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Discussion among Connecticut seniors like me invariably drifts towards our children and grandchildren with a common theme – everyone must experience inconvenient travel for family reunions because our children have left the state.
Why?
Because the Democrats have destroyed our once job-creating economy with high taxes to finance the public sector with high wages, huge pensions and Cadillac health care coverage.
While Governor Ned Lamont likes to pose as a fiscal conservative, he allowed state employee wages to increase by 33%, from $3.4 billion to $4.5 billion. As pension obligations increase with wages, the taxpayers’ bill to fund these pensions ballooned by $9 billion, from $34 billion to $43 billion.
And since our legislature is now in session to craft a new biannual budget, the fleecing of the taxpayers will continue.
After the state income tax passed in 1991, a 1993 referendum was held that placed caps on government spending. It passed by 80%. Further fiscal “guardrails” were placed on spending in 2017.
But loopholes and bond issues enabled our political class to increase spending anyway. In 1990, the annual budget totaled $8 billion. By 2024, it was $24 billion. Yet, Connecticut’s population barely grew and has actually decreased in the past five years. We lost one electoral vote in the 2000 census, and will probably lose another one in 2030.
The state’s deterioration is visible everywhere. Poverty is rife in our once-vibrant cities. Crime is out of control. Education has suffered, and one student is even suing the Hartford school system because she was unable to read even though she graduated from high school!
Police enforcement of our traffic laws has diminished. Our leaders sat by while venture capitalists took over our hospitals and bankrupted them, while CEOs made hundred-million-dollar salaries. Healthcare is an overpriced disaster.
Energy costs are out of control because inefficient policies implemented to mollify the climate change lobby caused the Democrats to use our utilities as tax collection agencies (“public benefits charges”).
The purpose of our state government has become to give fat salaries and pensions to useless bureaucrats and educrats while satisfying liberal activists with too much time on their hands.
Public services? Affordability? Forgettaboutit.
Administrators at UConn are raking in huge six-figure salaries.
And these people also get lavish pensions.
More than forty UConn professors and administrators have pensions that exceed $150,000 annually. And these pensions have annual cost of living adjustments meaning they increase every year.
Yet the main demand of the liberals in this legislative session is “Tax the rich.” But who are the rich? Is some doctor working eighty hours a week making $300,000 a year taking care of the sick rich? Is some lawyer working seventy hours a week making $400,000 a year fighting for his clients rich?
How do this doctor and lawyer pay for their retirement? They must save and invest into 401Ks.
But let’s go back to the UConn administrator who makes the same salary and then retires at 60 with a $150,000 pension that increases every year according to the cost of living. And let’s assume this averages 3% a year. By the time this administrator is 90 (quite common now a days, especially for women), the taxpayers of Connecticut will be on the hook to pay this person $375,000 a year! Not to mention funding this person’s health insurance. Connecticut educrats do not enroll in Medicare Advantage plans.
Now let’s return to our “rich” doctor and lawyer. How much money would these individuals have to save to retire at 60 with a similar pension from their savings? The answer is around $10,000,000. And that does not cover health insurance nor does this account for the vagaries of finance such as a stock market correction or high inflation.
So, who is really “rich” here? The answer is the retired Connecticut state employee with a six-figure pension that increases with inflation. Every two weeks, a fat check comes in the mail, and he never sees a significant health care bill.
To add insult to injury, these pensions are only 55% funded, up from 50%. The reason is that the fiscal guardrails forced tax revenue from stock market gains into the pension fund.
Yet Democratic leaders such as former Norwalk mayor Alex Knopp want to eliminate these guardrails supposedly to help our poorer citizens.
But the Democrats are more interested in fleecing our poorer citizens with gambling and by encouraging marijuana use, all of which is taxed to fund these pensions.
The Connecticut Lotto preys on our less affluent citizens. There is even a new app, Jackpocket, that fleeces people with greater efficiency. The casinos are only taxed on slot machine revenue, the preferred gambling method of the poor. Legalized marijuana dispensaries have gravitated to poor neighborhoods and our Emergency Rooms are flooded with young people having psychotic breakdowns caused by marijuana products with 25% concentrations of THC. Recently legalized sports betting is causing a rash of credit card defaults, bankruptcy and domestic violence.
And what is Senator Blumenthal’s response? To mandate changes in the algorithms of the software of the betting sites!
Connecticut has become a parody of responsible governance.
Why is this? Because the Democrats won the election. A coalition of liberal activists, government workers, pensioners and Trump-hating affluent white suburbanites combined to make Connecticut the only state in the country where the Democrats increased their margins in both the Assembly and State Senate.
So, we can all sit in traffic and suffer flight delays when we visit our children and grandchildren during the holidays. That’s what we voted for. That’s what we got.
