It should come as no surprise that Gov. Dannel Malloy’s budget is built on political calculations, more than math … or logic.
The whining from the special interests who stand to lose some skin in this budget cycle started early and has become deafening. The Connecticut Hospital Association saw a $200 million hit coming and lobbied hard. It didn’t work. The power generators, most notably Dominion Energy which operates the Millstone nuclear plant, lobbied against the seemingly inevitable extension of a tax that was supposed to sunset June 30. They, too, lost. Big business lobbied hard for continuing the various tax credits and largely won. But the price appears to be the extension of the surcharge on profits, another tax scheduled to sunset June 30.
Malloy isn’t the first governor to break a promise on ‘temporary’ taxes but that doesn’t make it right.
Then there are the surprise winners, left scratching their heads at Malloy’s largesse. What lobby felt this was the moment to end the car tax? Certainly the cost of registering a car here is obscene but is it a pressing issue requiring action when the state faces a budget crisis? And what about restoring a $50 sales tax exemption for clothing? Will that make as big a difference to consumers or retailers as it does to the state’s bottom line?
And, of course, the hapless Republicans are again left on the sidelines, clucking their ‘we-told-you-so’ partisan rhetoric, as they watch the legislative train roll by. They are powerless as much by their lack of numbers as by their lack of new ideas to alter the course.
Malloy has made the calculation that somehow a 9 percent spending increase spread across two years makes sense. Perhaps it does to his political base but it’s just another affront to taxpayers. It’s unconscionable for an elected official to add that kind of spending at a time when revenue is weak at best.
Team Malloy makes a big deal of cutting $1.8 billion and produces a chart that compares Malloy’s planned spending to that planned by Jodi Rell’s administration. Yes, the totals are lower but the lines take a parallel trajectory — up, not down. And therein lies the problem.
Despite his rhetoric about transparency and generally accepted accounting principles adherence, it seems clear that Malloy is playing fast and loose with the process here. More expenses are being bonded; more payments are being delayed and pushed beyond this fiscal cycle; more gimmicks are being employed to evade the spending limit.
To be sure, there is a lot to like here. Malloy is right that we need to invest in ensuring the next generation is educated enough to handle the demands of the 21st century economy. We applaud his vision in backing the ‘Next Generation Connecticut’ and ‘Bioscience Innovation’ initiatives. Of course, we’d applaud louder if he had any clue as to how we were going to pay for any of this. The answer, apparently, is that we are not. We are going to leave the bills for that ‘Next Generation’ and the next administration.
This is a bad budget that indelibly stains Malloy as a spendaholic, incapable of restraint even in the face of a clear budget crisis. But if this budget mollifies the teachers and the bureaucrats, the construction unions and the casual observers, maybe it’ll be enough to allow Malloy to be a two-term governor.
And, at the end of the day, that is what matters much more to him than whether the taxpayers gets their money’s worth from state government.
