Commentary ––

The Unmentionable Elephant In The Room

By Chris Powell

Governor Rowland can make up for the New England Patriots, Adriaen’s Landing, the Connecticut Resources Recovery Authority, his last campaign’s Republican ticket running mates, and even his golf game if he does just one thing before the November election: veto any tax increases passed by the Democratic majority in the General Assembly to fill the growing state budget deficit.

Holding the line on taxes is good politics. After all, as Mr Rowland has been noting, it’s not as if doing so would require slashing away at vital public services. No, state spending still could increase by two percent or so. But more important, holding the line on taxes is good government. For it is the only leverage the public has against an increasingly rapacious bureaucracy and a complacent legislature indifferent to getting value for the public’s money.

A definitive article in the July issue of Connecticut magazine about public employee compensation is titled “The Elephant in the Room” to signify the inability of Connecticut’s political leaders even to mention the personnel accounts that add up to a third of the state budget. But if the line is held on taxes, pressure on the budget might build so much that there would be a chance of a reviewing those accounts and others that could use it, as well as laws and policies that forbid ordinary efficiencies in government.

Nothing could be more valuable than showing the people of Connecticut why the obvious and humane solution to hard times –– avoiding unnecessary spending increases and cutting back on excesses –– can’t be implemented. And what would be more wonderful than hearing someone in authority wonder aloud whether care for the mentally ill and retarded should be reduced so that state employees don’t have to be asked to give up a few of the many paid holidays they get that few workers in private enterprise get, like Columbus Day, Martin Luther King, Jr, Day, Washington’s Birthday, Lincoln’s Birthday, and Veterans’ Day?

The arrogance of the state employee unions and their agents in the Democratic legislative leadership is breathtaking. Rather than consider a few painless efficiencies, they have seized on a scapegoat: 6,000 or so millionaires. Millionaires, the unions and the Democratic leaders say, should pay more in state income taxes, right now, retroactively, for the tax year already begun.

“The idea of a giveback by workers and middle-class people to protect millionaires who aren’t even paying their fair share makes no sense at all,” says Daniel Livingston, chief negotiator for the State Employees Bargaining Coalition.

Senate Democratic President Pro Tem Kevin B. Sullivan and House Speaker Moira K. Lyons agree that the income of millionaires is simply for state government to dispose of as necessary at any time. At a press conference the other day, they said the state should take more from millionaires and give it directly to state employees.

Never mind that the fairness of state income-tax rates in general was never an issue with the state employee unions and their agents in the legislature until the government’s ability to keep raising spending by five percent or more each year was suddenly impaired.

No, the desperate policy here is simply to find a minority more despised than state employees and to expropriate it.

Of course until now Mr Rowland has been of no help in starting a discussion about the hungry elephant in the room. He has happily presided over most of the near-doubling of state spending in the last decade and has left the state bureaucracy pretty much to itself. But circumstances have delivered to him the opportunity for historic leadership, the opportunity to pose a question of sweet reason: Why can’t government make do for one more year with what it got this year?

The irrationally negative answers to that question, from whining to outrage, will display more greed than can be found among those awful millionaires.

(Chris Powell is managing editor of the Journal Inquirer in Manchester.)