🔒‘Best deal we can get’? Only if we’re too scared

Governor Malloy's tentative deal for concessions from the state employee unions identifies the kind of savings state government should pursue. But while it may go as far as any Democratic governor could go, it doesn't go as far as the state should go and, given its financial disaster, as far as the state could go politically. Thus the deal makes an argument that the state's next governor should be a Republican, if he or she isn't just another self-funding ignoramus.

The deal is said to save state government more than $1.5 billion over two years, but most of that — foregone wage increases — is just slowing the rate of increase of spending, not actual reductions.

Other provisions would have the effect of reducing wages slightly. State employees would take three unpaid furlough days in two years, effectively offsetting a few of their six gratuitous paid holidays, like Columbus Day. But the furloughs would end after two years.

There would be gradual increases in employee contributions toward medical insurance, but those contributions would remain small relative to the luxuriousness of the benefits.

For new hires, defined-benefit pensions would be reduced and supplemented with 401(k) pensions. But defined-benefit pensions should be eliminated for new hires so state government eventually can get out of the pension business, which is bankrupting and corrupting the government — corrupting because elected officials can never bring themselves to appropriate adequately for the benefits they promise.

Overtime earnings credited to state employee pensions would be reduced to 60 percent. This practice also should be eliminated.

Worst of all, the deal would extend the contract for state employee benefits by five more years, to 2027, when such contracts should not extend much beyond the term of the governor who executes them. The House Republican minority leader, Rep. Themis Klarides (R-Derby), notes that while Malloy has often complained that decisions made by his predecessors have restricted him unfairly, he now proposes to do the same thing to his successor.

So the General Assembly should press for an agreement more favorable to the public interest. Amid Connecticut's economic decline, the cost of state government employment should be reduced, not merely restrained, and legislators should not accept the assurance of House Speaker Joe Aresimowicz (D-Berlin) that what the governor has negotiated “is probably the best deal we can get.”

For the state employee unions are not the instruments of God sent forth to bedevil democracy. No, they are state government's own creations, for their powers — collective bargaining and binding arbitration of contracts — are established by statutes that can be repealed.

That is, the unions are not a legal, moral, or supernatural problem but a political problem, and contrary to Aresimowicz's suggestion, Connecticut does not need their permission to govern itself. It's just that elected officials are afraid of such a big special interest, the monster they have created. But saving Connecticut requires subordinating special interests to the public interest, starting with this one.

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Against Trump, anything is fair

For years anonymous sources were falling out of favor in journalism, particularly in regard to defamatory allegations. Increasingly they were considered unfair and of doubtful credibility, since people have a right to face their accusers and allegations can't be judged when their source is hidden.

But now that Donald Trump is president, anonymous sources are fashionable again. The New York Times and Washington Post churn them out practically every day to disparage his administration, as if that administration isn't easy enough to disparage fairly.

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