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The headline in the Hartford Courant – “Lamont confronts spending cap” -- was slightly and unintentionally misleading. Actually, Lamont is, and has been for his whole term in office, confronting Democrat gatekeepers in the General Assembly, two of whom, President Pro Tempore of the State Senate Martin Looney and Majority Leader Bob Duff, are arch progressives. House leader Matt Ritter is more cautious than Looney, whose largely urban district has been in Democrat hands for decades.
Perhaps operating under the false pretenses of British economist John Maynard Keynes who famously suggested that states needn’t worry overmuch about their national debt because “It is a debt we owe to ourselves,” Connecticut’s debt lovers have been in the business for decades of boosting the state’s accumulative deficit. Under the direction of dominant state Democrats, Connecticut has managed to compile a gargantuan state debt of close to $80 billion.
In a September 29, 2021 Yankee Institute report, Marc Fitch told us, “According to Truth in Accounting’s annual Financial State of the States 2021 report, Connecticut’s overall debt increased in 2020, leaving each taxpayer with an overall state debt burden of $62,500 per taxpayer. The average debt burden across the country was $9,300 which, as the report notes, is $2,000 worse than last year… Using the latest Comprehensive Annual Financial Report, Truth in Accounting found Connecticut’s total debt related to retirement costs, bonding and other debt totaled $79.5 billion. Connecticut’s ranking in the report dropped from 48th in 2020 to 50th in 2021.”
Fitch’s figures pointed to a multi-decade upward increase in spending and a downward decrease in debt payment.
Looney in particular has rarely supported spending cuts, perhaps the most efficient way to reduce mounting expenditures. Any talk on the Democrats part of reducing expenditures by cutting state unionized personnel is verboten.
The spending guardrails
When, a short time ago, the General Assembly, with the assistance of minority Republicans, enacted so called “spending guardrails,” the state’s borrowing costs significantly improved because reliable national and international rating agencies valued upwards Connecticut’s economic status. Connecticut’s business climate began shimmering, a signal to surrounding spendthrift states to send to “the land of steady habits” productive profit enhancing businesses seeking to escape the claws of ravenous tax hungry neo-progressive politicians.
Connecticut’s promising state surplus swelled significantly – such things happen when responsible adults facing repeating debt gird their loins and reduce spending. The swelling surplus has now caught the eyes of chronic spenders in our Democrat dominated General Assembly. To neo-progressives such as Looney and Duff, any state surplus is an irresistible temptation to increase spending, and net spending, once increased, rarely is reduced.
So then where are we as a state right now?
We have a governor in Ned Lamont who presents himself as a moderate or “fiscal conservative” in economic matters and a cutting edge neo-progressive on social issues.
For decades after so called “economic pragmatist” Lowell Weicker graced Connecticut with a state income tax, succeeding governors and spendthrift members of the state’s General Assembly did not dedicate a single dollar to the payment of a mounting state debt. The first serious attempt to control spending – and therefore debt -- was taken when Republicans captured one house of the General Assembly. Bowing to a short-lived change in Democrat political dominance, the General Assembly enacted spending guardrails, and the guardrails produced a continuing surplus.
The word “surplus” is here used advisedly – with a sardonic twist. If the state’s entire surplus had been used to discharge the state’s accumulated deficit, Connecticut would still be in arrears for non-payment of outstanding debt. If the assets of all the state’s millionaires were to be expropriated by tax-hungry neo-progressive Democrats in the state legislature and the millionaires themselves were to be lodged in gulags in, say, toney Greenwich Connecticut, thereby reducing their future depredations, state debt would continue to increase in the absence of permanent spending cuts enacted by a General Assembly of responsible adults.
There is one and only one way to discharge Connecticut’s debt, and that is by paying off the debt, rather than by striking a “fiscally conservative” pose and continuing to spend highly inflated money on tax chomping groups that support the re-election efforts of spendthrift Democrats.
Among Connecticut’s productive tax paying citizens, only a few dunderheads were surprised when Looney and Duff proposed that the spending guardrails – but not state spending – should be trimmed. The irresistible temptation to spend money gathered but not yet disbursed will always override responsible governance for neo-progressives.
The LooneyDuff guardrail trimming -- which opens the possibility that the spending cap may be exceeded by $61 million -- caused Lamont to pull back on the spending reins, and Jeffrey Beckham, Lamont’s budget director, promptly sent a memo “to all agency heads last week that said officials will closely scrutinize filling jobs in all categories: full-time, part-time, temporary, and durational,” according to the Courant.
“Effective immediately,” Beckham wrote in his memo, “hiring will be curtailed. The Office of Policy and Management will consider position requests that it determines are essential for critical agency operations and will evaluate such requests on a case-by-case basis. To support position requests, agencies must submit complete justifications as to the criticality of the position to be filled, including detailed explanations of need, implications of not filling the position, and alternatives that have been considered in lieu of filling the position.”
The canned response from Looney and Duff was not unexpected. The presence of the state budget surplus accompanied by the proposed constraints on spending, the two said, demonstrate that “any directives for cuts or freezes from the Office of Policy and Management are premature and only reinforce the need for further modifications to our onerous and outdated budget constraints.”
Translation: Looney and Duff would rather abolish the constraints on spending than to address responsibly an outstanding net state debt of $54 billon.
Truly, who does Beckham think he is – Elon Musk?
