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COMMENTARY: Rowland Gets A Campaign Budget And Democrats' Share Of Credit

By Chris Powell

Governor Rowland is taking into the gubernatorial campaign a state budget that

makes taxpayers and special interests alike more or less happy and leaves his

Democratic opposition no big issues except the old structural ones that few

people in office from either party have ever wanted to address.

The central dynamic of the second-year session of the General Assembly was

that, despite what is supposed to be biennial budgeting. Everybody -- starting

with the governor -- had to rewrite the budget to get their hands on state

government's burgeoning surplus, the product of prosperity's return to

Connecticut and the extra taxes being paid on stock market profits and rising

personal income.

His opponents will resent Rowland's luck in presiding at such a time, but it

is a little more than luck as well. For there would be precious little surplus

even now if Rowland's opponents had been entirely in charge of the budget for

the previous three years. While even Rowland left some big holes in his

previous budgets and gambled that there would be a surplus, there would have

been far less restraint on spending without him. State spending is still

growing, but under Connecticut's first Republican governor in a quarter

century, it is growing at the lowest rate in that time.

So some of the surplus will be spent in the name of education. Some will

finance tax cuts, including a substantial cut in the gasoline tax. Some will

repay state debt, and some will be held in reserve. And in what the governor

made the legislative session's big issue, some will be refunded directly to

taxpayers in rebate checks in July.

Of course the rebate is an election-year gimmick. Many Democrats and even some

Republicans noted that as a strictly financial proposition, it would have been

far better to use the rebate money to repay still more debt, since the state

debt, having surpassed $13 billion, $2 billion more than the annual budget

itself, remains the highest state debt per-capita in the country. In the face

of that debt, the surplus really isn't much of a surplus at all but more like

one year's payment on a home mortgage that still has 50 years to go, a term

far beyond the debt's usefulness to those who are living in the home. It is a

debt that will have to be repaid by people who did not benefit by it.

But if the governor hadn't insisted on the rebate and, just as important, on

cutting the gas tax substantially, the money involved there never would have

been applied to the debt anyway. No, it would have been spent -- under the

control of the Democratic majority in the legislature, but with few Republican

legislators objecting much.

Only Rowland's insistence on the rebate and cutting the gas tax gave the

Democrats an appetite for fiscal responsibility. The Democrats have been

unable to withstand the political momentum the governor has generated for tax

cuts and spending restraint. So rather than advocate even more spending than

the generous increases the governor already was proposing this year to make

the election campaign go easier, or let Rowland win popularity for more tax

cuts, the Democrats took a liking to debt reduction. It was a way of disposing

of the surplus with the minimum political credit to the governor.

The Democrats' advocacy of debt reduction was doubly ironic -- first because

that highest per-capita debt is the doing of Democratic governors and

legislatures over the last three decades. But it was ironic as well because

many Democrats preached debt reduction this session not so much because they

want fiscal restraint as because they want to avoid it. That is, many

Democrats fear that the tax cuts being legislated amid budget surpluses will

pressure the government into controlling spending when the economy declines

again and the surpluses disappear.

The fear of a time when spending might have to be controlled induced the

Democrats to accept the rebate in principle, since it was not a permanent tax

cut but was good for only one year.

Since Rowland himself proposed plenty of spending increases at the start of

this legislative session, the Democratic contribution on the budget was mainly

to make the tax rebate more progressive, to apply it to more people of lesser

incomes who don't pay much in state income tax but who still pay property,

sales, and gas taxes. If there had to be a rebate, this indeed was a fairer

way of doing it. But since most Democrats went along with the rebate only

under duress and are on record as saying that it's a bad idea, they may leave

Rowland free to take their share of the credit as well as his. He surely will.

Meanwhile there was no coordination of positions between the Democratic

majority in the legislature and the party's candidate for governor, US Rep

Barbara B. Kennelly, even though House Speaker Thomas D. Ritter is co-chairman

of Kennelly's campaign. Whether this is a matter of Kennelly's unfamiliarity

with state issues or the Democratic legislative leadership's lack of interest

in Kennelly, the result is the same: the party's loss of a major opportunity

to present its alternative to the public, if indeed the party has one.

With the legislative session out of the way, his agenda largely enacted, and

little criticism of it to be heard, the election is more than ever Rowland's

to lose. The biggest political threats to him now are smugness and scandal.

But state government is a big place, and scandal always can explode at any

time.

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