Commentary––

Incongruities Are Taking Over

As Connecticut Gets New Budget

By Chris Powell

For all the turmoil, anguish, and delay about the new state budget passed by the General Assembly and sent to Governor Rowland this week, Connecticut might have thought that the most profound reconsideration of government was at issue.

In fact the new budget is just a lot more of the sometimes reckless, sometimes disgraceful, sometimes funny, and sometimes pathetic tinkering, gimmickry, and borrowing Connecticut was promised would end with the enactment of the state income tax in 1991 –– gimmickry, tinkering, and borrowing undertaken precisely to avoid serious review of government operations and policy changes.

The General Assembly and special interests have prattled for months about “budget cuts,” but the legislature has just raised taxes by $250 million per year on top of the $650 million annual increase that was enacted in an emergency in February, and the new budget will increase total spending by an average of more than three percent over each of the next two years. If services important to what leaders of the legislature’ s Democratic majority like to call “the poorest of the poor” will be curtailed here and there, it will be only because the poor again have been sacrificed to the interests of the unpoor –– particularly to increases in compensation for state and municipal employees, the latter necessarily euphemized as “aid to cities and towns.”

Even in what was supposed to be Connecticut’s worst financial crunch in a decade, the state budget remains what it always has been –– far more a balancing of political influences than of true public needs.

Perhaps most disgracefully, the legislature has just told Connecticut’s walking wounded of mentally ill, addicted, and generally unemployable people that they should give up $150 of their $350 monthly state welfare stipend. Since most of this stipend is only signed over to the private social service agencies that house and care for these poor souls, the legislature has just enacted a huge tax increase on charity. Meanwhile the legislature could not muster the courage to do what other state legislatures have been doing: deprive liquor retailers of their undeserved government subsidy, the Sunday closing law, which shields liquor stores from the competition faced by all other retailers.

No, the most sacrifice the legislature could exact from liquor retailers was to extend their closing time one hour, to 9 pm Monday through Saturday, which will recover only a fraction of the tax revenue that is lost by banning Sunday sales.

Making liquor retailers compete on the same terms as other retailers could have raised enough in taxes from new liquor sales to save “the poorest of the poor” from the devastation of their meager stipend. But it seems that the legislature would prefer to see the mentally ill, alcoholic, and addicted freeze to death in the gutter than for political patronage to be withdrawn from the liquor business.

Under the new budget three tiny but vital agencies that keep government honest –– the Ethics Commission, Freedom of Information Commission, and Elections Enforcement Commission –– will lose personnel, the Ethics Commission nearly a quarter of its staff, exactly because the legislature and municipal government resent being held to account. Meanwhile Connecticut’s Ministry of Propaganda, the Permanent Commission on the Status of Women, which provides no services at all, only political correctness, will continue as superfluously as before. (Even the Department of Public Safety has never been given the formal designation “permanent.”)

Motor vehicle licensing fees, traffic fines, and business taxes will rise; the homeowners’ property tax credit against the state income tax will be reduced; the weeklong waiver of the sales tax on back-to-school clothing will be repealed; and state government’s big endowment from the national damage lawsuit against the cigarette manufacturers will be sold for less than 50 cents on the dollar to raise quick money now.

But nursing homes will maintain their exemption from competitive bidding for welfare patients, and the construction unions will keep their lucrative subsidy, the “prevailing wage” law, which forbids state and municipal governments from getting the best price for public construction projects.

Government is a big place, so of course any budget will have its incongruities. But as state government’s purpose becomes primarily to feed itself, regardless of its declining effectiveness, the more the incongruities take over.

Maybe most incongruous this week were the relieved embraces of Democratic and Republican legislators after enough members of the Republican minority agreed to vote for the budget and thereby provide the Democratic majority with enough political cover that the budget could be called bipartisan.

Connecticut’s two-party system thereby became what it usually becomes in the end, a one-party system under which only the government itself is saved and no one is clearly responsible for anything politically, even as the public pays more for less on its own way to joining “the poorest of the poor.”

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