Having proposed a state budget that severely reduces support for the neediest while putting hundreds of millions of dollars into raises and benefit increases for state and municipal government employees, Governor Malloy seemed to be inviting the General Assembly to raise taxes, relieving him of his campaign pledge not to do so.
But last week he gave interviews seeming to preclude any tax increase and instead emphasized the supposed state constitutional limit on spending, which he suggested is inflexible.
“There’s a spending cap,” the governor told news reporters in his office. “There’s no way around it.”
Chris Powell
Yes, in the last election the Republican minority in the legislature increased enough to make difficult any achieving of the super-majority necessary for a straightforward bypassing of the cap. Yet the cap has always been more illusion than substance and has been evaded many times in many ways over the years, including lately by the governor himself, whose latest budget, after its submission, was discovered to have exceeded the cap because of a miscalculation.
Further, there is always the option of borrowing for current expenses, which long ago was considered immoral but lately has been the Malloy administration’s practice.
Interviewed last week by WTIC-AM1080’s Ray Dunaway, the governor noted that nobody likes the spending cuts he proposed in social services but even the most vocal critics of those cuts fail to specify where the money to restore the funding is to come from. Indeed, while Republican legislative leaders complain that the governor isn’t consulting them about the budget, they have nothing to add. The Republican strategy is only to avoid any responsibility and let the governor stew in the mess he has made of the state’s finances. The Republicans won’t risk blame for identifying better priorities than the governor and Democratic legislators can set while their party is controlled by the government employee unions.
There are not just alternatives but obvious alternatives for the budget, and the governor’s budget director hinted about them a few weeks ago when he noted that more than half the budget is a mater of “fixed costs” because of labor union contracts and benefit entitlement laws.
That is, governors and legislatures legislated those costs outside the ordinary democratic process and could legislate them back inside it.
Among the governor’s boasts lately has been that he has increased funding for state employee retirement benefits. State “aid to local education,” a sacred cow of budgeting, is actually just state aid to unionized teachers and their salaries and benefits. Anyone genuinely concerned about the neglect of Connecticut’s neediest might ask whether raises every year, gold-plated medical insurance, and defined-benefit pensions for state and municipal employees are more important than care of the neediest, especially when most taxpayers have only defined-contribution pension plans if they have any pension plans at all.
But not even Republican legislators dare to ask such questions.
Last week the governor’s great transportation initiative, the bus highway between Hartford and New Britain, began operation with great celebration. But even with fares waived as a promotion, the buses have few passengers and will incur operating losses indefinitely. No one in authority asks how that project is more compelling than care of the mentally disabled, mentally ill, and addicted.
Talking about the budget with the reporters last week, the governor said, “I know how hard it is. I’ve lived through this.'”
Hard? As long as half the budget is a “fixed cost” beyond discussion and government employees are still getting Columbus Day off with pay, nobody is even trying.
Chris Powell is managing editor of the Journal Inquirer in Manchester, Conn.