Writing a weekly column is a bit of a challenge, because, well, stuff changes faster than every week or so. You could be writing about somebody who dies on deadline and it makes you look sort of creepy.
Or, you could be writing a scathing piece about Connecticut’s Permanent Commission on the Status of Women — and just before you go to press, some smart-aleck legislator could campaign to remove ‘Permanent” from the commission’s name, spelling the end of the road.
That’s why I prefer to write about this year’s state budget negotiations. Nothing much happens. The process is never over. There is no budget. Life goes on. I can write with the confidence that comes with knowing that from the time the ink dries on my parchment, to the time the presses roll, the budgeting process will be much as it was before I began.
NOTE TO EDITOR: THIS COLUMN IS ABOUT THE STATE BUDGET. YOU CAN STICK IN YOUR DESK DRAWER AND RUN IT IN A FEW MONTHS.
Connecticut is close to, if not already the declared winner, in the contest to be the last state in the union to finalize some sort of patched-together, dishonest, wing-and-a-prayer budget — which is not to say that Connecticut’s will be much better or worse than most others, but that it will make the state budgeting process look foolish and mediocre.
When something like this happens in the business world, there will always be a consultant or tweed-jacket professor around to blame it on “lack of leadership.” But what exactly does that mean?
At the least, it suggests the need for someone with a vision, with a philosophy, with an ideology that gets the group to the end zone, because he or she is a philosopher king who doesn’t get distracted by unimportant obstacles.
To be sure, you see no one like that in the Connecticut budgeting morass. The Democratic majority leaders in the General Assembly can only articulate the need for “more:” more money, more taxes, more spending — because they are speaking on behalf of their real clients, the state employees and their assorted labor unions.
Gov. M. Jodi Rell articulated a philosophy of sorts (no new taxes during a recession), but couldn’t back it up with blood-thirsty cuts in spending, because she’s not one of those “smaller government is my goal in life” kind of Republicans. Now, with all three Republican legislators still calling for “no new taxes,” Rell concedes that maybe a few tax hikes wouldn’t be such a terrible thing.
You need a philosophy, an ideological fervor, to tame the hungry tax-and-spend beast. Ponder the inaugural address of former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush in 2004: “There would be no greater tribute to our maturity as a society than if we make these government buildings around us empty of workers; silent monuments to the time when government played a role larger than it deserved or could adequately fill.”
That’s the pawing-the-ground kind of thinking that sets an agenda and clarifies a budget negotiation before the leaves of autumn start to fall. The next word out of Jodi Rell’s mouth (she of the quiet competence and high approval ratings) will be “consensus.” Run for the hills and clutch your wallets.
Margaret Thatcher, the iron-willed prime minister who transformed England, had it right. ‘Ah, consensus…the process of abandoning all beliefs, principles, values and policies in search of something in which no one believes, but to which no one objects.”
That will be the final product of the very, very slow Connecticut budget negotiations.
Laurence D. Cohen is a freelance writer.
