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The cost of energy in Connecticut is very high, relative to other states. A piece in CTMirror, reprinted in the Hartford Courant, tells us that both Democrats and Republicans want to reduce energy costs.
“Republican state legislators,” according to CTMirror, “are closing in on a strategy leaders say would chop $125 or more yearly off Connecticut residents’ rising electric bills.” The strategy is to use a portion of Connecticut’s swollen budget surplus to pay off costs incurred by the state’s two energy suppliers, Eversource and United Illuminating. Eversource supplies the bulk of energy to Connecticut consumers.
Democrats say the GOP solution is fraudulent and politically convenient in an election year when everyone is suffering from high prices. Neo-progressive Martin Looney, Democrat leader in the Senate, is quoted in the piece: “Republicans have had ‘almost a religious adherence to the guardrails,’ and now, two and a half months before the election, they’re willing to jettison it for something they think will give them a political advantage. They’re basically taking a position of convenience.’”
And Democrat leader in the House Matt Ritter is piping the same tune: “But Ritter noted the Republicans would circumvent the guardrails and pay $300 million to electric companies to save families — by the GOP leaders’ own estimates — about $12 per month. And the speaker said his office believes the actual savings would be closer to half of that amount. ‘It fails the common-sense test,’ Ritter said, adding that he believes Republicans are groping for an issue because their presidential nominee, Donald Trump, is projected to run very poorly again in Connecticut. ‘When you are desperate for an issue, you propose things that don’t make sense.’” The guardrails are a Republican initiated device to cap spending in the state.
It is the ambition of state Democrats, thus far successful, to weave Trump’s name into every political discussion, relevant or not, perhaps to avoid increasingly difficult defenses of Vice President Kamala’s past domestic and foreign policy measures.
The usually perceptive author of the piece, Keith M. Phaneuf, has missed the irony of the objections. Looney, Ritter and many other Democrats in the state’s General Assembly opposed the guardrails, essentially a cap on spending. Forcing the guardrails down their throats was a bit like pouring a pint of castor oil down the collective neo-progressive gullet. The state’s swollen surplus is a measure of the success of spending guardrails and, of course, Democrats, who enjoy an almost veto-proof majority in the General Assembly, have been hard at work ever since transferring the surplus to favored constituencies.
At the very least, we have here a case of the pot calling the kettle black. The real difference between Democrats and Republicans on the issue of the surplus is that Democrats want to use the increasing over-taxation cache to benefit important minority interests, principally state employee unions, while Republicans want to use a portion of the surplus to benefit all energy consumers, a much larger, less differentiated group of voters.
The decisive question is: Why shouldn’t the whole surplus be returned to state taxpayers? A surplus is, after all, an intentional overcharge on state taxpayers. If I buy a loaf of bread from my local grocer and notice I have been overcharged, the proper remedy is to bring the bread and bill back to the store for a refund.
Speaking of bread and bills, this writer has often noted that we may count on the fingers of one hand lofty speeches in Connecticut’s General Assembly protesting the high cost of excessive spending. We know spending waltzes hand in hand with inflation.
Cumulative inflation during the President Joe Biden/Vice President Kamala Harris administration is about 18%. Inflation, a devaluation in the purchasing power of the dollar, is caused wholly by politicians who 1) print money, 2) borrow money excessively, 3) accumulate massive debt, and 4) transfer spending debt to future generations while lying through their teeth to their constituents about the predictable consequences of 1,2,3 and 4.
The cost of inflation is reflected in the high cost of goods and services and can be reduced only through spending retrenchment. It is the business of an alert, informed media to prevent the kind of confusion that drifts like a toxic cloud of unknowing through most stories on inflation and high energy prices.
Public confusion is the most effective instrument in the tool box of autocratic politicians. We know that companies are not tax payers; they are tax collectors. They collect the mounting cost of excessive regulations from their consumers and pass it on in the form of higher prices.
Like love, energy is wonderfully mixed in all our calculations. When you buy a loaf of bread, you are buying the costs incurred by companies – note the plural – that put the bread on the table. Inflation, a hideous tax because it is hidden, is passed along to consumers, as are other taxes and the costs of regulations.
Connecticut state Democrat politicians, committed to a future in which the internal combustion engine shall be a distant memory, have required energy companies to collect the tab for conversion to an all-electric car market. But – in an astounding reversal of past practice – the state has agreed to reimburse energy producers for costs they have imposed on energy producers by passing a portion of the state tax over-charge to politically tormented energy producers. This is not a solution to a problem. It is a new non-solution to a problem that produces new, more confusing problems. Utopian visions are always beset by new problems the cost of which is usually borne by bewildered taxpayers.
