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.

A Primer On Connecticut Politics: Pesci On The Media, The State Of Connecticut, Notable Politicians Past And Present

Q: Before we get to the particulars, the details where the devil lives and breathes, let me ask you some general questions.

A: Sure.

Q: When did you first start writing for newspapers?

A: I remember my first or second column for the Journal Inquirer. I’m not sure of the date. It was a column on Thurman Milner, who was then running as mayor of Hartford. Mr. Milner won the contest and became the first black mayor of a major city in Connecticut.

Q: Do you remember what the column was about?

A: I do. It has long since been consigned to the newspaper morgue at the JI…

Q: Curious that you remember.

A: No one forgets the circumstances involving the birth of their first child. The mayoralty race was well underway when the JI stumbled upon some questionable credentials presented by Mr. Milner. He had flourished a certificate from “Roachdale College.” The paper discovered the certificate was produced as a result of a dormitory scheme. In due course, a story appeared, but no other newspapers were picking up on it. Journalism, as you know, is ten percent thought and ninety percent repetition. I wrote a letter to the JI and received back a note from Chris Powell, the paper’s Managing Editor – also, at the time, the JI’s Editorial Page Editor – asking if the paper could print it as a column. I assented. Mr. Powell requested other columns, and a career of sorts was launched.  Sometime later in 1992, Mr. Powell ran for the state senate on the Republican ticket against a strong incumbent Democrat from Glastonbury. He was disappointed, but not shocked, when he lost the race. Connecticut is as blue as Herman Melville’s inscrutable blue sky. I recall joking with Mr. Powell at the time that he was setting himself up for a painful defeat because he was a journalist, and many people in the state were just itching to hang all the state’s journalists on hooks in Hell. Anyway, not to stray too far from your question, Mr. Powell later left the editorial page because someone else had been hired to take his place on the page  while he was campaigning, and perhaps he was weary wearing too many hats. He had been writing columns in the JI under his own byline since 1969 and distributing to other papers commentaries that were appearing as unsigned editorials in the JI. The new Editorial Page Editor was, I had supposed, not too comfortable with an excess of conservative opinion on his pages, and I lapsed into a hiatus of a few months. Up to that point, I had been writing for the paper for about ten years.  My temporary absence from Op-Ed pages in Connecticut was cut short by Mr. Powell, who suggested that I send future columns to a series of Connecticut papers. He was sending his column to the same papers under his own byline.  And so, here we are.

Q: I notice you chuckled twice so far: first when you said that journalism was ten percent thought and ninety percent repetition, and again when you said editors supposed their papers were non-ideological and non-partisan. What’s so funny?

A: I see I’m not going to be allowed to get away with much here, but it would be pointless to insist on a less inquisitive interlocutor. Repetition of a story lies at the very heart of journalism. Stories unfold, and essentials are always repeated. A big story – Watergate during the Nixon administration may serve as an example – is picked up by a host of papers and the elements of the story are always repeated. I’m not convinced that the tern “non-partisan” is all that useful; a paper that is partisan would not consider itself so. We should recall the birth of modern American newspapers in the post-Civil War period. Many of the leading papers of that day were unabashedly partisan, and quite a few were little more than party organs. You may have noticed that there is a synergy, shall we call it, between newspapers and politicians. One of the reasons Connecticut is called “the land of steady habits” is because its newspapers have been habitually left of center.  As incumbent politicians drift to the left, they carry the media with them; and as the newspapers go, so go remaining politicians as yet untouched by ideological imperatives. I can think of only one newspaper editorial page in the state that might reasonably be styled conservative. That would be the Waterbury Republican American.  Most of the rest are left of center. The preferred term today is “progressive,” though there are some important differences between progressives and liberals. I am speaking here of editorial opinion and perhaps the editorial prerogatives of publishers and editors.

Q: Let me interrupt you. Wouldn’t the editors of most papers in Connecticut insist their papers are moderate?... Another smirk!

A: That defense might have been true in Connecticut a few decades ago. Times change. I would argue that the very standard by which one may calculate the ideological posture of the media in Connecticut has shifted to the left. But it is true: Most reporters, editors and commentators working today might consider themselves moderate. They have said that, and they are wrong. The claim to moderation is a conscience salve. You just rub a little “moderation” on your editorial page and you have proofed yourself against the charge that you are left of center. Most newspapers in Connecticut allow national conservative commentators to ventilate on their Op-Ed pages. This is a painless concession to moderation and “fair-play.” There may be a conservative Op-Ed writer or two ventilating about state politics in Connecticut newspapers; if so, they have not yet disturbed the political universe. Presently [This self-interview was conducted at the end of January, 2014], Connecticut’s gubernatorial office is held by a Democrat who appears often as possible marching energetically in union picket lines. Governor Dannel Malloy has gone to some trouble to identify himself publically as a progressive Democrat. Most of his PR initiatives are readily identifiable as progressive. He is comfortable with the progressive policy prescription of President Barack Obama. All the leadership positions in the General Assembly are held by progressives. The state’s entire U.S. Congressional delegation is Democratic, and Democratic voters in the state, many of whom are not progressive but who reflexively vote the party line, outnumber Republicans by a ratio of two to one. The old Democratic Party apparatus one associates with Tammany Hall is still very strong in Connecticut’s cities. The operative axioms that underlie Mr. Malloy’s first two budgets are progressive, and none more so than the tax increase in his first budget, the largest in Connecticut history, as well as his venture into crony capitalism. Moderate Democrats in the state have long since been consigned to the dustbin of political history. Moderate Republicanism -- as represented by the three “fiscally conservative, socially liberal” past members of the state’s U.S. Congressional delegation -- is a desiccated corpse. The same is true in the Democratic Party. All moderate Democrats have been put out to pasture. A Bill O’Neill or an Ella Grasso today would be moldering on the back benches of Connecticut’s progressive Democratic Party. This is the real universe of decisive political facts that shapes Connecticut politics. The liberal to progressive mass has a strong gravitational pull on the media. If we ask ourselves -- “How did things get this way? Why is Connecticut, for all practical purposes, broke?”  -- it seems to me proper to lay much of the responsibility on the shoulders of Connecticut’s left of center media. A stronger resistance to the progressive, leftward drift might have given us a more moderate configuration, but Connecticut’s media has for the past few decades simply succumbed to the gravitational pull of Democratic and progressive interests. I think it may have been Chesterton, himself a repentant journalist, who pointed out that no great struggle is needed to float downstream; even a dead body eventually reaches that point at which rivers dump effulgent into the ocean. The media in this state has too often cooperated with the ruling regime. The vigorous and healthful antibodies one expects from a media in opposition – the only kind of press that deserves respect -- simply are not in evidence.

Q: That seems a little harsh. Let’s go back to some of the political characters in the state. Connecticut is full of them: former Senator and Governor Lowell Weicker; former U.S. Senator Chris Dodd, now a shill, as you think, for Hollywood; former suit-prone Attorney General Richard Blumenthal, now a U.S. Senator; former U.S. Senator Joe Lieberman; Governor Dannel Malloy, whom you’ve called the most progressive Connecticut governor since Wilber Cross -- a curiosity shop of characters, including Mr. Powell, whom you seems to respect.

A: Mr. Powell is among the best newsmen in Connecticut, and his impatience with nonsense is refreshing. It was Mr. Powell who styled Mr. Weicker a “gasbag” in his review of Mr. Weicker’s fact-based autobiography, “Maverick.” I reprinted the review, with Mr. Powell’s permission, on my blog site, “Connecticut Commentary: Red Notes From  A Blue State." I’ve also interview him several times on the blog.

Q: What makes a good newsman?

A: He must have an intuitive grasp of the nature of a good story and the will to pursue it to the gates of Hell. There’s a little bit of Alexander Pope in every good journalist:

“Am I proud?

Yes, why should I not be,

When even men who do not fear God

Fear me?”

To arrive at Pope’s rather generous estimate of himself should be the ambition of any reporter or journalist who relishes his own independence. And I’m using the word “independence” here to indicate a sharp separation between journalists and politicians. Mr. Powell is fond of quoting Joseph Pulitzer on the point:  A good reporter should have no friends.  And then too, anyone who appreciates Fredrick Bastiat has his foot firmly planted on the right path.

Q: In understanding the drift of Connecticut politics during the last few decades, how important is Mr. Weicker? He’s retired now, but still a bit of a live wire.

A: Yeah. He pops up from time to time, most recently in an Op-Ed piece in the Hartford Courant in which Mr. Weicker advises the Republican Party to become more like Mr. Weicker. The shape and destiny of the Republican Party – very much on the downslide these past few decades – cannot be understood without a careful consideration of Mr. Weicker, the last Jacob Javits Republican in the Northeast.

Q: Javits… there’s a name that is not likely to ring a bell in the memory of people younger than 30.

A: Mr. Weicker is not younger than 30. Mr. Javits, a Republican U.S. Senator from New York who professed a progressive brand of Republicanism, left politics in 1980. Mr. Weicker has identified himself on a few occasions as a “Jacob Javits Republican.” Mr. Powell, in his review of Mr. Weicker’s autobiography, identified Mr. Weicker as a gasbag who used his own party as a campaign foil to assure his re-election in a state dominated by Democrats.

Q: And you?

A: Mr. Powell has the better and more objective view. I think it was Bernard Shaw who pointed out that most autobiographies take liberties with the truth. Mr. Shaw said the most truthful biography of Napoleon would have been one written by his butler. In his own party, Mr. Weicker was the spreading oak in the shade of which nothing vital could grow. He also famously – and accurately -- called himself “the turd in the Republican Party punchbowl.” When he was chased out of the Senate in 1989 by then Connecticut Attorney General Joe Lieberman  -- a “Jacob Javits” Democrat, be it noted -- Mr. Weicker’s home party breathed a huge sigh of relief and began earnestly to attempt to dig itself out of the rubble. Mr. Weicker later ran as an independent for governor of his state and won. He imposed an income tax on Connecticut and then high-tailed it out of town, declining to run for a second term on a ticket of his own invention.  Democrats in Connecticut learned from the Weicker-Lieberman race that any Jacob Javits progressive Democrat could defeat any Jacob Javits progressive Republican, and they’ve been winning office ever since. In the past 16 years, beginning with U.S. Representative Nancy Johnson and ending with U.S. Representative Chris Shays, all the Republicans in Connecticut’s U.S. Congressional delegation have been replaced by progressive Democrats. And in 2004, Republicans surrendered the gubernatorial office to Danell Malloy, who is every bit as progressive as President Barack Obama. The ruination of the Republican Party is Mr. Weicker’s legacy to his state – that and the state income tax. When Mr. Malloy in his first budget imposed upon the people of Connecticut the largest tax increase in state history, Mr. Weicker commiserated. He had been there, done that.

Q: You believe Mr. Lieberman and Mr. Weicker were leading political parallel lives.

A: Sort of. There are astonishing correspondences between the two. Through two bruising races – the Weicker-Lieberman race for the U.S. Senate and the Lieberman- Lamont race for the U.S. Senate – the two senators were pretty aggressive antagonists. It was Mr. Weicker who encouraged Mr. Lamont to challenge Mr. Lieberman. Of the two races, the Weicker-Lieberman contest was the more interesting to me.  Mr. Weicker, during his 18 years in the Senate, had staked out for himself large swaths of political territory that belonged to Democrats. He was friendly with Edward Kennedy and Chris Dodd, whose father, Tom Dodd, he had defeated in 1971 when Dodd the elder was reeling from scandals largely of his own making. David Koskoff wrote a fairly good book about Tom Dodd, “The Senator From Central Casting: The Rise, Fall and Resurrection of Thomas Dodd,” which I reviewed for one of the newspapers. Mr. Weicker’s campaign against Tom Dodd was, he later acknowledged, rougher than it should have been.  I made a record of Weicker’s comments on Tom Dodd when he was invited to appear on a radio show to say some soothing things about U.S. Senator Chris Dodd. He said, “In 1970, I made my first run for the U.S. Senate. It was a unique event in that I was pitted against a Democrat, Joe Duffy (sic), and an Independent, Tom Dodd — a beginning for me but an end to the distinguished career of Sen. Dodd. Though happy to win, I wasn't particularly proud of the tough verbiage I had landed on Dodd.” He also left some knuckle marks on Joe Duffey’s face.  Mr. Duffey was the anti-Vietnam political candidate of the moment. Mr. Weicker, who had called upon President Nixon to campaign in his corner, said Duffey and other protestors like him should be in jail. Later on, during the Watergate period, Mr. Weicker was to change his mind about the war. Mr. Lieberman was familiar with Mr. Weicker’s campaign methods. During the 1989 senatorial campaign, he attacked Mr. Weicker both from the left and the right. Much to Mr. Weicker’s dismay, Mr. Lieberman was indirectly assisted in his campaign by staunch conservatives such as Bill Buckley. The much abused Connecticut GOP, it seemed, was in full scale revolt against the “turd in the Republican Party punchbowl.” Mr. Weicker, at long last, was shown the door by his party. Today, Mr. Weicker says the Connecticut GOP booted him out, presumably for infidelity. But it was Mr. Weicker who had initiated divorce proceeding many years earlier; the final and fatal break was merely formalized with his loss to Mr. Lieberman. No one – not even he, it must be supposed – was surprised. During the Lieberman-Lamont race, Weicker and the Weicker-likers in the Democratic Party teamed up against Mr. Lieberman, but to no avail. Mr. Lieberman slipped the noose. Mr. Weicker and Mr. Lieberman were both liberals. A liberal group, the Americans for Democratic Action, rated Mr. Weicker in 1986 the most liberal Republican in the Senate. His rating was 20 points higher than that of Senator Chris Dodd. The bizarre notion of Mr. Weicker as a centrist was, even then at the apex of his senatorial career, preposterous. It was a fiction promoted by liberals who no doubt appreciated Mr. Weicker’s service in rendering harmless anyone in his party who displayed toxic conservative symptoms.

Q: Mr. Weicker declined to run again as governor. Had he done so, would he have won?

A: No.

Q: But he did say in an interview that ran in Connecticut magazine that he thought he could win.

A: Politicians are people whose whole lives are lived in the intersection of “yes” and “no.” The piece you’re referring to is called “Final Say: Lowell Weicker,” published in 2012. There is no final say with Mr. Weicker. There are no “last words,” and may never be as long as he has breath in him and there are Republican careers yet to destroy. The interviewer asked Mr. Weicker to justify his choice of Barack Obama over Mitt Romney in the presidential election, and Mr. Weicker doubted that a Republican moderate could survive a Republican primary, which is pure fantasy: Mr. Romney was hardly a fire breathing conservative, and he survived the Republican primary. The Republican Party in Mr. Weicker’s own state has never nominated a conservative for high office. Mr. Weicker’s nuisance value has ebbed since he left office. A re-election would have forced an awkward defense of the income tax in a general election. That tax was popular only among progressives in Mr. Weicker’s state. The tax changed the character of Connecticut and opened the flood gates to improvident spending. By the time Mr. Malloy was elected governor, spending in the state had tripled -- and the coffers were empty. Interestingly, the amount of the deficit faced by Mr. Malloy in the post-income tax period was, almost to the dollar, the same as it was when Mr. Weicker inaugurated his income tax. No one from O’Neill to Malloy had seriously addressed the spending side of the budget. A few months after Mr. Malloy was installed as the first Democratic governor since O’Neill had declined to run again as governor, Mr. Weicker lamented, “Where did it all go?” And I replied in a column, “Into the black hole, you ninny.”

Q: Mr. Weicker’s right hand man, Tom D’Amore, died recently and suddenly of a heart attack. His funeral drew quite a few people.

A: Yes, deservedly so. He was a nice man. During the height of the Cold War, a British agent was asked whether he could defend another agent who had gone over to the enemy. He said that if he were ever forced to choose between his country and his friend, he hoped to God he would have the good sense to betray his country, so imperious are the claims of friendship. The same might be said of Mr. D’Amore’s relationship between his friend, Lowell Weicker, and the Connecticut Republican Party. After he had been more or less appointed Republican Party Chairman by then Senator Weicker, Mr. D’Amore assured  the Republicans who had confirmed him as Chairman that he was not interested in presiding over the demise of the Republican Party. But he did -- he and Mr. Weicker. Rebuffed in his senatorial campaign with Mr. Lieberman by the very Republicans he had scorned over the years, Mr. Weicker had a second act as governor, in the course of which he imposed his income tax on the state that had rejected him. Some people at the time suspected that spite of some kind was roiling in Mr. Weicker’s veins. But it is equally likely that Mr. Weicker felt he was tying a knot in his loose legacy by imposing an income tax on the state. Within the space of two succeeding Republican governors, the state budget tripled. After Mr. Malloy had become governor, the first Democratic chief of state in Connecticut since the departure of Mr.O’Neilll, he imposed a massive tax increase to discharge a massive deficit, the result of profligate spending made possible by the Weicker’s income tax. Mr. Weicker was asked to comment on the new Democratic governor’s massive tax increase, the largest in Connecticut’s history, during a function attended by elder statesmen at the Hartford Club. Mr. Weicker heartily commended the governor for his steely courage and said he understood the necessity of tax increases. So, one imagines, did Mr. D’Amore.

Q: Senator Joe Lieberman ran aground on the same rocks, you believe.

A: Not quite, but the political Odysseys of both Mr. Weicker and Mr. Lieberman were eerily similar. Both were senators of long standing: one, Mr. Lieberman, a liberal Democrat whose foreign policy views were shaped by years of opposition to Soviet communism in its various shapes and permutations; and the other, Mr. Weicker, whose politics were shaped by a politically profitable resistance to what one might call Reagan Republicanism. Both took a bridge too far, Mr. Weicker far more often and more exuberantly than Mr. Lieberman.  Both were sensible that they were operating in New England, about which Barry Goldwater said: If you lop off California and New England, you’ve got a pretty good country. Mr. Lieberman endorsed John McCain for president over Democratic nominee Barack Obama, causing Democratic heads back home to explode. Mr. Weicker’s sleights to his party nominees are perhaps too many to mention.  One of U.S. Senator Chris Dodd’s Republican opponents, Republican Party nominee for the U.S. Senate Roger Eddy, popped down to Washington to secure Mr. Weicker’s support and was assured by Mr. Weicker that he could count on him 100 percent. Mr. Eddy returned home whistling “Happy Days Are Here Again,” only to hear, on the eve of the election, Mr. Weicker’s radio endorsements of Mr. Dodd – the revenge of “the turd in the Republican Party punchbowl.” Mr. Weicker was punished for his party lapses when liberal Democrats in his state and Republicans tuned towards Lieberman in his senatorial race. And progressive Democrats in Connecticut attempted similarly to punish Lieberman by flocking to Weicker preferred candidate Ned Lamont in a Democratic primary. Mr. Lamont won the primary but lost the general election to Mr. Lieberman, who by that time had discovered the benefits of party independence. Mr. Lieberman ran as an independent senator and won; Mr. Weicker ran as an independent governor and won.  But that history is not likely to repeat itself.

Q: Why not?

A: It takes a politician full of years in Congress to pull it off, and the present members of Connecticut’s U.S. Congressional delegation are – what shall we say? – light-weights. Both Connecticut U.S. Senators Dick Blumenthal and Chris Murphy are new arrivals. It takes a good long time for a U.S. Senator to grow a beard and, at least in Connecticut, all the long beards have drifted off to greener pastures elsewhere. Mr. Weicker hung himself with an income tax. Mr. Dodd is now lobbying in Hollywood. Mr. Lieberman has attached himself to a prominent law firm as a lobbyist. Before they had kicked the dust of the Senate from their feet, both Mr. Dodd and Mr. Lieberman had vowed, but not on a stack of Bibles, to eschew lobbying. It’s sure a strange world, isn’t it?

Q: But all that is in the past, so much water under the bridge. Can we talk a bit about the present and the future?

A: Yes. But remember, the past exercises a gravitational pull on the present.

Q: How would you describe the correlation of political forces in Connecticut today?

A: There is no enemy to the right in Connecticut, never has been. And in the absence of strenuous opposition, the state has moved very far to the left. Most Democratic politicians, who were alive and kicking in, say, 1990, the last year of the O’Neill administration, would be dismayed at the leftward drift. President Richard Nixon, shortly after he had taken the country entirely off the gold standard, used to say, much to the annoyance of the late Bill Buckley, “We are all Keynesians now.”  Similarly, it might be said by Mr. Malloy, “We are all progressives now.” Mr. O’Neill’s first term saw a rapid increase in spending, owing mostly to the boom period in the 1980s that had produced successive budget surpluses. The surpluses spurred spending, which resulted in a higher budget ceiling. When the boom ended, as all booms must, no serious attempt was made by O’Neill administration Democrats to lower the ceiling through spending cuts. Improvident spending had produced a deficit, which in turn led the way to so called “tax reform.”  The O’Neill deficit opened the door to an income tax. Mr. Weicker waltzed through the opening, and his “tax reform” relieved all state legislators at the time of a mounting pressure to reduce spending. Facing a similar set of circumstances in 2011, Mr. Malloy “pulled a Weicker.” The Malloy tax increase, the largest in Connecticut’s history, raised the spending ceiling. Connecticut is now the highest taxed state in the nation, and as such it is poorly positioned for a quick recovery if  the rising tide mentioned in a memorable speech by President John Kennedy ever does lifts all the boats.  I do say “if” because progressive proposals adopted both in Washington and at home in Connecticut have delayed a national and state-wide recovery. All this is background music, but the correlation of forces in the state, including a compliant, left of center media, is such that these harsh notes reach the ear as bewitching music, a song of sirens.

Q: But the Republican response to what you call the siren song has more or less fallen on deaf ears here in Connecticut. Are Republicans not shouting loudly enough?

A: I think the alternative message promulgated by Democrats, part of the siren song, is more alluring. Theirs is a bread and circus remedy. The Republican message is that wealth, real wealth, is created wholly in the private marketplace by entrepreneurs who are free to create products people want. The free flow of marketable intelligence is curtailed when the government aggressively, unnaturally and unnecessarily directs the flow. Democrats say: Not to worry, there’s nothing we can’t fix; and they proceed to offer a series of fixes, sometimes involving their political cohorts, that worsens matters. Long term solutions imposed from above on a quasi-free market rarely produce beneficial effects. The progressive is a Chanticleer convinced the sun cannot rise in the absence of his crowing.  

Q: These would be the crony capitalists.

A: Yes, progressive crony capitalists. Honore Balzac used to say that behind every great fortune lies a great crime. If he had lived in the 20^th and 21st centuries, he might have amended his apothegm. Nowadays, behind every great fortune lies a politician dispensing favors. And please don’t think that purist Democrats have no blood on their hands. It has been common among Democrats in Connecticut, champions of the proletariat, to launch rhetorical missiles at rich Republicans during campaigns. Republican nominee for the U.S. Senate Linda McMahon’s leaky boat was sunk by commentators who never failed to mention her self-financed $50 million dollar sputtering campaign. That’s fine: All’s fair in love and politics. The victor in the race was Dick Blumenthal, now the 6^th richest Senator in Congress. Mr. Blumenthal’s campaign suffered a bump in the road when he was shown several times in several different venues saying or strongly implying that he had served as a marine in Vietnam. These were bald-faced lies; Mr. Blumenthal said he had misspoken, and the bump was quickly surmounted. U.S. Representatives Rosa DeLauro and Jim Himes are millionaires, both Democrats. Mr. Dodd exchanged his Senate chair for a $2 million a year salary as a Tinsletown hawker, and if Mr. Lieberman has ever suffered proletarian want in the Senate, he is about to be richly rewarded for it. Mr. Weicker, whose grandfather was a successful business man, earned most of his money the easy way. Now that Mrs. McMahon – who ought not to have been elected to the Senate for a fistful of reasons – has been got out of the way, one expects to hear little in the future concerning the corrupting influence of personal wealth. How can you urge that point of view when three of the seven members of Connecticut’s all Democratic U.S. Congressional delegation are millionaires? The real corrupting influence in politics today lies in mutually beneficial  political exchanges between powerful politicians and crony capitalists on the right or left who prosper because of their efforts. These efforts always create disabling distortions in the market place and rarely help the majority of creative wealth producing entrepreneurs unattached to large corporations.

Q: But you can’t fit all that on a bumper sticker.

A: Right. “Raise the minimum wage” fits. It’s a campaign battle flag rather than a useful proposal.  The flag indicates that those in favor of the proposal have chosen to place themselves in the trenches with the poor and dispossessed. How many heads of household in Connecticut make no more than minimum wage? Probably not many. You are not likely to come upon that statistic in your local paper, and why not? It is the very first question that should be put to any politician in the state who is advocating for a boost in the minimum wage. Most minimum wage earners are part time workers in households with an average annual income of $50,000, some of them kids socking away a few bucks to defray the cost of their increasingly expensive college loans. After Governor Malloy gave UConn millions of tax dollars, the university boosted its tuition fees. The minimum wage raises the cost of labor for employers who either will or will not be able to recover sometimes slight profits by increasing the cost of his product or service. That loss may be recovered by reducing the hours of full time employees, laying off workers or reducing the quality of the product or service rendered, unintended consequences none of which are likely to help aspiring college students or, say, a child in poor section of a city who would like to contribute his fair share to the upkeep of his household. The minimum wage in Connecticut is also connected to union salaries by means of contractual escalator clauses; so any increase in the minimum benefits a powerful special interest group in the state that, some say, provided the edge to Mr. Malloy during his second run as governor.

Q: Are people so easily fooled?

A: Some are, enough are. It was Lincoln who said “You can fool some of the people all of the time, and all of the people some of the time; but you can’t fool all the people all the time,” though that would seem to be the ambition of many politicians.

Q: Thanks. It’s been fun. Let’s do it again.

Bonding, The Budget And Corporate Welfare

When Mark Twain said ““Never put off till tomorrow what may be done day after tomorrow just as well," he might easily have been talking about bonding.

Usually a state sells bonds to pay for long term capital projects. But like any political practice, the selling of bonds may be subject to abuse. The use of bonding to pay off current expenses that ought to be discharged through tax increases or spending decreases is considered a “no, no” among agencies that rate state bonding. The practice, however, is a “yes, yes” among politicians who want to avoid either the unpleasant option of raising taxes or the equally unpleasant option of cutting spending. The beauty of bonding for such politicians is that it allows them to escape the wrath of voters who understandably resent tax increases imposed to pay for current budget expenses and improvident spending. The downside to bonding abuse is that current expenses are carried into the future, a benefit for cowardly politicians charged to the future generation on a “buy now pay later” plan.

Bonding puts off until the day after tomorrow payment for obligations that ought to be met today by those responsible for incurring debts.

Bonding for current expenses was one of Mr. Malloy’s bêtes noire when he was running for the governor’s office, and a change from a modified cash basis system to a Generally Accepted Accounting Principles (GAAP) system was the candidate’s answer to budgetary skulduggery that had led to unmanageable budget deficits.

Pointing to the delinquencies of his two Republican predecessors, Mr. Malloy was compelled, he said, to institute the largest tax increase in Connecticut history, second only to the tax increase that followed Governor Lowell Weicker’s income tax. Requiring revenues under GAAP to be counted in the year they are received necessarily created a budget differential of some $1.2 billion. Initially, Mr. Malloy had planned to bridge the gap through budgetary savings. The recovery that Panglossian Democrats in the General Assembly hoped might flood the state’s treasury with sufficient funds to pay down the differential never materialized, and Mr. Malloy now has decided to pay down the $1.2 billion gap through bonding. The funds generated through bonding will be dedicated to this purpose unless, according to one news account, “there’s an emergency,” in which case the money may be used for some other purpose following a three-fifths vote in the Democratic dominated General Assembly. It is not unheard of for governors in Connecticut to declare budget emergencies. 

During the fag end of the last legislative session, the Democratic dominated General Assembly ordered Connecticut State Treasurer Denise Nappier to borrow $750 million to facilitate the conversion to GAAP.  The decision to borrow rather than saving the money to pay down the differential will cost the state more than $200 million in interest over the life of the bonds.

The Malloy bonds naturally “improved” the state’s cash flow and, for the first time in many moons – prior to the elections too -- state Comptroller Kevin Lembo was able to predict a small budget surplus.  Cash flow is improved whenever taxes are increased or bonding is used to generate funds that are not made available in a depressed economy.

No political skullduggery here – just business as usual in a state addicted to chronic spending.

On the Republican side of the political barricades, Mr. Malloy’s decision to pay for the  differential by bonding rather than by the means he had first settled upon – save money in the state’s piggy bank and use it to convert to GAAP – produced  a forceful objection from Republican Party gubernatorial hopeful  John McKinney.

“Appropriating real dollars to reduce the state’s GAAP deficit,” Mr. McKinney said, “would have been an honest and direct way of dealing with the problem, and I would have supported those efforts. But that’s not what the governor is doing. Instead, he is borrowing in order to kick that commitment down the road another two years.”

For Democrats, GAAP has become the equivalent of a budget chastity belt. However, it is never an adjustable belt that assures chastity. A chastened big spender would understand that budget deficits are caused by the disposition to spend. And there is little or no acknowledgement among members of Connecticut’s spending class that spending must be curtailed or that excessive regulation – which always drives up business costs – must be pared back. Everywhere, big spenders await the “rising tide that will lift all the boats,” an expression employed by President John Kennedy in his well-known speech to the Economic Club of New York in 1962, in the course of which Mr. Kennedy said:

 “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. Malloy has instead used what little money he found in Connecticut’s debt ridden budget to advance a destructive crony capitalist program, which involves giving rare tax dollars to companies he bribes for the pleasure of doing business in the state, including profitable mega-companies or smaller companies that use abused taxpayers to finance their moves from one town to another.

Lifting all the boats is not a progressive specialty, and it is doubtful that John Kennedy could be elected dog catcher circa 2014 anywhere in progressive, crony capitalist Connecticut.

Memorial Day 2013

A few weeks ago, my wife Andree and I – and of course her guide dog Titan – visited my nephew who has just relocated from Connecticut to North Carolina. We had decided to make our 20 year pilgrimage to Washington D.C. and spent a full day there before pressing on to see David and his wife Corin.

The very first time I had visited the nation’s capital was on November 24, 1963, two days after President John Kennedy had been assassinated. Four of us in Danbury, where I was attending college, had decided to hitch to Washington to attend the funeral and show our respect to a president we all loved.

The years do roll by. The joke between Andree and I was that we would try NOT to make these trips to Washington a habit, a promise easily kept.

On this occasion, our mission was to visit the war memorials: The Second World War, the Korean  and the Vietnam wars. All three memorials are clustered near the Lincoln Memorial, which honors the president who presided over the Civil War. We have a special affection for that memorial and had visited the studio of Daniel Chester French many years ago. Mr. French used Lincoln life-masks in creating the face and hands of his seated Lincoln. Of the memorials we visited, only this one was familiar to us.

The World War II memorial captured perfectly the vast scope of a war that left so many bloody footprints on the desolate ground of a shattered Europe. The Korean War memorial, life sized soldiers in ponchos walking warily through the greenery, was shockingly real. And the Vietnam memorial, names etched on a black wall caressingly fingered by passers-by, recalled the silence enshrouding sacrifices that can be redeemed only through a hallowed silence.

Across the Potomac lies Arlington, its stones on our visit, when no sign of a cloud marred the inscrutable blue sky, white as bleached bones, pure as the purest unstained thought, awakening “the mystic chords of memory, stretching from every battlefield and patriot grave to every living heart and hearthstone all over this broad land” and swelling “the chorus of the Union…”

The words, of course, are from Lincoln’s First Inaugural Address. No one has ever improved on Lincoln, who knew he was writing for the ages.

We came home chastened. And on this Memorial Day, once again the sheer immensity of the sacrifices of those “who gave the last full measure of their devotion” fills us with a steely resolve that these honored dead “shall not have died in vain - that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom - and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.”

To remember is a prayer.

 

Abortion and Connecticut’s U.S. Congressional Races

One of Linda McMahon’s most insistent critics, Chris Powell of the Journal Inquirer, noted in a post-debate column that Mrs. McMahon’s view on abortion was … ahem … “more nuanced” than that of Chris Murphy.

The views of President Barack Obama on abortion are, if possible, more extreme than those of Mr. Murphy. There are no circumstances in which the president would disallow an abortion. As an Illinois state senator, Mr. Obama had fulsomely supported legislation permitting abortion on demand, which would include the kind of sex selection abortion practiced in China and – this may surprise pro-abortion proponents – abortions condemned by the early church fathers in the late Roman Empire. The paterfamilias of a family in Rome at the time St. Augustine of Hippo was fulminating against the practice held life and death powers over his children, born and unborn. While infanticide was rare, in the Clintonian sense, during the reign of the Caesars, a father could not be punished under Roman law for committing infanticide, most often involving female infants, by exposing the born infant to the elements. Abortions were more common. The president also has opposed the so called “born alive” bill, a measure that would have extended to infants born alive during botched abortions the same legal protections afforded born babies.

It was Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan of New York, no tea partier, who declined to vote in favor of partial birth abortion because he regarded the practice as a form of infanticide.

Polls show a drift of women into the Republican camp. They also show that women’s views on abortion are more moderate than those of Democratic Planned Parenthood pied pipers. A July 2011 Gallup Poll measuring the favorability of restrictions on abortion shows preferences for a law making partial birth abortion illegal during the last six months of a pregnancy (64-31%); a law requiring doctors to inform patients about risks prior to performing abortions (87-11%); a law requiring parental consent for abortion (71-21%); a law requiring a 24 hour waiting period before an abortion is performed (69-28%); and the poll shows a slim majority (50-46%) in favor of a law requiring those seeking abortion to be shown an ultrasound image of the fetus.

Here in true blue Connecticut, as elsewhere in the nation, a long standing accommodation on the question of abortion had in the past tended to prevent unnecessary political abrasion between church and state. Such accommodation necessarily involves a resolve on the part of legislators to find a way to preserve religious rights guaranteed by the First Amendment – “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances” -- while preserving other rights. Any constitutionalist worth his salt knows very well that you cannot extend a constitutional right infinitely in any direction without abridging other rights.

When the resolve on the part of the state to accommodate religious prescriptions is missing, it seems reasonable to impute extremism to the legislator unwilling to make the necessary accommodations. This year, for the first time in its history, the national Democratic Party pushed abortion rights to extreme limits -- at the expense of orthodox Christians who understandably are concerned with the erosion of their first amendment rights to freely exercise their religion according to long accepted religious precepts.

The Obama campaign appears to be operating on the supposition that extremism in the service of the “virtue” of abortion will result in a harvest of votes from women. So far, recent polls show a severe drop-off of votes from women, perhaps because women are conscious of themselves as integrated personalities rather than ovary containers. Mr. Romney has cutthe gender gap from 20 to 9 points. At the same time, Independents seem to be declaring their independence from a party that has more in common with Eugene Debs than Former President JohnKennedy, who sounded in a speech he gave in 1962 to Economic Club of New York very much like a Chicago school economist not unfamiliar with Frederick Hayek’s masterful “The Constitution of Liberty,” a book published in 1960, one year before Mr. Kennedy assumed the presidency.

In Connecticut, Republicans have ceded to Democrats positions on social issues that are not supported by a majority of voters. Who convinced them that elections do not turn on such social issues as abortion, much more prevalent among African Americans than whites, or the integrity of the traditional family unit in urban areas, where fatherhood is a distant memory and young men who have not yet landed in prison search and find an aberrant form of social definition in murderous gangs? Although only 13 percent of American women are black, figures from the Centers for Disease Control show they account for 35 percent of the abortions. What accounts for the massive retreat from so called social issues on the part of Republicans? And why do Republicans running for the U .S. Congress from the Northeast this year sound like larval progressives who cannot wait to march to Washington and protest their party’s positions – except on fiscal issues?

Clinton, The Corpse at the Convention

Former President Bill Clinton’s hour upon the stage at the Democratic National Convention – actually, it was 48 minutes – was mostly a 5,896 word defense of Obamacare. Following his speech, the fact-check vultures at the Washington Post dampened some of his fanciful political rhetoric.

Mr. Clinton is sometimes lovingly remembered by both moderate Democrats and Republicans as a president who was willing to reach across party lines to slay ungovernable deficits. During his first term, Mr. Clinton cut spending and raised taxes on upper income taxpayers. Because the economy of his day had been revved up by traditional methods employed by his predecessors – tax reductions and moderate regulatory reform – Mr. Clinton was able to use additional revenues pouring into the treasury to offset an alarming deficit. The budgets offered by Mr. Clinton and affirmed by the U.S. Congress were in balance – indeed, they contained surpluses -- unlike the current the non-budget offered by President Barack Obama. The last time Congress passed a budget, weighing in at $3.53 trillion, was in 2009. Although Democrats commanded the White House and both houses of Congress following the elevation to the presidency of Mr. Obama, no budget was passed.

Tammy Z And The Real Deal

When I last talked to Tammy Z – her smile can be seen from Pluto – my thought was: Here’s luck for the Republican Party.

Mrs. Zawistowski is a Republican candidate for State Representative in the 61st District, which includes Suffield, East Granby and Windsor, CT.

She is a business owner at a time when business is suffering under the hammer blows of a Democratic assault on free enterprise and a woman who very likely will be able to withstand the laughably absurd charge that the Republican Party is prosecuting a “war against women,” the Dem’s new all-purpose bumper-sticker slogan for Campaign 2012.

Tammy Z -- Republican of the Year in 2011, Small Business Leader of the Year 2011, former Executive Vice President of Northeast Savings in Hartford, former Assistant Director of the UConn Center for Real Estate and Economic Studies, the Vice Chair of East Granby Board of Finance – presently is the owner of Resource Books, LLC.

Beyond all this, Tammy Z, who has made her own way in the world, has lived her eventful life with her eyes opened.

A large part of the campaign strategy employed by incumbent Democrats this year will be to refocus public attention from Connecticut’s continuing economic downslide – and, more importantly, the destructive prescriptions offered by incumbents to solve such problems as entrepreneurial flight from Connecticut’s punishing high taxes and burdensome regulations – to sexy campaign formulas scripted by National Democrats in Washington DC, the same crew of Chicago politicians  who have not been able to produce a balanced budget in three years. Hence “the Republican war on women.”

Both Connecticut’s governor and most cob-webbed covered Democratic incumbents in the state – too few of whom are women – have signed on to the same script. The real operative slogans of the current Democratic Party in Connecticut are: 1) “There is no enemy to the left,” one of the reasons the party has drifted so far from its roots; and 2) “Permanent tax increases, temporary cost savings.”

That is what the state’s first Democratic governor in more than 20 years and the state’s Democratic dominated General Assembly have and will continue to deliver: a steady policy drift leftward, higher taxes, and temporary cost savings.

Tammy Z knows that, despite the too ardent Democratic Party claims to the contrary, women already are IN THE BOAT to which President John Kennedy made reference when he said “A rising tide lifts all the boats,” thereafter cutting taxes and simplifying regulations to spur a stalled economy.

When the tide rises, women prosper as well as men. When the tide is in recession, they suffer the same deprivations – which fall most heavily on those who are struggling to make their way in a world full of false promises and solutions that drive real progress backwards.

Such women, she told me, will no longer be satisfied with political slogans, the equivalent of romantic sweet talk. Their eyes are open. They want the Real Deal.

Tammy Z’s campaign site is here.

Her Facebook page is here.

Campaign Hooey

During the Abe Lincoln canvass, candidates for the presidency were much interested in bonding emotionally with the working class.

They were even more interested in displaying their military badges and ribbons. At one point, Lincoln became so put-off by the imposture that he openly ridiculed, as only Lincoln could do, the grand military hustle of the Democrats. Lincoln’s own military service in the Black Hawk War, three enlistments of about 30 days each, was refreshingly free of heroism. Following the hostilities, Lincoln’s horse was stolen. He and his companion, George Harrison, were compelled to walk and canoe back to New Salem.

Lincoln, of course, was born in a log cabin, though he managed to ease his way into a comfortable middle class berth as a fairly prosperous lawyer.

George Washington -- net worth: $525 million, a cool, half billion in in today’s mostly worthless currency – rates as America’s most wealthy president. Next in line is President Thomas Jefferson, net worth $212 million; followed by Teddy Roosevelt, net worth $125 million; followed by Andy Jackson, the father of the Modern Democratic Party, at a net worth of $119 million; followed by James Madison, net worth $101 million; followed by Lyndon Johnson, net worth $98 million; followed by Herbert Hoover, net worth $75 million; followed by Franklin Delano Roosevelt, net worth $60 million; followed by Bill Clinton, net worth $38 million; with John Kennedy bringing up the rear as the 10^th most wealthy U.S. President. Mr. Kennedy did not inherit his daddy’s wealth; most of his income and property came to him through a family trust shared with his siblings. Among the top ten wealthiest Presidents, there are but two Republicans in the bunch, and none of this great wealth, much of it held by Democrats who married well, was a bar to the presidency.

If the Father of the Country ever felt the need to put himself forward to electors as a chip off the old middle class block, he manfully resisted the temptation. Jefferson thought of himself as an enlightenment aristocrat; ditto Madison, the father of the U.S. Constitution. FRD’s wealth came to him through marriage and inheritance, and when he ran into difficulties with creditors, his mommy bailed him out. For the notable Democratic presidents listed above, great wealth was no bar to public service.

Here in Connecticut, the state’s all Democratic congressional delegation is studded with multimillionaires. Like Franklin Roosevelt and John Kennedy, U.S. Senator Dick Blumenthal married well; his wife’s father owns the Empire State building in New York, among other properties. Though U.S. Rep. Rosa DeLauro often points to her humble roots, she also is a multi-millionaire, and U.S. Representative Jim Himes made his millions on Wall Street not Main Street.

Military service remains for some politicians a springboard into politics. When Mr. Blumenthal sought to inflate his military record during his many campaigns as attorney general, he backed into a truth grinder, and it was discovered that, unlike the more modest Lincoln, Mr. Blumenthal had forseveral years been stealing valor from servicemen who had fought in Vietnam.

His opponent in the race for the U.S. Senate, Linda McMahon, financed her previous campaign from her private fortune. Mrs. McMahon’s great wealth did not come to her through marriage. She and her husband, both bankrupted at one point, earned their riches though enterprise and hustle. And though she never claimed to have been born in a log cabin, Mrs. McMahon’s hardscrabble trajectory does not resemble that of the one percenters who ascended to the presidency. Of course, the differences between Mrs. McMahon and Mr. Lincoln are too apparent not to have been noticed by Connecticut’s vigilant media: One was the CEO of a wrestling empire and the other was a politically astute lawyer from Sangamon County in Illinois well known in the frontier towns for his wrestling prowess.

Claims of modest birth still play well on the stump, even among millionaires operating outside the shadow of the largely mythical log cabin. A military record helps. The anti-authoritarianism lying at the center of libertarianism still tugs at the heart strings, as does an American as apple pie anti-clericalism, which lies at the center of the war on Catholicism being waged by Planned Parenthood and Connecticut’s Democratic congressional delegation, 100 percent of whom have received from the abortion provider a rating of 100 percent on votes important to Planned Parenthood’s money prospects.

Most political claims are gilded hooey, sometimes honeyed hooey, but always entertaining. It’s best during national and state campaigns to take the advice of Mark Twain and swallow the campaign braggadocio with “a ton of salt,” and then, when slipping into the slough of despond, reach for Henry Mencken: “A national political campaign is better than the best circus ever heard of, with a mass baptism and a couple of hangings thrown in… A newspaper is a device for making the ignorant more ignorant and the crazy crazier.”

Sex And The Secret Service

For a righteous man falls seven times, and rises again,

But the wicked stumble in time of calamity.

Do not rejoice when your enemy falls,

And do not let your heart be glad when he stumbles – Proverbs 24

Let’s face it, America – or at least that part of the country enmeshed in the news-entertainment business – loves to condemn a sex scandal.

Politically, sex scandals are an chancy business. Republicans, for obvious reasons, would prefer their party to remain free of the taint of scandal, and Democrats would wish the same. Of course, when the sexually wicked stumble, partisans in either party, oblivious to Proverbs, rejoice when their enemy falls. For all the talk about sexual liberation, we lag moral miles behind Europe – especially France which, in matters involving sex between consenting politicians, pursues a laissez faire policy. But like the gentle rain that falleth on the just and the unjust, any political party can be stricken by sexual scandal.

A scandal that in some sense involves a president is the most troubling. It was not until well after the manufactured fantasy of John Kennedy’s Camelot ran aground on the rocks of reality that people began to realize the extent of the president’s sexual athleticism – even though he had a really, really bad back. At one point, the young and charismatic president had become involved with a lady, a potential Morgan Le Fay of Camelot, who had been connected to Chicago mafia boss Sam  Giancana. In the course of Mr. Kennedy’s three year extramarital affair with Judith Exner, Mr. Kennedy’s bed partner was used to pass on to Mr.  Giancana classified CIA plans for the assassination of Fidel Castro. An ensuing Bay of Pigs invasion involving Mafia assistance proved to be a spectacular failure.

Democrats this year are waging a rhetorical war on Republicans who they insist are waging a war on women; yet in the recent past, it is Democratic presidents rather than their Republican counterparts on the other side of the political aisle who have tended to use women as their sexual footstools. Somehow, one cannot imagine President Richard (Nietzsche) Nixon, whose political ethics certainly were pragmatic, or other Republican presidents such as Gerald Ford or the Bushes, père et fils, or Ronny Reagan … you know… fooling around in the White House.

Back in the good old boy days, when the media thought it improper to comment on the sexual exploits of presidents, the chief business of the Secret Service was to protect the president from bullets and what used to be called in the administration of President Bill Clinton“bimbo eruptions.” Until a stained blue dress hit the public fan in the midst of an impeachment hearing, Mr. Clinton vehemently insisted that his relationships with his several Morgan Le Fays were strictly platonic or the result of the fevered imaginations of his sexual targets.

The role played by Senator Joe Lieberman in the Monica Lewinsky affair is generally forgotten by all but an appreciative Mr. Clinton. It was Mr. Lieberman, by roundly condemning Mr. Clinton in the accents of an appalled Cotton Mather, who saved Mr. Clinton’s presidential hide.

In the wake of the Secret Service scandal involving agents whose principle business it is to protect the president from bullets and bimbo eruptions, Mr. Lieberman once again helpfully has stepped forward. The president himself, it must be said, so far is free of taint; the funny business between agents and Colombian prostitutes occurred well before Mr. Obama arrived in Columbia to spread cheer among Latin Americans. Still, congressional committees are on the prowl. Questions have been raised; in particular, did the White House advance team know about the hanky-panky with legal prostitutes some of whom may have been… well, younger than past Democratic presidential consorts?

The investigation of the secret service has now uncovered a twelfth agent who, significantly, was not staying at Hotel Caribe in Cartagena, where eleven other Secret Service personnel stayed, but at the Hilton, the president’s hotel in Cartagena.

Said Mr. Lieberman, "The Hilton is significant because that's where President Obama was going to stay. Now we don't know at this point that what the twelfth agent is being charged with and why he's been put administrative leave. It just gets more troubling. To act as these people did in Cartagena as if they were college kids on spring break, it is reprehensible."

While adamantly refusing to supply details of an internal investigation, White House Press Secretary Jay Carney has announced that White House legal counsel has concluded no White House staff engaged in any "misconduct" in Cartagena.

Here is Mr. Lieberman hashing the matter over with Bob Schieffer, the host of CBS’s widely watched "Face the Nation" Sunday broadcast:

When Mr. Schieffer asked Mr. Lieberman whether the White House Office of Advance staff might be involved in the scandal, Mr. Lieberman that he had no indication of such involvement but suggested that the office “ought to be launching their own internal review of all white house personnel, advance teams and the rest, who were in Cartagena."

It’s better in these matters not to be blindsided by the unknown.

Courant On Tax Relief

The canned response to any attempt to lower taxes in Connecticut goes something like this: In the grand scheme of things, savings from the proposed tax reduction will be insignificant. And the computed savings, in any case, will deplete money made available to the state that is used for noble and necessary purposes such as, not to be too bitterly sardonic, miss-educating urban school children for several decades.

Thus does the Hartford Courant vociferously object in an editorial to a decision made by Democrats in Connecticut’s General Assembly to cap the state’s gross receipt tax on gas for one year only.

The title of the paper’s March 24 editorial is “Gas Tax Cap Is Showboating.” Apparently, political showboating in the future is to be frowned upon by editorial editors and writers at the Courant.

A few days before the editorial appeared, Democrats in the General Assembly had devised a TEMPORARY ONE YEAR ONLY cap on the state’s gross receipts tax, a charge placed by the General Assembly on gas upon its arrival in the port of New Haven. The aptly named “gross receipt tax,” in addition to the excise tax on gas at the pump, increases the dollar price of a gallon of gas in Connecticut by about 50 cents, 25 cents for the gross receipt tax and 25 cents for the excise tax at the pump – the highest gas tax in the nation

Connecticut is one of the few states that charge a gross receipt tax, initially levied to pay for upkeep on the state’s transportation infrastructure. Over the years, as so often happens with “dedicated” funds in the tax and spend state, the gross receipts tax revenue stream was partly diverted into the General Fund. The Courant notes in its editorial that last year only half of the $334.5 million generated by the receipts tax, about $165.3, tricked down from the taxing authority into the state’s transportation fund, although the Federal Highway Administration last year ranked 75 percent of Connecticut’s road in “less than good” repair. The state adds its 7.53% Gross Receipts Tax to each wholesale gasoline sale.

The gross receipts tax is especially pernicious because the tax rises automatically with increases in the price of gas and is, unlike the excise tax shown at the pump, hidden from the consumers’ view, an ideal tax for politicians wary of voter’s disapproval at a time when citizens in the state already have been harshly punished by the largest General Assembly sanctioned tax increase in state history.

The super-tax increase, larger even than the massive increase in taxes and consequent spending following the Courant supported Lowell Weicker income tax in 1991, was levied by the first Democratic governor in more than 20 years on sales and service transactions that conscientious editorial writers at the paper doubtless consider, viewing each separately, far more insignificant than the “cost” to state government incurred by a temporary cap on the gross receipts tax. A partial list of new taxes imposed by Mr. Malloy, with the concurrence of the Democratic dominated General Assembly, may be found at the Connecticut Commentary site.

The Courant in its editorial does not oppose the temporary tax relief that would follow upon passage of the Democratic bill because the bill itself, which caps the tax only for one year, is a preposterous fraud.

Pushed over the edge by Len Suzio, a populist Republican who has called for the elimination of the gross receipts tax, Democrats in the General Assembly up for re-election produced a bill that would cap the tax temporarily, a measure designed to fool all of the people some of the time, just long enough to secure the elections of Democratic legislators who favor permanent tax increases and temporary tax relief.

No, the Courant objects, here and always, to ANY tax relief – permanent or temporary – a shameless and reckless position when the ever-rising tide of spending in Connecticut is fatally lowering the level of business activity that former President John Kennedy once said would lift all the boats. The demand-siders on the editorial board of the paper further insist that only a reduction in demand – and not an increase in supply – can reduce the price of gas at the pump, a notion that any economist worth his salt would consider juvenile and anti-historical.

There is not a single economist, living or dead, who does not believe that the price of a product can be lowered by an increase in its supply. When President John Kennedy said that a rising would lift all the boats – a, phrase borrowed by his speechwriter from the regional New England Council chamber of commerce – the president was announcing his intention to spur business activity by reducing tax rates. This is what Mr. Kennedy said:

“It is increasingly clear that no matter what party is in power, so long as our national security needs keep rising, an economy hampered by restrictive tax rates will never produce enough revenues to balance our budget just as it will never produce enough jobs or enough profits… In short, it is a paradoxical truth that tax rates are too high today and tax revenues are too low and the soundest way to raise the revenues in the long run is to cut the rates now."

When thought itself has been replaced by the seeming irresistible urge of left of center environmental purists at Connecticut’s only state-wide newspaper to array one’s unexamined prejudices in print, legislative policy – disastrously – will follow suit.