Meeting with journalists last week at the Executive Residence in Hartford, Governor Malloy congratulated himself for the General Assembly’s quick adoption of his state budget, the legislature’s earliest adoption of a budget in memory. The governor called it a budget without the usual gimmickry.
But it’s not hard to write a budget that simply imagines 5 percent in savings that are unlikely to be achieved, a budget of $40 billion over two years that has the state employee unions agreeing to concessions of $1 billion per year, or about $22,000 per employee per year, a quarter of the average employee’s compensation. No one really believes that such concessions will be forthcoming, as much as the governor and legislators might love to believe it.
The legislature might have moved even faster by adopting the Republican minority’s budget proposal, which imagined not only the governor’s $1 billion per year in union concessions but also another half-billion in savings from Medicaid waivers from the federal government and prosecution of Medicaid fraud — utter hallucinations.
In fact, Malloy’s union concessions and the Republicans’ Medicaid savings were the biggest budget gimmicks ever.
Even as he prepared to sign it into law, the governor wasn’t convinced that the budget was done. Rather, he mused at length about what he’d have to do if the unions failed to give in — thousands of layoffs and big cuts in spending, likely including state financial grants to towns. Laying off 10 percent of state government’s workforce of 45,000 people would save only about $400 million per year, requiring further cuts of $600 million per year, or 3 percent of the budget, since the governor insists that he’ll not let taxes be raised more than his budget already raises them.
Government can always restore its solvency by ruining the people, even as maintaining its solvency is not really government’s highest objective, or shouldn’t be. Government’s highest objective is the people’s prosperity, and with or without the union concessions, Malloy’s budget will impose on Connecticut the biggest tax increase in its history.
During last year’s election campaign Malloy often noted that Connecticut has not had any private-sector job growth in 20 years. Indeed, for several years after the income tax was enacted in 1991, Connecticut even lost population. The state still is losing population relative to the rest of the country.
These are not coincidences. The more wealth government extracts from the private economy, the less the private economy prospers, and the more prosperity is reserved for the government class.
After only four months in office Malloy is more in command of state government’s accounts than any Connecticut governor in the last half century. Having been Stamford’s mayor for 14 years rather than a mere legislator, he always has had to govern, rather than just talk and pose.
And yet with or without the union concessions his budget accomplishes no reforms or policy departures. Its consolidation of state agencies is only cosmetic; their functions and personnel will endure. Malloy’s budget will be no more than another enormous increase in the tax burden — higher income, sales, and business taxes, and an expansion of the sales tax base — just to feed the machine of government and perpetuate its failing ways.
How could anyone think that the result will be any different this time?
Chris Powell is managing editor of the Journal Inquirer in Manchester.