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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Opaque Budget process

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

No Exit

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

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

And last year was not a banner year.

Doing It Right: The Simon Foundation

As we were walking down the line of spotless kennels, each one with a dog in it, Mark Greenberg paused by one of them. In it was tan dog, very lively and exuberant.

Mr. Greenberg offered the dog his hand. The dog immediately calmed down, as if he had been waiting in the dark watches of the night for a familiar presence. Finally satisfied, the dog reverted into his usual mode but, as I thought, with a sprightly bounce in his step. His tail was wagging merrily.

The kennel manager, Lisa Agresti, was beside us. We had just toured the inside of the kennels, all of them shining like new pennies, and even now in the late afternoon, smelling of water, a hint of disinfectant hanging about walls of the Simon Foundation in Bloomfield.

“Would you like some ear protection?” Ms. Agresti offered. “It can get a little loud in here.”

I waved away the suggestion. Half way down the hall of kennels I was beginning to have second thoughts. As soon as the dogs caught a whiff of us, they set up a clamor, the kind of raucous noise one might expect at the foot of a besieged castle. Each dog knew the manager. She paused at several kennels. A story of one kind or another, few of them pleasant, was attached to each of the dogs like a vanishing doom, some of the tales bitten off by the barking.

Now we were outside, in a large grassy courtyard, examining the kennels from a different angle. The front door to the kennels opened to the long hallway we had just traveled; the back door opened to a spacious grassy courtyard. Off in the corner near a wooded area was a fenced in rectangle that looked from a distance like a large enclosed tennis court.

“Do they roam free there?”

“No. None of the dogs is ever off leash. They are always with the handlers.”

Before adoption, all the dogs, each lovingly cared for, are pre-trained. On route, we had passed clean, well lit grooming rooms, a large inside training courtyard where the dogs were socialized and made, as Mr. Greenberg put it, “kid friendly.”

“Where do you get the kids?”

With a wry smile, Mr. Greenberg pointed to his animated son, a curly haired blond lad then frolicking among two dogs he had befriended. Inside the large training-socialization room, was an older dog, a professorial look about him, set apart in a room partitioned with glass, watching the frolic with lofty indifference from a waiting area. Staff was everywhere, grooming, walking the dogs, cleaning, training. Mr. Greenberg bent down to the tan dog.

“This one,” he said, “is now doing very well. He was a particularly bad case when he came to us. He was repeatedly stabbed and came to us full of holes. He looked like someone had been using him as a dart board.”

Thinking a firing squad might be appropriate, I asked Mr. Greenberg, “Do they know who did that?’

He shrugged his shoulders. “You never know.”

Many of the dogs rescued by the Simon Foundation come from pounds. The foundation pulls from Watertown, Bristol, New Haven and Windsor, houses the Hartford and Bloomfield pounds, and is capable of intervening quickly in extraordinary cases. The town of Canton recently asked the foundation for help when upwards of forty dogs, many of them malnourished, were discovered living in substandard conditions. A team was immediately dispatched, the dogs were tagged and veted, and 18 of them are now residing at the foundation. Nearly all pound dogs have an inescapable death sentence hanging over their heads. Pounds generally keep dogs about eight days after they arrive, after which they are euthanized.

At the point at which the dogs arrive, their owners have long since disappeared behind an impenetrable veil. In some cases, they had never accepted ownership of the dog. In other cases, they had been unwillingly forced by circumstances to give the dog up. And, in some cases, the dogs and cats had been abused, bearing upon their bodies the marks of human depravity, the stain of inhumanity, their former masters now collectively referred to as the nameless “they” we invariably use when speaking of incomprehensible cruelty.

Of course, no one at the Simon Foundation – not the kennel manager, not the trainers, not the dog handlers who daily walk the dogs, not the groomers, not Linda Greenberg, who had played no small part in pulling the Simon Foundation from the imaginations of both herself and her husband -- is interested in recriminations.

They are interested in rescuing dogs and cats and placing them in what they call “a forever home.’

President Harry Truman is credited with having said “If you want a friend in Washington, get a dog.” Mark and Linda Greenberg have had over the years hundreds of friends.

As we are chatting in the entrance to the foundation, amid cats prowling behind glass enclosures -- one of which, a sleek, short haired mother, had recently given birth to a litter of four – Mrs. Greenberg dances in, cradling a chocolate lab mix, very frisky, lapping at her face and seeming to attend to her message as she tells Mr. Greenberg excitedly that she had already placed the dog, which had arrived at the Simon Foundation only a day earlier. The foundation has just celebrated its 100th placement since January.

Someone, a satisfied customer who had accepted a dog some months earlier, told her at the time he took home his dog that, if she could find him a young brown dog, he would be interested. The dog, with a little chip of a scar on his forehead, had arrived, she made the call, and his new owner would be coming by within the week.

The future owner of the dog had already been interviewed in one of the rooms in the receiving area of the foundation, a process designed to match the animals with those who adopt them, in the course of which needs are assessed and satisfied before the dog is placed. In the case of the chocolate lab, the process would be hastened. In and out – just like that. It doesn’t happen this way that often.

The story of the Simon Foundation is, in many ways, the story of every business. Businesses usually begin with the perception of a felt need and varying attempts – halting at first, later perfected, after much trial and error – to satisfy the perceived need. Along the way, if the need has been sufficiently answered, the business may be successful; it may make money, or not.

It should be noted that the foundation did not flower from a bitter root of greed. Very few successful businesses do. No one at the Simon Foundation is making a pile of money. A bit like Blanche DuBois in the Tennessee Williams play “A Streetcar Named Desire,” the foundation depends upon the kindness of strangers and gratefully accepts donations. To raise additional funds and defray costs, the foundation offers ancillary services – grooming, the boarding of pets when their owners go on vacation, training programs, and the most nutritious dog and cat food for sale in the area.

Long before the Simon Foundation in its finished form was but a glint in the Greenberg’s eyes, the couple had found Triboro, an abandoned German Shepherd, running along the Triboro Bridge in New York. Yankee the cat was discovered outside Yankee Stadium. Eggy was exploring a garbage can outside a Chinese restaurant when she was rescued by the Greenbergs. Ashley, riddled with bad habits, was adopted after Linda had read an ad in a newspaper. But Ashley’s imperfections were sweetly ingratiating, and later, after generous dollops of love and affection, even Ashley succumbed to the patient care of the Greenbergs.

Both of them kept collecting cast off animals. At some point, the Greenberg’s home became crowded. Surveying the Noah’s Arc of abandoned and rescued animals, one of the two whispered, “We need a bigger house.”

But it was Simon, another German Shepard, that turned the trick. After Simon arrived, the Greenbergs purchased a larger house with a more accommodating back yard. And the little mustard seed grew and grew and grew.

Over the years, the foundation evolved, as these things often do. Mark and Linda had been caring for the animals, posting photos and bios on Petfinder and hand delivering every adopted pet to their newly found homes. Capacity had been a problem from the first. The Greenbergs needed a piece of land to accommodate their vision of a world class rescue facility. The Simon Foundation in Bloomfield now offers to animals that have been abused, abandoned, neglected -- in some cases facing euthanasia -- a sanctuary where they can live out their lives in peace or, as often happens, find a permanent home with caring people whose hearts are larger than houses.

“That tan dog,” I asked on leaving, “does he have a name?”

“Oh yes,” the manager said. “They all must be named to be trained.”

Naming things, from time immemorial, has been a way of owning things; it is the way the heart, even a heart of darkness, embraces the world. We name our children before they are born so we can call them home to our hearts.

“What is the dog’s name?”

“Miracle,” she said, adding, “he probably will not be placed. We’ll take care of him here. This will be his home.”

Perfectly fitting, too: Every home should have a miracle in it.

The Simon Foundation is located at 89 Dudley Town Road in Bloomfield. Adoptions of dogs and cats include a six week training class and a home visit by staff. The foundation strives to place animals in homes that offer the greatest likelihood of success and permanency, and every animal placed is appropriately spayed or neutered and vaccinated. Dogs are trained on site to respond to the usual commands: stay, down, come, leave it, heel and go to bed. Further information is available at The Simon Foundation site or by calling 860-519-1516

McKinney Blames Paid Sick Days For Manufacturing Losses

From WTNH:

Unilever announced Thursday that they will be closing their Clinton plant, leaving nearly 200 people out of work. The plant will be closed by the end of 2012, the company said in a written statement. The move will affect 49 salaried and 135 hourly employees.

"It is regrettable, but not surprising that Connecticut businesses are choosing to move jobs and opportunity to other states. As Unilever clearly stated, Connecticut is simply too expensive. This year, Governor Malloy and legislative Democrats have made it even more expensive to do business in Connecticut by passing the largest tax increase in state history, doubling the corporate tax surcharge, and imposing costly new mandates such as paid sick leave. We need to reverse these trends in order to have any chance at putting Connecticut's unemployed back to work," says Senate Minority Leader, John McKinney in a written statement.

Jon Green, Executive Director at Connecticut Working Families, released the following statement in response to Senator John McKinney's remarks on the closing of the Unilever plant in Clinton, CT:

Senator McKinney’s comments about the closing of the Unilever plant are just plain dishonest. He knows that the paid sick days law does not apply to manufacturers like Unilever.

Senator McKinney's political rhetoric has never created a single job in Connecticut. In his years as one of Connecticut’s most powerful politicians he has watched thousands of jobs leave our state without contributing a single honest and useful idea to remedy this situation. Instead he delights in each new announcement of job losses as an opportunity to score cheap political points.

Jon Green's remarks may be a little over the top, as McKinney was just throwing paid sick days in as to the environment in Connecticut, not specifically blaming it for the loss of jobs. McKinney has a history of blaming paid sick leave for manufacturing job losses, however, even though the law doesn't apply. So Green's being perturbed is understandable.

Also, McKinney attacking Malloy and the Democrats for raising taxes is beyond disingenuous. The huge deficits created during the Rowland/Rell Republican administrations had to be addressed in some way, and the tax increases passed were the least possible.

Playing Job Roulette

How much should a job cost?

When jobs are purchased by the governors of states that over-regulate the so called free market, which becomes less free the more regulations are piled on regulations, using their tax structures to transfer money from tax payers and small businesses to larger more government savvy corporations too big to fail, the cost of a job can be very dear.

President Barack Obama’s stimulus package, a scheme to gather taxes from the voiceless masses and pass them along to favored businesses and union groups, has simulated only the appetite of those in the federal government who consider it their business to soften the sharp edges of problems they themselves have have had a hand in creating.

The inability of the Obama stimulus package to reduce the jobless rate in the United States is the surest indicator that the president’s plan has failed. When number crunchers toted up the amount of stimulus spent per job produced, they arrived at a figure of $278,000. In most places outside the Beltway loony bin, that figure would have suggested an abysmal failure. But Washington moves away from its failures at a snail’s pace.

According to the the White House Council of Economic Advisors’ seventh quarterly report on the impact of the “stimulus,” just under 2.4 million jobs, both private and public, were created at a cost to date of $666 billion, which represents a charge to taxpayers of $278,000 per job created.

Tax Lawyer’s blog puts the cost benefit ratio in perspective: “In other words, the government could simply have cut a $100,000 check to everyone whose employment was allegedly made possible by the ‘stimulus,’ and taxpayers would have come out $427 billion ahead.”

This is not the shape of success. A malingering jobless rate tilting towards 10 percent, two years into an administration that considered 8 percent to be intolerable, cannot be considered a vindication of a stimulus plan that was supposed to return the economy to normalcy.

Here in Connecticut, Governor Dannel Malloy recently announced he had arranged a “performance-based” economic development package worth between “$47 million and $71 million to grow and retain jobs at CIGNA Corp. as the health insurer declared Connecticut its corporate home,” according to a report in CTMirror.

The state, in other words, is going to confer a tax and loan benefit on an insurance company that has promised to move 200 jobs from Philadelphia to Connecticut to comply with a job incentive program that showers benefits on companies that produce a minimum of 200 new jobs in Connecticut. CIGNA came in just under the wire.

"’Our corporate headquarters, effective today, is Bloomfield, Conn.,’ said David Cordani, the chief executive officer of CIGNA, a Fortune 500 company with 30,000 global employees and $21.3 billion in annual revenues.”

CIGNA’s history in Philadelphia dates to 1792. The city of brotherly love is not sweating the loss of 200 jobs, provided it retains 1,100 CIGNA jobs at Liberty Plaza in Center City. CIGNA, it should be noted, is a well established company with a rather large footprint in Connecticut as well.

Mr. Cordani plans to “create at least 200 jobs in the next two years, retain its 3,883 jobs in the state and make a minimum of $100 million in investments in its technology and real-estate infrastructure in return for a package of tax credits, a loan and job-training grants” worth, on the low end of the scale, $47 million.

At $235,000 per new job in tax benefits and loans, the transaction appears to be a good deal for CIGNA, though Commissioner of Economic Development Cathrine Smith, a former top executive of ING, another insurance giant, believes that the deal will in the long run be “revenue positive” for beleaguered Connecticut.

Big Business – Pfizer is a case in point – tends to use such tax breaks and loans as opportunities to perfect their business operations. When the tax breaks and loans run out, they may reconsider their options and occasionally move jobs to more cost effective states. Philadelphia need not morn its loss forever. Times and circumstances change, and large mobile companies, like the mercurial Mercury of mythology, have wings on their ankles.

Iceberg Sighted, Full Speed Ahead

Two reliable economic forecasters, Goldman Sachs and Macroeconomic Advisors, have downgraded their previous economic forecasts, according to The New York Times:

“Two months ago, Goldman Sachs projected that the economy would grow at a 4 percent annual rate in the quarter ending in June. The company now expects the government to report no more than 2 percent growth when data for the second quarter is released in a few weeks.

“Macroeconomic Advisers, a research firm, projected 3.5 percent growth back in April and is now down to just 2.1 percent for this quarter.”

Chief United States economist at Goldman Sachs Jan Hatzius, peering through clouded skies, said he could not rule out yet another recession:

“We’re still a reasonable way off from that,” he said. “But I’m not as confident as I would like to be.”

Connecticut is in the grip of a long hard recession. During the state’s last soft recession, it took about ten years to recover jobs lost, and this was at a time when the federal government was not wading knee deep through a $14 trillion deficit.

To put the matter brutally, Connecticut, first in the nation in per capita debt, cannot rely on an impoverished federal government to throw it a life line should Mr. Hatzius’ shaky confidence abandon him altogether. If the nation does tailspin into a double dip recession, Connecticut cannot and should not expect to be rescued by a morally and economically bankrupt federal regime.

Someone should tell progressives in the General Assembly to prepare for stormy weather. The sun they expect to shine someday will be a long time coming in a state that soon will withdraw about $4 billion from the private economy to finance yet more improvident spending on a busway to nowhere and a costly project in Farmington presumed to rehabilitate – yet again – a UConn Health Center that already has absorbed millions in tax money.

Every dollar drawn in taxes from the private economy is a stimulus dollar lost to private enterprise at a time when the private marketplace in Connecticut is diminishing.

These dollars will be spent by politicians on dubious public works projects that they claim, without blushing, will stimulate the economy. The surplus that solicitous state Democrats have tucked into their as yet unresolved budget package will, as usual, be deposited either in a exhausted “rainy day” fund or flushed into the general fund. Either way, this money will be used, immediately or later, to pay for current expenses. Taking money from the private economy and using it as a so called stimulus is on a par with taking a bucket of water from the deep end of the pool and dumping it into shallow end of the pool; it does not increase the net gallons. And depending upon how the tax money is distributed, the transfer may result in a net loss of revenue.

If investment dollars are spent unwisely in a private economy, the private market punishes poor decisions by driving out of business the business that has made them; and, assuming the business is not propped up by tax dollars, the investors do – and should – lose their shirts. In a public market place fed by tax dollars administered by politicians, tax providers and consumers do not determine the fate of public projects, because there is no nexus that connects the supply of product or service with consumer satisfaction. That is why urban public schools, proven failures, continue merrily along as damaged institutions. That is why the UConn Health Center did not fail when it began to lose tax dollars or, as politicians sometimes put it, “tax investments.”

Once a pipeline is driven by politicians from taxpayer’s wallets to state supported business, their “investments” can only fail when politicians withdraw their support. And, as a general rule, their support depends upon political rather than economic outcomes. Every state financed enterprise, in other words, is fail-proof – provided the business does not lose favor with politicians who are willing to finance it, as usual, with other people’s money. In this kind of a scheme, decision makers are punished by the prospect of non-election, a remote eventuality in a state, like Connecticut, that has been dominated for a decades by a single party.

The remedy for business slowdowns and recessions is to lower the cost of business by reducing taxes and regulation, allow failing enterprises – public or private -- to fail, recover the lost service or product through privatization or increased competition, and depoliticize private markets whenever possible. An approach of this kind will not win politicians many union votes. On the other hand, a plan to save the state that really does save it from drowning in eternal indebtedness would be a vast improvement over Plan A, Plan B or any other silly concoctions the General Assembly may serve up to vex and bedazzle us.

Democratic Caucus To Malloy – Nyet

Plan B, held out to unions then in negotiations with the Malloy administration as a spook on a stick, was a thing of shark’s teeth and vampire fangs.

Senator Edith Prague, almost always friendly to unions, warned the rank and file members who ultimately rejected the plan that brimstone would fall from the sky should Plan A be rejected and, when the plan was rejected, Ms. Prague suffered what can only be described as a political breakdown; she said union members were mad to reject a plan described by a private union leader as an offer to die for. Jonathan Pelto, the voice of unionism in Connecticut’s left leaning press, writhed in indignation and bit his fingernails to the cuticles. The leader of the Democratic caucus in the House, Speaker Chris Donovan, up to this point a declared disinterested observer in the negotiations taking place between the Malloy administration and union leaders, put off plans to announce his candidacy for U.S. Rep. in the 5th District and pledged his services as facilitator in chief in the General Assembly, along with his counterpart in the Senate, President Pro Tem Don Williams.

After the unions defied Governor Dannel Malloy by rejecting Plan A, thought by many commentators in Connecticut to be considerably more benign than the fearsome Plan B, Mr. Malloy’s union unfriendly Plan B was submitted to a union friendly Democratic caucus in the General Assembly, which proceeded to defang it.

The number of layoff threatened by Mr. Malloy were pared back; a threat to fill positions left vacant by layoffs through the privatization of state jobs did not survive the chopping block; a measure to save expenses by reducing the number of sick days accrued by state workers from 15 to 10 per year did not make the cut.

Mr. Williams’ spokesman, Derek Slap, told reporters that Mr. Malloy’s attempt to rein in spending by suspending for two years a provision in the statues that restricts the privatization of state jobs and imposes a formal process before any state service can be contracted out to a private business was hacked out of Mr. Malloy’s revised budget by General Assembly leaders who were concerned that even a temporary suspension of the provision might cause administration officials of the Malloy administration to revert to the felonious behavior that resulted in a jail term for former Governor John Rowland.

The Democratic dominated General Assembly, over vigorous protests made by Republican leaders excluded from budget negotiations, did festoon the governor with extraordinary rescission authority for a limited period. Mr. Malloy may proceed with his layoffs, later to be fine tuned by the legislature. A deal struck at the last moment  between Mr. Malloy and Democratic caucus leaders in the General Assembly allows legislators to reject from July 15 through August 30 any negotiated rescissions made by the governor.

Forbidden by union friendly Democratic leaders in the General Assembly from privatizing the jobs “lost” through layoffs, Mr. Malloy can only refill positions deemed necessary after the bloodletting has occurred by rehiring as consultants state workers he has laid off or by hiring new blood; and once one computes the payouts in pension and benefit costs owed to those laid off plus the somewhat reduced salaries and long term liabilities assumed by the state in the case of new workers, the net costs of the transaction forced upon the Mr. Malloy by leaders of the Democratic caucus in the General Assembly will still be unsupportable.

This happy news, once it sinks into the cranial matter of Ms. Prague and Mr. Pelto, should bring a spring to their step and a bloom to their pale cheeks. Bottom line: Malloy has been snookered by friends of labor in the General Assembly. A little tete a tete with departed former Governor Jodi Rell might have tipped Mr. Malloy off to what was coming round the bend at him at the speed of a new environmentally friendly bus.

It is said that -- somewhat like Lafcadio, the anti-hero of Andre Gide’s novel, “Lafcadio’s Adventures,” who stabbed himself in the thigh with a small knife whenever he did something that contradicted his much prized freedom of choice, so as not to forget the insults he was forced to bear -- Mr. Malloy has a lively memory. If so, the snookerers will have much to fear somewhere down the road; and, if not, they will have lived politically successful lives.

Nancy DiNardo’s History Lesson

"The Democrats,” new Republican Party Chairman Jerry Labriola said after he had been installed by party central, “have created a record like no other I've seen since the enactment of the income tax in 1991. Our job is to highlight the contrasts between the Republican Party, which is the party of the private sector, the party of growth and opportunity, contrasted with the Democratic Party, the party of government unions, oppressive taxation and absolutely no job growth in Connecticut over nearly a generation."

Republicans, Democratic Party Chairwoman Nancy DiNardo responded, were attempting to shift responsibility for the state's fiscal mess: "Let's just ignore the fact that we've had a Republican governor for 20 years. Clearly, the voters of Connecticut are not fooled by the Republican rhetoric. The Republican Party has tried to cater to extreme interest groups and is out of step with the residents of Connecticut.”

Mr. Labriola did not answer that it was refreshing to hear Ms. DiNardo admit – if only indirectly and perhaps for the first time in her long tenure as Democratic Party chairwoman – that Democrats, a majority in the General Assembly for more years than Mr. Labriola could remember, were at all responsible for the current mess. Most non-partisans, both in state and nationally, would agree with the timeworn adage that governors propose while legislatures dispose.

Two Republican governors, beginning with Governor John Rowland’s tenure in 1995, have sent budgets to the General Assembly, which then adjusted the budgets according to their lights and sought approval from the governor, who either vetoed the budgets or signed them. That is the way budgets always have been passed in Connecticut.

Additionally, Ms. DiNardo perhaps misspoke when she said “… we’ve had a Republican governor for 20 years,” a span of time that would include as a “Republican” former Governor Lowell Weicker, the father of the state’s income tax. Mr. Weicker ran for governor as an Independent, governed the state as an Independent, as an Independent installed the state’s income tax, with invaluable help from Democratic legislators, and was not, as he himself pointed out in his auto-biography, “Maverick,” comfortable with his own party, a unease shared by most Republicans.

Mr. Weicker, who discounted in his campaign an income tax as a solution to the state’s debt crisis, defeated the Republican candidate, John Rowland, who garnered 37 percent of the vote to Mr. Weicker’s 40 percent; the Democratic candidate for governor, Bruce Morrison, received 21 percent, which indicates that Mr. Weicker received a large amount of his support from Ms. DiNardo’s party.


But all this is ancient history, and revisionists will always quarrel with the solid facts of history. Governor Dannel Malloy’s election is much more recent. His failed budget proposal is more recent still.

There are no Republican fingerprints on the wholly Democratic budget that recently came to grief after it had been rejected by state union workers. And the Republican Party in Connecticut has never been in the grip of “extreme interest groups.” Indeed, some argue that the old Connecticut GOP, the party that has over the years excited such amiability in left of center Democrats such as Ms. DiNardo and others, did not survive because it simply surrendered its character to Democrats.

Mr. Labriola brushed up against the point when he began to draw distinctions between Republicans and Democrats in his remarks: Democrats are “the party of government unions, oppressive taxation and absolutely no job growth in Connecticut over nearly a generation,” while Republicans are “the party of the private sector, the party of growth and opportunity.”

Those few lines went down Ms. DiNardo’s throat like a porcupine with its quills extended – because they actually mean something. She then did what revolutionary leftists usually do when their revolutionary programs, once put in to play, begin to sink the ship: She accused those bailing out the water of “extremism,” a favorite ploy of New York Senator Charles Schumer, who was caught in what he thought was a private phone call to leading Democrats explaining that he always attempts to cripple the opposition by labeling Republican solutions “extreme.”

Those few lines went down Ms. DiNardo’s throat like a porcupine with its quills extended – because they actually mean something. She then did what revolutionary leftists usually do when their revolutionary programs, once put in to play, begin to sink the ship: She accused those bailing out the water of “extremism,” a favorite ploy of New York Senator Charles Schumer, who was caught in what he thought was a private phone call to leading Democrats explaining that he always attempts to cripple the opposition by labeling Republican solutions “extreme.”

Nationally, Democrats, under the leadership of President Barack Obama and political strategists such as Mr. Schumer, declined to approve their budget, produced by a veto-proof majority in the U.S. Congress. At home in Connecticut, Mr. Malloy’s budget has been shot down in flames by state union workers, not minority Republicans in the General Assembly who were shut out of budget negotiations by Mr. Malloy, Democratic leaders in the General Assembly and union negotiators.

Crippled and stumbling into the long Fourth of July weekend, left of center Democrats, moderate Republicans and Independents in the state picked up their papers on July 1 and were met with the astounding news that the Democratic dominated General Assembly, surrendering its constitutional budget making roll in this the constitution state, had given Mr. Malloy extraordinary rescission powers to bring into balance a budget approved by the legislature weeks before it was torpedoed by state union workers. Mr. Malloy’s most modest savings proposal, a plan to eliminate union longevity payments, was rejected by union bought leaders in the General Assembly such as House Speaker Chris Donovan.

No, said Mr. Donovan, “We’re not going to bring it up here today.”

These extreme measures are not likely to be noted by Ms. DiNardo. Why should “the party of government unions, oppressive taxation and absolutely no job growth in Connecticut over nearly a generation,” seldom rebuffed by voters, be expected to surrender their thus far extreme revolutionary ways?