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.

More Taxes On The Way, Connecticut’s Receding Tide

Now that Republicans have been cut out of the budget loop by Governor Dannel Malloy and progressive leaders in the General Assembly, future budgets will be assembled by Mr. Malloy, tax hungry progressives in the state legislature, SEBAC, a coalition of union leaders authorized to negotiate contracts with the state, and economists at the tax gobbling University of Connecticut (UConn).

According to a story that ran in CTNewsJunkie, “Economists at the University of Connecticut recommended Thursday looking at instituting a statewide property tax to close more than $1 billion funding gap in the state’s education cost sharing formula.”

In the UConn report, contributing economist Stan McMillen notes that Connecticut has underfunded its statutorily required share of educational funding to municipalities for the last 5 years by about $1.09 billion. The UConn report weighs a few gap filling options, including a sales tax increase to 8.3 percent and a boost in the income tax of 13.8 percent, although the report seems to favor the statewide property tax as an “outside the box” solution to the problem.      

When asked whether he anticipated any negative consequences from enacting a new tax, Mr. McMillen said, according to the CTNewJunkie report, “it was a ‘pay me now or pay me later’ issue.

“’We’re underfunding by $1.09 billion. That’s going to have downstream consequences,’ he said.”

Long ago and far away, during the gubernatorial administration of maverick Governor Lowell Weicker, it was generally assumed by the state’s administrative arm – the governor, the Democratic majority in the state legislature, municipal politicians and the state’s media – that, confronted with a budget deficit, the state of Connecticut should increase taxes. Connecticut, it was often said at the time, was suffering from a revenue and not a spending problem. This theory, happily embraced by all whose futures depended on rapidly increasing taxation, could be entertained only in a state in which personal income was consistently rising.

Somewhere along the line, the theory was found wanting. In a recession, the receding tide lowers all the boats – the obverse of President John Kennedy’s sage observation that “a rising tide lifts all the boats.”

In a 1963 speech to the Economic Club of New York, Mr. Kennedy explained in great detail how he proposed to raise the tide and consequently lift all the boats. Mr. Kennedy was intent on increasing revenue by – and here it is necessary for progressives to hang onto their red Phrygian caps – decreasing business taxes. Once the rising tide had flushed money into federal coffers, the federal government would have the resources necessary to inaugurate Great Society programs.

This is what Mr. Kennedy said:

“There are a number of ways by which the federal government can meet its responsibilities to aid economic growth… the most direct and significant kind of federal action aiding economic growth is to make possible an increase in private consumption and investment demand -- to cut the fetters which hold back private spending. In the past, this could be done in part by the increased use of credit and monetary tools, but our balance of payments today places limits on our use of those tools for expansion. It could also be done by increasing federal expenditures more rapidly than necessary, but such a course would soon demoralize both the government and our economy. If government is to retain the confidence of the people, it must not spend more than can be justified on grounds of national need or spent with maximum efficiency.

 “The final and best means of strengthening demands among consumers and business is to reduce the burden on private income and the deterrents to private initiative which are imposed by our present tax system – and this administration pledged itself last summer to an across-the-board, top-to-bottom cut in personal and corporate income taxes to be enacted and become effective in 1963…”

Mr. Kennedy was as good as his word. His program was enacted and a cataract of funds poured into the national treasury. Following Mr. Kennedy’s tax cuts, enacted after the president’s death in the Johnson administration, unemployment was reduced from 5.2% in 1964 to 4.5% in 1965 and further fell to 3.8% in 1966.  Though it had been estimated that the cuts would result in a loss of revenue, tax revenue increased in 1964 and 1965. The tide had lifted all the boats. After Mr. Kennedy’s assassination, his successor, President Lyndon Johnson, diverted some of the swelling revenues to finance his Great Society programs.

Would it not be a useful idea for someone in UConn’s economics department to record Mr. Kennedy’s address to the Economic Club of New York and run it on a continuous loop through the ear buds of the professoriate at UConn?

In the meantime, the idiot notion that Connecticut is suffering from revenue rather than a spending problem has been exploded even within the editorial pages of the state’s left of center media -- following the largest tax increase in the state’s history, which followed 22 years after the second largest tax increase in state history. That silly idea ought to be permanently buried in the fever swamps of progressivism.

The Dick And Chris Show

Governor Dannel Malloy at first allowed that legislators who were to create bills assuring Connecticut citizens would not be exposed to another mass murder incident such as had occurred in Sandy Hook should take their time and craft a bill that would suit the purpose. Then he jumped ahead of his own gubernatorial commission and publically announced his own prophylactic measures, for which he received some mild criticism: How was the legislature to write an effective bill in the absence of hard data furnished by three investigatory bodies, the most important of which was the criminal investigation? Apparently, Mr. Malloy took this objection to heart, because he then issued strong signals that the various commissions should be allowed to complete their assignments so that a proper bill might be written.

After all, Mr. Malloy and members of Connecticut’s all Democratic U.S. Congressional delegation – most prominently Senators Dick Blumenthal and Chris Murphy – had visited Sandy Hook, met with family members of children slain by mass murderer Adam Lanza, and assured them that effective remedies were in the offing, Mr. Blumenthal insisting that national legislation was exceedingly important because state borders are porous and illegal weapons might easily pass through the semi-permeable membrane of state laws. Connecticut already has on its books some of the most restrictive gun laws in the nation. Mr. Murphy has been running tight end around the National Rifle Association (NRA), pummeling it defensively whenever he can and at the same time hoping to receive a pass from the anti-weapon team that he might carry to a touchdown.

Several difficulties have intervened. In New York, Governor Andrew Cuomo quickly rammed through the legislature a ban on certain weapons but neglected to exempt New York policemen from the ban, a major boo-boo. The governor and legislature also launched a ban on magazines that contained more than 7 rounds, only to realize when the applause had died down that there is no company in the United States that produces such a magazine; so the solons in New York prohibited more than 7 rounds in any magazine holding more than 7 rounds, which raises the embarrassing question: How is the law to be enforced in the absence of X-Ray vision glasses that would allow the rearmed New York police to count the number of bullets in an opaque magazine? Mr. Cuomo and the anti-gun nuts in the New York legislature are still struggling with that one.

The moral to these goof-up is: Not only does haste make waste; sometimes, it makes you look incredibly stupid. And state office holders do not want to appear to be imbeciles. Idiot voters in the Unites States, it is generally supposed, are still in the minority.

The Dick and Chris show alighted in Connecticut days after Harry Reid, the Democratic Majority Leader in the U.S. Senate, had buried ardent hopes for a federal ban on assault weapons. Connecticut, much more progressive on this point than most states, already has such a ban. A federal ban is the Holy Grail of senators Blumenthal and Murphy.

Why? Because, as Mr. Blumenthal has been telling us, gun runners, the sort of disreputable folk who sell guns to criminals not legally authorized to use them, easily run around porous state laws; but a federal law… well sir, that’s the ticket!

Now then, it is important to understand that the proposed anti-assault weapon ban that was to have been presented in the U.S. Congress – the Holy Grail of Mr. Blumenthal and Mr. Murphy -- was not shot to death by itchy-fingered members of the NRA. The measure was not put up for a vote in the chamber where Mr. Blumenthal and Mr. Murphy do business -- when they are not hustling Connecticut legislators in their home state to hastily pass a bill in the absence of determining data -- because it was withdrawn by Mr. Reid, whose specialty lies in counting votes. The Democratic votes in a chamber owned by Democrats weren’t there.

Here is the breathless Blumenthal hustle: “Connecticut’s failure to act in the next two weeks will be a detriment when we go to the floor. On the other hand, if Connecticut can act within the next two weeks it will provide a very powerful momentum. It will speak volumes about determination and dedication here to making sure our nation is safer.”

Connecticut legislators, who wish to avoid the trapdoors through which idiot New York politicians have fallen, are pausing to consider hard data soon to be released in affidavits that have been carefully hidden from public view. As Attorney General in Connecticut for more than 20 years before his elevation to the U.S. Senate, Mr. Blumenthal should understand the importance of affidavits in prosecution and bill writing.

Mr. Blumenthal and Mr. Murphy need to get back to work in the Beltway rounding up votes for the Holy Grail in THEIR Democratic dominated Senate.

They should make haste: Time wasted is time lost.

Lawlor the Lawgiver

State Senator Len Suzio held a news conference in the Legislative Office Building, sparsely attended by the public but well attended by the state’s media, to call public attention to what he regards as serious failures in Connecticut’s newly adopted and Orwellian named early release Risk Reduction Earned Credits program. The title of the program begs the question -- Risk Reduction for whom?

Certainly IbrahimGhazal’s risk of getting murdered as he was peaceably going about his daily business at an EZ Mart store in Meriden was not reduced after the program was hastily adopted in a legislative session normally devoted to budget fixes. A Democratic dominated General Assembly joined at the hip to the first Democratic governor in more than 20 years, Dannel Malloy, has made it possible for ambitious Democrats to pass hastily contrived bills through a sausage making assembly line that in the past was considerably more thoughtful and deliberative.

Police have arrested Frankie Resto, a prisoner who had been given early release credits under the provisions of the General Assembly’s new law, for the murder of Mr. Ghazal.

In the blink of an eye this session, Democrats were able to abolish the death penalty – by arguing that the prospect of death does not deter capitol felonies. At the time of passage, Connecticut Commentary argued that if capital punishment had no deterrent value at all, no punishment, however minor, could deter crime. At times the Democrats appeared to be arguing for the abolition of punishment as well as capital punishment.

The bill abolishing the death penalty, passed by Democrats over the muted objections of an emasculated Republican minority, applied abolition prospectively. The bill was crafted so as not to affect the Connecticut 11, capitol felons presently awaiting execution on death row.

Thanks to a cowardly Democratic majority in the General Assembly, Connecticut is now prepared to execute 11 men in the absence of a law mandating execution for heinous crimes, oblivious of the natural law informing all jurisprudence, according to which men may not arbitrarily be punished in the absence of a law prescribing punishment: Nulla poena sine lege -- “Where there is no law, there is no transgression” – is, outside of the totalitarian state, a part of the Natural Law that informs Western laws and ethics. The natural law, in its varying permutations, may be found in the Torah, the Sermon on the Mount, the Magna Carta, statutory law and the U.S. Constitution. Alas, Connecticut’s General Assembly and its governor, formerly a prosecutor, are untouched by it.

Mr. Suzio’s too loud objections to the hastily written and poorly applied Risk Reduction Earned Credits program has produced a sour note from Michael Lawlor, who had served in the General Assembly for a quarter century before accepting a well paid position among Malloyalists as the governor’s undersecretary for criminal justice policy and planning at the Office of Policy and Management. As co-chair of the Judiciary Committee, Mr. Lawlor was practiced at sliding dubious legislation past his Republican comrades on the committee, not always successfully.

“The idea that you could take a tragedy of what happened in Meriden, this murder, and turn it into some sort of a political football is really outrageous,” Lawlor told a reporterfor CTNewsJunkie. “I think it’s extremely irresponsible to capitalize on a tragedy like this.” Mr. Lawlor added that if Mr. Suzio was serious about getting something done, he wouldn’t be holding a press conference, because that’s not how public policy is changed in the Malloy regime.

Mr. Suzio, as well as family victims left in grief by behavior even Mr. Lawlor might consider anti-social, do not agree with that assessment.

Mr. Lawlor argues that under the previous program, Mr. Resto would have been released earlier. Mr. Suzio argues that Mr. Resto was released early under the auspices of the new Risk Reduction Earned Credits program, and the credits that served as his get-out-of-jail-early card should never have been applied in a rigorous and fault free early release program.

“He [Mr. Resto] actually got drunk in prison at one point in time,” Suzio said at his press conference.“He set a fire in a prison, yet he still earned 199 days early release credits?”

To date, 7,589 prisoners, many convicted of violent felonies, have been released early under the provisions of the retroactively applied Risk Reduction Earned Credits program. Where will they be living, asks State Victim Advocate Michelle Cruz? The state, she points out, has only 1180 beds at half way houses and 3,500 behavioral slots available to those who receive early release. Who is supervising their release? Have they been given psychiatric evaluation before release? How are the credits applied?

“Many of the offenders are being granted RREC for simply signing up for a program rather than completing the program. For example,” Ms. Cruz said, “a sex offender who refuses to sign up for sex offender treatment as required, is instead signing up for programs such as study of the Philippines. Once they sign up they are receiving credits to get out early,”

In her research, Ms. Cruz cites inmates denied parole for failure to complete required programs while at the same time earning risk reduction credits for enrolling in programs they do not need. “For example a sex offender who refuses to sign up for sex offender treatment as required, is instead signing up for programs such as study of the Philippines. Once they sign up they are receiving credits to get out early,” said Cruz.

Ms. Cruz has asked the Department of Correction to calculate the recidivism rates of the 7,589 inmates released through the program.

The most recent study of recidivism within the Connecticut Department of Correction, completed in February of 2012 by the State Criminal Justice Policy and Planning Division of the Office of Policy and Management, followed 14,398 male sentenced offenders after they were released or discharged from a prison facility in 2005, providing a five year review of recidivism. The study found that within five years of their release; 79 percent were re-arrested, 69 percent were convicted of a new crime, and 50 percent were returned to prison with a new sentence.

The study also found that; 50 percent of the offender group had served at least one sentence for violating the terms of their probation, 46 percent had served time in prison for a drug charge and 19 percent had served a prior sentence for driving under the influence or alcohol or drugs.

Reviewing the cases of 773 early release inmates returned to custody for either committing a new offense or violation of probation or parole, Ms. Cruz has discovered that many were re-arrested for: Violation of a protective order (felony); Carrying a dangerous weapon (felony); Attempt to commit arson 3rd Degree(felony); Burglary 3rd (felony); Attempt to commit arson 1st degree (felony).

Surely such data would be of interest to legislative Democrats in the General Assembly who may have prematurely approved the Risk Reduction Earned Credits program.

At one point in his news conference, Mr. Suzio hoisted in the air, none too steadily, a bulging file containing the prison discipline records of one of the graduates of the new Risk Reduction Earned Credits program.

Perhaps he should have mailed it to Mr. Lawlor.

Mr. Ghazal’s murder occurred four streets down from Mr. Suzio’s residence in Meriden, and it demonstrates, Mr. Suzio said during his inconvenient press availability, that theRisk Reduction Earned Credits program could use a bit of fine tuning, a suggestion to which the governor and Commissioner of Department of Prisons Leo Arnone so far have turned a deaf ear; now comes Mr. Lawlor sniping that Mr. Suzio is exploiting a murder purely for political purposes.

Pray, was the prospective provision in the death penalty abolition bill not inserted into that piece of legislation for political reasons? And was the abolition bill favored by Democrats and Malloyalists not created by politicians? And may it not be said of that measure that Democrats in the General Assembly, in the course of passing the bill, made rather extravagant appeals to emotional sentiments to insure passage of the legislation? In ordinary political parlance, we call this politicians being politicians.

Mr. Suzio, quite reasonably, is trying to assemble information that will allow him to improve a program hastily pushed through the legislature. So far, he has been met with prevarications, information supplied to him that is at best ambiguous if not misleading, and charges from Mr. Lawlor that he is exploiting for political purposes the pain caused by a criminal whose record WHILE INCARCERATED IN PRISON suggests that he never should have been given early release credits through the General Assembly’s hastily devised – and apparently non-adjustable– risk laden Risk Reduction Earned Credits program.

In passing the program, the General Assembly blew on a dandelion full of seeds that will take root everywhere in Connecticut, not only in Meriden. When a legislature enacts a bill, it must own the real time consequences of the bill. And the media should be asking: Whose risks are reduced by Governor Malloy’s and Mr. Lawlor’s and the Democratic dominated General Assembly’s Risk Reduction Earned Credits program?

But first, they will have to get past Mr. Lawlor’s political spam.

The Dovovan-Williams Jihad

Speaker of the state House Chris Donovan and President Pro Tem of the state Senate Don Williams have been closeted together discussing two bills: a jobs bill pushed by Governor Dannel Malloy that appears to have bipartisan support in the General Assembly and Mr. Donovan’s signature minimum wage bill.

Mr. Donovan, running for the U.S. Congress in Connecticut’s 5^th District, dearly wants to push his bill raising the minimum wage 50 cents over two years through the General Assembly, and to this end he announced last week that he intended to attach his bill to a budget implementer.

After meeting with Mr. Williams for a little more than an hour, Mr. Donovan appeared to be uncertain which donkey’s rear he would attach his tail to, according to a story in CTNewsJunkie.

Mr. Williams, who can count up to 36 without stumbling, is convinced he lacks the votes in the Senate to pass Mr. Donovan’s minimum wage hike, a point he pressed upon Mr. Donovan sometime before the soon to be retired Speaker conditioned passage of the jobs bill in the House upon the passage in the Senate of his signature legislation. Mr. Donovan declined to present Mr. William’s bill in the House, and both bills expired in the last session.

Mr. Malloy – unlike former Republican governor Jodi Rell, a vigorous political campaigner –could easily  throw his support to former state Representative Elizabeth Esty, the wife of Daniel Esty, the governor’s Commissioner of the Connecticut Department of Energy and Environmental Protection (DEEP).

At the Democratic nominating convention, Mr. Donovan rolled over Mrs. Esty, winning the 5^thDistrict nomination by 64 percent of the vote, marshaling 216 votes to Mrs. Esty’s 66. Both Mrs. Esty and Dan Roberti, who garnered 54 votes, qualified to campaign against Mr. Donovan in a primary. The delegate count likely encouraged Mr. Donovan to continue his efforts in persuading Mr. Williams to bring up the minimum wage bill in the Senate.

The introduction into the Senate of Mr. Donovan’s bill, assuming the numbers argue against it, is a politically charged affair. There are compelling reasons to vote against the bill: Minimum wage hikes artificially increase the price of labor, and the price of labor figures in the calculations of small businesses that tend to hire minimum wage workers. Beyond a certain point, businesses operating on a slender profit margin and forced to pay what may be for them an insupportable wage will accommodate the state ordered hike in wages by cutting back on hiring those affected, mostly young people entering the job market for the first time. Businesses that cannot make the cost saving accommodations will go out of business. In the long run, these compelled choices will not invigorate business activity and job production. Should Mr. Donovan’s minimum wage bill pass, Connecticut’s minimum wage will be the highest in the nation. In the long run, Mr. Donovan’s signature minimum wage bill sends to businesses considering moving into the state and instate businesses considering expanding a message that frustrates current efforts to prime the job pump.

In the short run, minimum wage hikes are campaign boosters, a staple political product of the fevered progressive on the make. In the long run, we are all dead. The long run is for chumps; it’s the short run that gets you elected and re-elected, particularly in a one party state in which left of center Democrats depend upon unions to prime the voting pump. Caught between the proverbial rock and a hard place, Democrats in the General Assembly would rather not commit themselves publically to a vote on the minimum wage bill.

At the moment, Mr. Donovan is focused on attaching his bill to some viable legislative vehicle. Using a budget implementer to ferry his minimum wage hike through the General Assembly, some Democratic legislators think, might jeopardize the more politically attractive bi-partisan jobs bill. Asked by the reporter for CTNewsJunkie whether he thought such a prospect was likely, Mr. Donovan replied, “We’re hoping to make everybody happy. That’s what we’re trying to do.”

Mr. Donovan has already loosed his moorings to the tattered remains of what some benighted traditionalists still insist on calling the Democratic Party’s moderate “vital center.” There is no center, merely epicenters colliding with each other. Mr. Donovan purports to represent the future of state Democratic Party politics, solidly union connected, firmly centered in the state’s cities, unapologetically progressive and rather impatient with the stuffy old guard of the Democratic Party.

The new dawning day needs a new vanguard. Mr. Donovan is prepared to lead. Followers will find the welcome mat put out before the door to utopia.

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.

Malloy s GAAP Falls Through The Gap: Trouble In Paradise

Much fuss was made during the gubernatorial campaign by former Mayor of Stamford Dannel (then Dan) Malloy concerning the adoption of Generally Accepted Accounting Principles (GAAP), the subject of Governor Malloy’s very first Executive Order.

The old way of accounting, which had given rise to budget finagling that allowed governors and legislators less scrupulous than Mr. Malloy to fudge budget figures, was supposed to give way to GAAP, an accounting process that would scrub politics of distasteful gimmickry.

“An implementer bill passed Tuesday by the House,” according to a story in CTNewsJunkie, “postpones the full implementation of GAAP until 2014 and eliminates the $1.5 billion deficit a transition to GAAP would create. But it also promises to spend about $100 million a year over the next 15 years starting in 2014 to pay down the $1.5 billion GAAP deficit and in order to ensure that deficit doesn’t grow it allocates about $75 million in fiscal year 2013 and $50 million in 2014.”

Zach Janowski, an investigative reporter for the Yankee Institute, has reported that if GAAP were operative right now, Mr. Malloy’s projected two year surplus would disappear altogether and be replaced by yet another wearisome deficit.

So, its rather a good thing – from the point of view of politicians less scrupulous than Mr. Malloy, that GAAP has, so to speak, fallen through a legislative gap.

Ben Barns, Mr. Malloy’s budget director, adamantly denies that GAAP is being delayed: “We’re not delaying the implementation of GAAP, we’re beginning to amortize the cumulative unfunded GAAP liability starting in two years. We are moving as quickly as practical to implement GAAP. We’re intending our budget be balanced on a GAAP basis from inception through final audit starting with 2012. So I think the notion that we’re delaying GAAP is completely unfounded. It’s not the case.”

House Minority Leader Lawrence Cafero begs to differ. GAAP was Mr. Malloy’s “cause celeb” in January when he took office; he signed an executive order that said “I’ll try to do my best to implement GAAP”; in February, Mr. Malloy made GAAP a conspicuous part of his budget proposal, vowing that a portion of the surplus would be used to cover the cost of the transition to GAAP, Mr. Cafero said. Following the postponement of the transition until the next biennium, “All we know now,” Mr. Cafero said, “is that we have a governor who says one thing and does another.”

The General Assembly has put forward a 15-year plan to eliminate the accumulated GAAP deficit of $100 million. That reform is bound to collide with a General Assembly that has over the years grown comfortable with a smoke and mirrors budgeting that allows politicians to hide dying bodies under the rug.

And Connecticut itself may be a dying body, according to a report recently issued by the Institute for Truth in Accounting and the Comeback America Initiative.

The fundamental accounting difference between GAAP and Connecticut’s current modified cash accounting (MCA) is that revenue is recorded when earned in GAAP; Connecticut, utilizing MCA records revenue when cash is received.

“What they try to do under this political math,” said Sheila Weinberg, founder and CEO of the Institute for Truth in Accounting, is push any revenues into a current year budget and push any expenses out of it. “It’s just manipulation of the numbers. That’s what got the corporations in trouble. A lot of corporate leaders are sitting in jail just for games like this.”

The number fudging merely obscures but does not settle underlying problems.

“While Connecticut reported total assets of $29.7 billion,” Connecticut Budget Watch reported, “the Institute’s review of the state’s 2010 financial report revealed that there are $44 billion of off-balance sheet retirement obligations. More than $18.7 billion of the State’s assets cannot be easily converted to cash to pay state bills of $74.5 billion as they come due. These assets consist of capital assets, including infrastructure, buildings and land, and assets the use of which is restricted by law or contract. The State does not have the funds needed to pay for $63.5 billion of state obligations.

Each taxpayer’s share of this financial burden equals $49,000.

To put it in simple terms, Connecticut has spent far more than it has collected in tax revenue. As a result, every taxpayer in the state now owes the state $49,000. When state assets are sufficient to pay off the obligations – and not before – the Connecticut’s books will be in balance. In addition, one of the methods the Malloy administration has settled upon to partially redress the imbalance, retroactive tax collections, may be unconstitutional, according to former Comptroller General of the United States David Walker, the founder and CEO of the Comeback America Initiative.

“It is not normal or advisable to have retroactive tax increases,” Walker said. “Retroactive increases have been successfully challenged in court. If such an increase is challenged legally, there will be both budget and accounting implications.”

Mr. Malloy’s spokesman, Juliet Manalan, said, “The Governor is not concerned that the budget will be challenged on Constitutional grounds.”

The state’s asset shortfall and $63.5 billion in state obligations ought to be an issue of greater concern.