in curbing the modest ambitions of past Republican governors, and there is no reason to suppose they will not employ their talents to frustrate a governor who proves to be insufficiently progressive on matters they consider ideologically important – like, to fetch for one example, ramping up the progressive income tax on Connecticut Gold Coast millionaires.

While Mr. Malloy has said he is averse to tax increases, he has moved steadily in the direction of increasing state revenue through a series of measures – borrowing money to pay off budget expenses, reneging on a gentleman’s agreement with “bad” energy producers to liquidate a “temporary” tax on the production of electricity, boosting the notorious gross receipt tax on gasoline, and short-sheeting hospitals, to cite but four examples – that most charitably may be described as revenue enhancers.

All eyes in the General Assembly are fastened on the governor. Given an inch, progressive legislators have now demanded a yard – a ten percent increase in spending. It is precisely incremental increasing in spending of this kind that has tripled the bottom line of Connecticut budgets since the imposition of the state income tax in 1991, a short two decades ago. Progressives in the General Assembly are betting that while the governor’s no tax increase spirit is willing, his progressive Democratic flesh is weak. Because taxing and spending are inextricably connected, the easiest way to drive up taxes by 10 percent is to increase spending by 10 percent. And the red ink, in progressive strategy, is little more than an inducement to impose a steeper progressive tax on greedy hedge fund managers living the life in Fairfield County.

Lawlor’s Penology And The Corpse At The Hearing

During a public hearing on the state’s new Risk Reduction Earned Credit Program, the informational portion of which was devoted to testimony given by politicians rather than the public, there was a dead body in the room, that of Ibrahim Ghazal, murdered by Frankie “The Razor” Resto shortly after Mr. Resto, a violent criminal, had “earned” early release credits from a program that was the brain child of Mike Lawlor, tapped early in his administration by Governor Dannel Malloy to serve as Under Secretary for Criminal Justice Policy and Planning.

Some of the public figures, notably among them Mr. Lawlor, danced nimbly around the corpse.

Mr. Lawlor, who has been tinkering with penological reform since his days as co-chair of the Judiciary Committee, was able to put some of his ideas into practice after his installation as Connecticut’s prison commissar.

Mr. Lawlor’s career in this regard has been marked by several successes. An early opponent of capital punishment, Mr. Lawlor was doubtless pleased when Connecticut gave up the barbaric practice of putting to death such multiple murderers as Michael Ross. Mr. Ross’ specialty was raping and strangling young women.

Mr. Lawlor, sitting as co-chair of the Judiciary Committee, argued strenuously during an earlier attempt to abolish the death penalty that capital punishment, encumbered as it was by endless appeals, was rarely applied and urged then Governor Jodi Rell “to reach out to our state's prosecutors and judges before taking action. Ask these front-line professionals their off-the-record opinions on whether anyone will ever be executed in Connecticut. I believe that she will be told what many of us have been told - the Connecticut death penalty is a false promise.”

Mr. Lawlor’s view carried some weight when the death penalty was finally abolished by the Democrat dominated General Assembly during the early years of the Malloy administration. Lacking the courage of its convictions, the General Assembly produced a measure that exempted those currently on death row from its humane gesture.

In 2003, Mr. Lawlor told the New York Times he favored "alternative ways of combating overcrowding, like making it harder to put people back in prison for technical violations of their parole,” which could result in re-incarceration, “and argued that transfers should be a last resort.” In response to prison overcrowding in 2004, Mr. Lawlor argued strenuously against the expansion of prisons. So persuasive was Mr. Lawlor that the bill, co-sponsored by both Republicans and Democrats, passed unanimously in the Senate and received only token opposition in the House. “The key,” Mr. Lawlor said at the time, “is to resist doing the simple thing -dumping a bunch of money into a new prison."

Alas, the best laid plans of mice and men are often torn asunder. Following the horrific home invasion and multiple murder in Cheshire -- in the course of which two paroled inmates raped two family members and murdered three people, a mother and two young daughters, by setting a house on fire -- Mr. Lawlor never-the-less continued to stump for early release: “Some people say let's put them all in jail. OK, fine, but that means dramatically increasing taxes or shutting down a bunch of colleges."

During a special session called to enact stiffer penalties for home invasion in 2008 following the murder by arson in Cheshire, a new law was passed making home invasion a class A felony, and the parole board under whose supervision the two convicted Cheshire murderers were released was reformed: In fact, the parole board was decimated; heads rolled. Mr. Lawlor at the time opposed efforts to pass a three strikes law, which was defeated. Had a three strikes and you’re out law been in place before the Cheshire murders, Connecticut would have been spared the necessity of housing on death row two murderers, both of whom had lengthy prison records.

Mr. Lawlor’s Risk Reduction Earned Credit Program is the crown jewel of his career in penological reform. In effect, the program repeals Mr. Lawlor’s earlier momentary setbacks.

The putative therapeutic benefits of the hastily launched, poorly conceived program had little effect on Frankie “The Razor” Resto. “The Razor,” so called because he had for some years been in the business of shaking down drug dealers with a razor, was given early release credits under Mr. Lawlor’s program -- even though, according to testimony given to the Judiciary Committee by newly elected State Senator Dante Bartolomeo, Mr. Resto fought while in prison with other inmates, dealt drugs, burnt his mattress, was in other ways an incorrigable prisoner, and unfortunately was never subject to the non-existent “Three-Strikes” law so ardently opposed by Mr. Lawlor.

The law establishing early release credits was passed October 1, 2011 and made retroactive to April 1 (no joke) 2006. Since the provisions of the bill were applied retroactively to 7,589 prisoners, many critics of the program contended that the applied credits were both UNDESERVED and unjust.

Having cashed in his credits, Mr. Resto acquired a gun, likely NOT from a gun show or an authorized dealer, and murdered Mr. Ghazal, whose son Fapyo, present at the hearing and also severely beaten in an earlier robbery at a different store, must in the future refer to his father forevermore in the past tense.

Speaking for every victim of Mr. Lawlor’s program, past, present and future, Mr. Ghazal’s son said at the hearing press conference,“This guy, he destroyed our life. He destroyed my mom’s life. He destroyed my life.” But by the time the real public spoke, Mr. Lawlor and his retinue of subalterns had left the hearing room relatively certain that Mr. Lawlor's utopian prison reforms would not be torn asunder by an obliging judiciary committee over which he once presided as co-chairmen.

The Spending Problem

A number of conclusions may be drawn from the presidential campaign. Republicans, led by Mitt Romney, lost, and Democrats, led by President Barack Obama, won. That datum you can take to the bank.

Republican Party internecine quarrels arise over the “why”questions. Why did Mitt Romney lose? Why did Mr. Obama win? What are Republicans doing right, and what are they doing wrong?

Within the Republican Party, there are two schools of thought. The schools are as old and venerable as the modern Republican Party, which sprang, pretty much full-blown, from the brain of the late Bill Buckley.

One school holds that Republicans are not moderate enough to appeal to moderate Republicans and Democrats. This premise founders on the following datum: In Connecticut, centrist Democrats have been routed by progressives, a progressive being a liberal raised to the 10^thpower. There is no longer a live and effective middle to Connecticut’s state Democratic Party. Most of the Democrats enjoying power positions in their party have abandoned the liberal ship for the progressive dinghy.

Some few commentators who continue to speak reverently of“the vital center” are simply remembering with great affection a political order that has vanished in Connecticut and, perhaps more broadly, in New England.

An opposing school holds that Republicans are not conservative enough. Moderate Republicans in the Northeast, they point out, are a vanishing species. In Connecticut alone, moderate Republicans have fallen to Democratic opponents in numbers too astonishing to ignore. U.S. Representatives Nancy Johnson, Rob Simmons and Chis Shays all were defeated in office by purportedly moderate Democrats who now style themselves progressives. Indeed, Chris Shays was the last moderate Republican U.S. House member in New England.

The fallen Republican bodies seem to cinch the argument of those on the right who say that moderatism – if one may invent a word – is responsible for Republican losses in the Northeast. A robust conservatism elsewhere in the country continues to produce congressional and gubernatorial winners. In Connecticut, the entire U.S. Congressional delegation is Democratic and progressive. Both houses of the General Assembly are dominated by Democrats. And in 2011, Dannel Malloy, for many years mayor of Stamford, became the first Democratic governor in the state since former Governor William O’Neill hung up his spurs more than 20 years earlier.

Running on a “shared sacrifice” slogan, according to which everyone in the state should bear their fair share of misery, Mr. Malloy was able, by cutting Republicans out of budget negotiations, to push through the Democratic dominated General Assembly the largest tax increase in state history. Some Republicans quipped at the time that Mr. Malloy, always an aggressive political competitor, may have felt himself in competition with former Governor Lowell Weicker, a self-styled “maverick” Republican who had imposed upon Connecticut the state’s secondlargest tax increase. The Weicker income tax had been resisted vigorously by previous Democratic governors William O’Neill and Ella Grasso.

Mr. Malloy’s promised savings were largely amorphous, which hardly seems a fair shared sacrifice. Even after he had imposed the largest tax increase in the state’s history, Mr. Malloy has had great difficulty balancing his budgets.

Recently Mr. Malloy has been criticized by Republican state legislators – two of whom, Larry Cafero, a member of the state House for 14 years, and John McKinney, a member of the state Senate for as many years -- as having adopted discreditable budget balancing methods, a charge deployed effectively by Mr. Malloy during his first campaign against his two Republican predecessors, Governors Jodi Rell and John Rowland. Like President Barack Obama, Mr. Malloy inherited his red ink.

Both Mrs. Rell, often criticized by Connecticut’s left of center media as an indolent governor, and Mr. Rowland, were styled as Republican “firewalls” who thwarted improvident spending. In truth, neither was effective in preventing the Democratic dominated General Assembly from readjusting Republican budgets to accommodate more spending. Taxation and consequent spending have increased under a Democratic regime that regards firewalls as momentary obstacles to be overcome.

Indeed, spending is a problem Republicans, both nationally and in Connecticut, seem powerless to confront. The rhetorical ammo that might be effectively discharged in a campaign against improvident spending is simply absent. The central pillar of the Romney campaign was not improvident spending but rather over taxation and consequent economic anemia.

The last president who put a sizable dent in spending, budget reduction and taxes was Calvin Coolidge, styled by Amity Shlaes, the author of“Coolidge,” as “the Great Refrainer.” Even the sainted Ronald Reagan spent money like a class-warfare intoxicated Democrat; the federal budget rose by over a third during his administration. Connecticut’s Yankee Institute will host Ms. Shlaes, who believes Mr. Coolidge may serve a model for a reinvigorated Republican Party, at the Stamford Sheraton on March 28. Information is available here.

DNC Messaging

It’s a little bit like watching a fly fallen into mug of beer wildly flapping its wings. Once the rhetorical mood hits Governor Dannel Malloy, he DOES go on.

One has only to compare the talking points in the 20 minute speech given by Mr. Malloy with those given by 1^st District U.S. Representative John Larson to understand that the script from which both borrowed was co-produced at Central Casting.

In his pre-speech remarks, Mr. Malloy vowed that he would not spend his time during his strut on the national stage talking about himself,unlike his Republican Party nemesis, Governor Chris Christie of New York. Reporters and commentators who have covered the much traveled, fleet-footed Mr. Malloy since he was first sworn in as governor well understand how the presence of a camera awakens the showman in him. Unlike preceding Republican Governor Jodi Rell, Mr. Malloy does not shrink from partisan displays, and be bathes in media adulation more often than other Connecticut politicians.

This dramatic announcement from Mr. Malloy – it’s not about me; really, it’s never about me – was somewhat subverted when 1^stDistrict U.S. Representative John Larson stepped to the podium and delivered a 20 minute stem-winder that was 1) about himself and 2) overburdened with pretty much the same central casting talking points employed by Mr. Malloy.

Malloy on the GOP plan for entitlements:“Malloy said the GOP plan would slash education and entitlement programs ‘so Romney can give a tax cut of $265,000 to your average millionaire, and continue billions of dollars in subsidies for big oil.’

Larson on the same: “Mitt Romney and Paul Ryan have a different vision. Look at the details. The biggest problem with the Romney-Ryan plan for Medicare is obvious: They take away the Medicare, they end the guarantee, hand out vouchers, limit benefits, and force seniors to pay the difference of up to $6,400 dollars out of their own pockets.”

Same church, same pew, same rollicking partisan sermon; nothing unusual here, considering the setting. The progressive lions on the convention floor wanted red meat, and the two Connecticut Democrats gave it to them. Political conventions are part pulpit show, part circus sideshow. Everyone is expected to bow to the pieties and cheer wildly when the bearded lady is brought on stage.

Asked whether the country was better off than it had been before Mr. Obama took office, Mr. Malloy cried out exuberantly “Hell, yeah!”

A few short weeks before the DNC convened, Newsweek – hardly a conservative organ of opinion – printed a devastating cover story written by Niall Ferguson, “Obama’s Gotta Go,” that chilled the bones of Obamabot economist Paul Krugman:
 

“Certainly, the stock market is well up (by 74 percent) relative to the close on Inauguration Day 2009. But the total number of private-sector jobs is still 4.3 million below the January 2008 peak. Meanwhile, since 2008, a staggering 3.6 million Americans have been added to Social Security’s disability insurance program. This is one of many ways unemployment is being concealed.

“In his fiscal year 2010 budget—the first [Mr. Obama] presented—the president envisaged growth of 3.2 percent in 2010, 4.0 percent in 2011, 4.6 percent in 2012. The actual numbers were 2.4 percent in 2010 and 1.8 percent in 2011; few forecasters now expect it to be much above 2.3 percent this year.”

“Unemployment was supposed to be 6 percent by now. It has averaged 8.2 percent this year so far. Meanwhile real median annual household income has dropped more than 5 percent since June 2009. Nearly 110 million individuals received a welfare benefit in 2011, mostly Medicaid or food stamps.”

In America today, Mr. Ferguson pointed out, only half of the population is “invested” in its government:

“Nearly half the population is not represented on a taxable return -- almost exactly the same proportion that lives in a household where at least one member receives some type of government benefit. We are becoming the 50–50 nation -- half of us paying the taxes, the other half receiving the benefits.”

Debt burden figures, Mr. Ferguson maintained, are grossly underappreciated. He then hauled from the closet the “most recent estimate for the difference between the net present value of federal government liabilities and the net present value of future federal revenues—what economist Larry Kotlikoff calls the true “fiscal gap” -- is $222 trillion.”

The $222 trillion gap between expected future revenues and liabilities is a measure in dollars of the difference between the past and future prosperity of the country. “Not only did the initial fiscal stimulus fade after the sugar rush of 2009,” Mr. Ferguson writes, “but the president has done absolutely nothing to close the long-term gap between spending and revenue.” And while Mr. Ferguson, once an advisor to presidential candidate John McCain certainly is no fan of Mr. Obama, neither is the non-partisan data brought forward in the Newsweek cover story, which apparently has not been read by the ebullient Mr. Malloy or Mr. Larson.

The Malloyalist Propaganda Machine

After it had been pointed out that his drawings were hypercritical and highly unflattering representations of his subjects, a famous caricaturist responded,“What’s the point of having absolute power, if you are not prepared to abuse it?”

Roy Occhiogrosso, Governor Dannel Malloy’s Senior Advisor and a fierce Malloyalist, should have internalized the quote so that he would be able to flourish it when asked by reporters why the governor thought it necessary to recruit dozens of state officials as propaganda agents.

Is He Rell Yet?

For General Assembly Democrats determined to frustrate Governor Dannel Malloy’s education reform plan, the most recent projected budget deficits came just in time. Ben Barnes, Mr. Malloy’s money cruncher at the Office of Policy Management (OPM), and Comptroller Kevin Lembo, after dickering over the red figures, have agreed that the budget is in deficit by about $200 million; the real deficit is probably closer top $300 million.

Mr. Malloy’s education reform plan includes features that have not earned him many friends among teachers, union officials and Jonathan Pelto.

The Malloy plan calls for additional spending on high performing charter schools, financing that in a shrinking economy progressive Democrats in the General Assembly yoked at the knees to union interests insist might better be spent padding the salaries of unionized public school workers. The governor’s reform initiative also seeks to connect hiring and firing to pedagogical performance; and, in the process attempting to facilitate improvement in low performing schools, the governor has touched and been jolted by the usual electrically charged third rail of Connecticut politics – teacher tenure. Mr. Malloy’s ambition to tie tenure to job performance has made hairs stand up on the necks of union vote-dependent Democrats in the General Assembly.

Legislation gate keepers within the relevant committees were determined to ditch the Malloy education reforms as untimely and expensive.

During the unlamented administrations of former Republican Governors Jodi Rell and John Rowland, Democratic committee chairmen in the General Assembly successfully resisted efforts on the part of “firewall” governors to limit spending. With the ascendancy of Mr. Malloy, the first Democratic governor in more than 20 years, chronic spenders in the legislature hoped that taxes would be increased, thus removing from progressive Democrats in the General Assembly a bothersome pressure to reduce spending. They were not disappointed: Mr. Malloy astonished even former Maverick Governor Lowell Weicker, father of state income tax, by levying on recession ravaged nutmeggers the largest tax increase in state history.

“Mine’s bigger than yours,” Mr. Malloy easily could have boasted to Mr. Weicker. Where in heaven’s name, Mr. Weicker wondered a couple of years passed, did all the surpluses generated by his income tax go?

As it happened, neither Mr. Weicker nor Mr. Rowland nor Mrs. Rell were fully functioning firewalls. Had the gubernatorial firewalls prevented spending, the bottom line of Connecticut’s budget would not have increased threefold since the last pre-income tax budget of former Governor William O’Neill. It became the fashion during the post-O’Neill period for left of center political commentators and politicians in the state to lament that Connecticut was not suffering from a spending addiction; the state, it was agreed by all, had a “revenue problem.” That fashion has not gone out of style in the Malloy administration which, to put the matter plainly, is not interested in spending cuts that bleed.

Waiting-for-Godot progressive Democrats still believe the tide they have lowered by means of punishing regulations and high taxes will lift their boats – at some magical moment in the future. Mr. Barns attributes the current deficit to lower than usual tax receipts, most certainly the result of the diminishing returns all the governor’s men should attribute to high taxes, burdensome regulations and improvident spending. Mr. Malloy, with a bow to previous sleight of hand governors he has vigorously spanked in the past, proposed this year to patch the most recent deficit by shifting funds. Asked to defend the administration’s latest budget shifting gimmickry, the governor – Wait for it! – described the state’s plunge into economic idiocy as “basically a revenue problem” certain to disappear when the state's economic fortunes improve, sometime after the governor is out-rigged with a magic wand.

Mr. Malloy has been no more successful than his predecessors in controlling spending. But he may well be the first Democratic governor in living memory to have been rebuked by a spending addicted Democratic General Assembly for having proposed educational spending increases that are untimely and expensive.

Not to dash any utopian dreams, but it would be rash to suppose that this objection by tax devouring progressives in the General Assembly signals a disposition among dominant Democrats to cut spending. It is merely a convenient cloaking device utilized by committee leaders to abort educational reforms that impact union interests leading Democrats in the General Assembly have sworn to defend with their political lives, their sacred honor and our money – for votes.

Death Penalty Commutation

A decent time having elapsed, sort of, since two multiple murderers had been sentenced to death for having 1) beaten with a baseball bat a husband of a family in Cheshire, 2) forced the husband’s wife to travel to a bank to withdraw funds for the two murderers, 3) raped the wife and one of the daughters, 4) bound the daughters to their beds, 5) set fire to the house, murdering the daughters and their mother, anti-death penalty legislators in the General Assembly are planning once again to file a bill that would prospectively abolish the death penalty, replacing it with a sentence of life in prison without possibility of parole. Prospective abolition would leave intact the 11) death penalty sentences of the murderers awaiting justice on Connecticut’s death row.

Such a bill would leave intact the legislature’s power to commute death penalty sentences to life in prison at any time after the General Assembly had abolished the death penalty. Unlike most states, the pardon power in Connecticut is invested in the legislature rather the governor’s office (McLaughlin v. Bronson, 206 Conn. 267 (1988), citing Palka v. Walker, 124 Conn. 121 (1938)). The General Assembly exercised this power until it created the Board of Pardons in 1883. Although the General Assembly had delegated its power of pardon to a board, it never-the-less retains pardon powers; and since the power to commute is considered a part of the pardon power (Attorney General’s Opinion 96-10, citing 59 Am.Jur.2d, Pardon and Parole § 23), it would appear that the legislature may commute death sentences, according to an Office of Legislative Research report.



The anti-death penalty legislators did succeed in passing an abolition bill during the administration of former Republican Governor Jodi Rell, but the governor disappointed them by vetoing it. Current Democratic Governor Dannel Malloy has pledged to sign such a bill should it cross his desk. Encouraged by the governor’s pledge, anti-death penalty proponents in the General Assembly reintroduced their bill after Mr. Malloy’s installation as governor, an effort doomed by two key Democratic legislators one of whom, state Senator Edith Prague, withdrew her support for the measure after having had a conversation with Dr. William Petit, the father of the Cheshire murder victims.

At a time when a jury had convicted and sentenced to death only one of the two Cheshire murderers, the trial of the second murderer being in process, Mrs. Prague emerged from her conversation with Dr. Petit firmly convinced that both murderers should suffer the penalties prescribed for them by a jury of their peers. She expressed herself on this point in rather unforgiving language: “They should bypass the trial and take that second animal and hang him by his penis from a tree out in the middle of Main Street.” At the same time, Mrs. Prague indicated she might support future efforts to abolish the death penalty. But she found it difficult to look Dr. Petit in the face and “not give him something that would make his life a little easier.” The 86 year-old Mrs. Prague since then suffered a mild stroke but returned at the end of January to the General Assembly.

Democratic Senator Andrew Maynard of Stonington, meeting at the same time with Dr. Petit, followed Mrs. Prague’s lead. “It’s a toss-up,” he said, “I don’t support the death penalty broadly but I don’t support repealing it at this time. For my own personal reasons and as a matter of public policy, I don’t think it’s the right way for the state to act. But in this instance there are such mitigating circumstances, in my mind, that I could not in good conscience vote for repeal this year.” The mitigating circumstances having disappeared and the timing being better, Mr. Maynard now says “I’m inclined to support repeal.”

Even without the two wavering senators, there are, according to some head counters, enough votes in the General Assembly to pass the death penalty abolition bill.

The inevitable passage of the bill will unleash a flood of appeals that will at a minimum further delay the executions of Connecticut’s 11 death row inmates. It is almost certain that at some point in the future a Democratic dominated legislature supported by a Democratic governor, all of whom will have been instrumental in abolishing the death penalty, would be morally derelict in resisting the commutation of the death sentences of the 11 prisoners now awaiting execution on death row. The death penalty having been abolished for prospective criminals who in the future might violate Connecticut’s narrowly circumscribed rarely applied death sentence, no moral justification for the death penalty could withstand a call for the commutation of those awaiting execution authorized by a lapsed and outmoded law.

Connecticut’s Social Gospel

What might be called Connecticut’s social gospel is prospering under the hand of progressive Governor Dannel Malloy. Should anyone doubt that Mr. Malloy is a born again progressive, he has only to pay heed to remarks the governor made at a progressive panel discussion in Washington D.C., the epicenter of modern Democratic progressivism.

When president CEO of the Center for American Progress John Podesta, former White House chief of staff to President Bill Clinton, asked Mr. Malloy to display his progressive credentials, the governor unscrolled a partial list that included:

• The passage of Connecticut’s new earned income tax credit program

• The decriminalization of marijuana use in small portions, “the third most robust of its kind in the country,” according to CTNewsJunkie

• The passage of a law providing in-state public college tuition rates to undocumented Connecticut students

• A new law outlawing discrimination against transgendered individuals

• The implementation within the Department of Correction of a new risk reduction credit program that some think will reduce prisoner recidivism

• An executive order that provides a path for state child care workers and personal care attendants to unionize

• And, not mentioned by Mr. Malloy at the progressive conference, a pledge to sign a bill abolishing Connecticut’s death penalty

A bill abolishing the death penalty was presented during the administration of Mr. Malloy’s predecessor, Jodi Rell, who vetoed the bill. That attempt arrived on the heels of Michael Ross’ murder spree. The bill Mr. Malloy has pledged to sign will be presented following a particularly horrific crime in Cheshire.

Mr. Malloy’s crowning achievement was the passage of Connecticut’s paid sick day law.

“This year,” CTNewsJunkie reported, “Connecticut became the first state in the nation to pass a law mandating some employers provide paid time off for workers when they are ill.”

A pleased Mr. Malloy told the gathering of progressives, “So it was, I think, a pretty progressive agenda,” the passage of which was made easier by a General Assembly dominated by like-minded progressive Democrats.

The progressive social gospel in Connecticut is eclectic and politically pragmatic, its doxology wedded to no firm principles. This makes the gospel infinitely elastic. The same governor who on Monday raises taxes both on businesses and individuals can on Tuesday appear before a union group and assure them that at heart he is Samuel Gompers, which is reasonable enough. But then to reappear on Wednesday before yet another business group to sooth and stroke them with his plan to create jobs is a bit of a stretch for most chamber of commerce types who may have graduated from Capitalist University. The disjunctions do not seem to trouble Mr. Malloy, and indeed, once economic prosperity is coupled with crony capitalism the disjunctions disappear altogether. If job production is dependent on governors who pick and choose economic winners and losers, capitalists are reduced to beggars at the throne, and those who cozy up to power win the spoils. The invisible hand of commerce rewards entrepreneurs according to merit, which is determined by consumers who vote for products with their dollars. The visible hand of crony capitalism rewards political benefactors, the prizes being given out by politicians most of whom have never met a payroll or employed a worker who was not on the public dole.

When political parties did this sort of thing during the real progressive era, progressives and muckrakers in the media made it a point to inveigh against both the crony capitalists and governors and presidents who fed them from the public trough. The whole point of progressivism Teddy Roosevelt style was to bust up monopolies created by an alliance between powerful businessmen and politicians. Even Mr. Roosevelt, the scourge of monopolists, agreed to waive the Sherman Antitrust Act during the panic of 1907 so that U.S. Steel, owned by acquisition maestro J. Pierpont Morgan, could acquire Tennessee Coal & Iron (TC&I) to avert a Wall Street collapse of companies too big to fail.

That was then. Modern day Pierpont Morgans are made in Washington – and in the states by progressive governors who lavish upon them tax money in amounts that would bring a blush to the cheek of Mr. Morgan.

How We Got Here And Why We Aren’t Going Anywhere Fast

Governor Malloy’s “shared sacrifice” was never evenly – some might say “fairly” -- distributed. Progressive Democrats, in fact, do not believe in shared sacrifice. Their credo includes, on the tax side, a progressive income tax in which the “rich,” defined as anyone making more than $200,000 per year, pay the lion’s share of governmental “investments.” SEBAC negotiator Dan Livingston is typical of the genus.

In a progressive regime, the majority of people “invest” relatively little in their government and prudently vote for Democrats, who collect little from them in tax payments (AKA “investments”) while showering them with benefits. Whatever name one chooses to put to this lopsided getting and spending process, it is not “shared sacrifice.”

Nationally, the wealthiest 1 percent of the population earns 19 percent of all income and pays 37 percent of the federal income tax, a figure that excludes payroll taxes for Social Security and Medicare. The top ten percent pay 68 percent of the tab. The bottom 50 percent, those below the median income level, earn 13 percent of the income and pay 3 percent of the tax.

Combining payroll and income taxes, a Brooking Institution study offers the following breakdown: The richest 1 percent pays 27.5 percent of the combined burden, the top 20 percent pay 72 percent, and the bottom 20 percent pay just 0.4 percent. The bottom quintile is low because an earned income tax credit reimburses some or all of their 15 percent payroll tax. In Connecticut, low income groups pay little or no taxes and will be eligible shortly for a newly instituted income tax credit.

The opposite of a progressive tax, a flat tax, which does provide equity in tax collections, would more fairly share the sacrifice; nearly everyone would pay the same tax rate, all exemptions would be eliminated, the simplification of the tax code would facilitate payments, and a majority of the citizenry would be invested, both as tax providers and consumers, in their government.

Mr. Malloy began his journey as governor promising transparency in government, an end to budget trickery, and shared sacrifice. On the route to government as usual, he bumped into a General Assembly dominated by caucus leaders who for years had been politically wedded to union causes, a group of union negotiators who failed miserably in selling Mr. Malloy’s Plan A to rank and file union members, and a gang of crying mayors who winked at the glowing tax faggots so long as they were assured they would not be burned at the stake. Mr. Malloy also entered into an amusing spitting contest with New Jersey Governor Chris Christie, who is turning out to be much the better demagogue.

The Opaque Budget process

Transparency in government was the first casualty of what Democrats in the General Assembly call the “budget process.” Minority Republicans in the General Assembly were from the first cut out of the process, which should not have surprised Republican leaders in the legislature, and the budget was fashioned, per usual, behind closed doors.

There were reasons why the legislative closed shop should not have surprised Republican leaders in the General Assembly. Over a period of twenty years and more, Republicans had lost their primacy of place on the budget chessboard. Republican presence in the legislature is light. The Republican Party in Connecticut lost the last of its budget bargaining chips upon Mr. Malloy’s election to office, more than 20 years after the last Democratic governor, Bill O’Neill, had abandoned ship, leaving in his wake a deficit of about $1 billion, a modest deficit by today’s standards.

Mr. O’Neill was supplanted by maverick Independent Governor Lowell Weicker, the father of Connecticut’s income tax. Mr. Weicker was followed in office by Republican governor John Rowland, who spent a year in jail for having failed to provide “honest services” to the citizens of Connecticut. Mr. Rowland was succeeded by his politically bland Lieutenant Governor, Jodi Rell, a lady more sinned against than sinning regularly lampooned by both the Democratic opposition, the state’s left of center media and recently self described “turd in the Republican Party punchbowl” Mr. Weicker as an inoffensively pleasant do-nothing placeholder. Both Mr. Rowland and Mrs. Rell were moderate Republicans.

After Mrs. Rell came the Democratic deluge. While weary taxpayers gave the boot during the mid-term elections to Democratic big spenders in federal, state and gubernatorial office across the fruited plains, progressive Democrats in Connecticut hung in there. Republican gains in Connecticut’s General Assembly were modest. Before leaving his position as Republican Party Chairman, Chris Healy noted that Republicans had gained 15 seats in the House and 2 seats in the Senate. Republicans also held 100 of the top positions in the 169 towns in Connecticut but lost the governorship and all constitutional offices.

Upon Mr. Malloy ascension as governor, the state, so it was said, had lost its “firewalls,” Republican governors who presumably stood in the way of the Democratic General Assembly spending machine crying “Stop!” In fact, with the righteous wind of an income tax at their backs, spending in the General Assembly quickly accelerated, tripling within the tenure of three post-income tax governors. By the time Governor Dannel Malloy arrived at the fire, Connecticut was engulfed in spending flames. The state had accumulated a biennial budget deficit of more than $4 billion. Something had to be done.

Mr. Malloy’s solution to Connecticut’s debt problem did not differ markedly from that of Mr. Weicker or the two Republican governors who followed him. Mr. Rowland’s campaign pledge to repeal the income tax did not survive his first week in office. While governors in Connecticut’s neighboring states of New York and New Jersey held the line on taxes, Mr. Malloy, following a campaign in which he was hoisted into office by a slender margin of 6,500 votes and during which he seemed to spurn the imposition of more taxes as a first response to Connecticut’s red ink immediately increased a host of taxes by $2.6 billion and pledged to wrest about $2 billion in savings from state unionized workers.

There Will Be Time, For Visions And Revisions That Time Will Soon Erase

Very nearly all the decision makers in Connecticut – union leaders in SEBAC, the coalition of unions charged with contact negotiations, Mr. Malloy and his negotiating team, many liberal lawmakers in the General Assembly and Malloy administration well-wishers in Connecticut’s left of center media – were agreed that Plan A was favorable to unions.

Plan A assured $2.6 billion in tax increases, imposed a wage freeze on state workers for two years, after which the unionized workers were guaranteed wage increases of 3 percent for the following three years, and launched a medical benefit plan that cut costs and, so it seemed to some – one of the chief sticking points among union workers who gave a thumbs down to Plan A – reshaped benefits so that the new medical benefits package could in the future accommodate Connecticut’s Sustinet Plan, a state version of President Barack Obama’s universal health care plan.

Should Plan A be rejected in a final union vote, Mr. Malloy had at the ready an alternative Plan B that, said the same cheering section vigorously promoting Plan A, would be devastating to state workers. On the question of further tax increases, should state workers be so foolish as to vote down Plan A, Mr. Malloy had already crossed a Rubicon: He had pledged to all and sundry that he would not make up cost savings lost through a rejection of Plan A by further tax increases. Savings lost through a perverse refusal to adopt Plan A would be recovered through draconian layoffs and agency reorganizations.

As a lure to union members who might foolishly vote down Plan A, Mr. Malloy sweetened the pot by reducing the “shared sacrifice” of union workers by $400 million. Mr. Malloy’s number crunchers found an extra $400 million in budget receipts and used it to offset union contributions to the so called “shared sacrifice” the governor had demanded of both taxpayers and state workers. An artificial surplus of about $1 billion had been tucked into the budget, a portion of which Mr. Malloy used to finance an ambitious upgrade of the newly unionized UConn Health Center. Democrats did not propose to share their new found funds equally between tax payers and union members by splitting with taxpayers the $400 million Mulligan the Malloy administration had given outright to union members, possibly hoping the additional funds would induce members to vote in favor of Plan A.

The Democratic dominated General Assembly, Republicans dissenting, pre-approved the budget before the Malloy administration had secured union concessions because, some speculated, individual legislators did not wish to leave their fingerprints on a budget deal gone sour.

Were he alive and singing in these unhappy days, Robert Burns, author of the lines

The best laid schemes o' Mice an' Men,
Gang aft agley, (Often go astray)
An' lea'e us nought but grief an' pain,
For promis'd joy!

might have felt vindicated as a philosopher and poet; for, sure enough, the incomprehensible happened, and state union members rejected Plan A, after which Mr. Malloy rolled out the guillotine.

Plan B, everyone agreed, was a horror. It enforced real cuts in spending but likely was never intended as more than a pistol held to the head of rank and file union members to induce them to vote for the much milder Plan A, which included two years of wage freezes followed by 3 years of 3 percent wage increases, a two year increase in the retirement age and a doubling of the pension penalty should workers decide to retire early. Plan A also included an insurance feature mandating doctor visits and screenings, in exchange for which the state offered a pledge not to lay off current workers, all mild adjustments by most people’s reckoning.

When a minority of union workers rejected Plan A, Mr. Malloy was more or less forced by the weight of his rhetoric to pull the trigger on the pistol.

Plan B, a veritable spook on a stick, was unveiled; the usual culprits remonstrated with benighted union workers. Senator Edith Prague, a longtime union enabler in the General Assembly, said she thought those who had rejected so mild a plan were mad. Papers that in the past stood idly by as the state budget doubled and then tripled, insisting that Connecticut had a revenue rather than a spending problem, began to shriek like so many righteous Robespierres for the heads of union members. The Speaker of the House, Rep. Chris Donovan, put a temporary hold on his run for the U.S. Senate in the 5th District and returned panting to the legislature, where he encouraged union leaders to prevail upon the rank and file to make whatever adjustment might be necessary to adopt the discarded Plan A. Mr. Malloy said he was hopeful something could be done. Flagging spirits began to revive. Slowly, Plan A rose from the ashes.

When the Kabuki curtain opened towards the end of July, painted smiles were on every face. Union leaders, with a wink in the direction of rank and file members they were supposed to be representing, changed the by-laws governing contract negotiations – “drastically,” according to Chris Keating of the Hartford Courant.

Under the old by-laws, “14 of the 15 unions – representing 80 percent of the membership – needed to approve any changes to ratify changes in health care and pension benefits.” That is why Plan A, although approved by 57 percent of those voting, was rejected under union by-laws. Under the new and revised by-laws, imposed upon the membership unilaterally by the very negotiators who had failed to induce a sufficient number of workers to vote in favor of Plan A, “only 8 of the 15 unions – representing 50 percent of the membership [would be] needed to approve any changes,” according to Mr. Keating.

And as if this staged re-vote on Plan A were not surety enough that Plan A finally would be accepted, some news reports indicated union leaders were prepared to allow only those votes of union members who had voted against Plan A to be tallied under the revised by-laws, these to be added to the 57 percent of members who had under the old dispensation voted for Plan A. Those who had voted down Plan A would be given a chance to change their votes to affirmative. Those who voted affirmatively under the now abandoned by-laws would not be given the opportunity to change their “yes” votes.

Having been stung once, union negotiators and Malloy officials were determined to leave nothing to chance. Plan A MUST pass.

Unsurprisingly, Mr. Malloy hit pay dirt when SEBAC leaders announced that a deal had been struck on July 23. The plan soon to be submitted to the union membership differed from Plan A only in incidental matters. An impenetrable secrecy shrouded talks between union leaders and the agents of the Malloy administration.

Following the announcement, the State Employees Bargaining Agent Coalition “posted a notice announcing it was taking strict control over its Facebook page, an indication the unions already were trying to take control of messaging once a new tentative agreement is announced,” according to a report in CTMirror.

Outside the closed shop discussions in the course of which SEBAC leaders assisted Malloy administration officials in pushing through the union rank and file a re-do vote that was almost certain to pass frustrations swirled.

The frustrations were understandable said Matt O’Connor, one of the SEBAC negotiators in a Wall Street Journal report. "There may be issues individual unions want to raise with their leaders, but all of the actions by leaders of coalition are all in accordance with our bylaws."

Those would be the by-laws that Mr. O'Connor’s associates at SEBAC unilaterally changed in order to produce an approving vote by the rank and file, who were now prevented by the censors at SEBAC from participating in facebook messaging.

Mr. O’Connor adamantly insisted, according to an Associated Press report in the Times Union, rather in the manner of a Lady Macbeth protesting too much, that neither Mr. Malloy nor his agents played any role in a by-law change without which a re-do vote on Plan A would not have been possible:

"'We didn't give the governor anything,’ O'Connor said. ‘This was a decision made by union leaders based on reviewing the entire ratification process, hearing from the 45,000 members of our unions, applying lessons learned from this experience and following some very basic principles of union democracy. It certainly wasn't about the governor.’"

Of course, the secrecy surrounding the discussions would make it nearly impossible for anyone to verify Mr. O’Connors somewhat implausible version of events. We are to suppose that SEBAC negotiators who dramatically violated every rule of union democracy to achieve a result desired by Mr. Malloy, virtually all pro-union Democratic legislators in the General Assemby and Connecticut’s left of center media “didn’t give the governor anything.”

Following the by-law changes, rank and file discontent boiled over in the pages of the Wall Street Journal:

“Some union members said they're planning to vote against any new deal out of principle. Meanwhile, members of at least two bargaining units are urging their colleagues to disband.

"’AFSCME is a national union and has a lot of power, so it would be nice to stay with them, but if they're not listening to us, then we're going to have to find another union,’ said Jeri Herskowitz, who works in the judicial system.

“She said members of her local have started a process to jump ship and join the United Public Service Employees Union out of Ronkonkoma, N.Y.

"’In the past week, numerous workers in Connecticut have contacted us to leave their union and join ours. We're going to have to move very quickly to make this happen,’ said UPSEU President Kevin Boyle.

“Correction officer John Boyle spent part of the day Tuesday near the Donald T. Bergin Correctional Institution in Storrs offering union members information about joining the National Correctional Employees Unions, which was formed out of Massachusetts. Mr. Boyle, who plans to retire in August, said he is also spearheading a class-action suit against union leaders. He hasn't filed any court papers.

"’Union leaders sold us out, they got caught, and now they're going to have to face us in court,’ Mr. Boyle said.”

No Exit

Such is life in the tax-me, sue-me, flee me state. Mr. Malloy has imposed on his state the highest tax increase in its history, larger even than the tax increase previously imposed by Mr. Weicker in the state’s first post-income tax budget. In the absence of Plan B, which contained real spending cuts too Draconian for the refined tastes of big spending eastern seaboard Democratic politicians, spending will go up. State revenues will spike owing to the tax increases. But over the long term, in the absence of dramatic spending cuts, revenues will continue to shrink, because businesses from which the state draws its revenue will continue to flee the state when they cannot bribe it for tax dispensations, moving jobs and taxpayers to less high tax and regulatory environments elsewhere.

The exodus has already begun. Two days before the union-Malloy deal was announced with much fervor on the front pages of Connecticut’s newspapers, many of which find their own resources shrinking, a report surfaced in a business journal indicating that job additions in Connecticut were anemic: Connecticut has added only 1,800 jobs since the start of 2011, compared with a gain of 14,100 for the same period last year.

And last year was not a banner year.