It’s easy to lose sight of a lame duck governor in the run up to a hotly contested primary. But M. Jodi Rell has been on a roll.
First, she tasted a bit of vindication when the state closed its fiscal year with a $393.3 million “surplus,” a misnomer that defines an amount above what was expected, not above what was spent. Still this not-really-a-surplus amount is $150 million ahead of Rell’s own projection made just a month earlier.
By legislative agreement, the first $140 million of this “surplus” goes into the state’s General Fund. But given the state’s crushing structural deficit, Rell wisely proposes using the rest to reduce the amount of borrowing needed to balance the state budget.
Rell had taken a chance in signing off on a controversial plan to borrow the state’s way out of a billion-dollar budget hole. Rising tax receipts that suggest some level of economic recovery now make the mountain of debt roughly 23 percent smaller.
Then she risked some further public ridicule by halting the state’s plunge into creating an insurance pool for high-risk people without coverage. She demanded better than the federal government’s plan that would have created a system with prices so high as to be prohibitive. And she got it.
The devil is always in the details and those haven’t been released yet. But on the face of it, the governor shaved more than a third off the original premiums. Certainly the price is still high — $285 a month for an insured under age 30 — but it beats the Charter Oak plan’s price of $307 a month and the original federal offer of $465 a month. What Rell may have given away in coverage remains to be seen.
There also is the larger question of whether Connecticut should have agreed to take on administration of such a high-risk insurance pool when the feds were willing to do that work. But we’ll leave that now-moot issue for another time.
The confluence of the revenue numbers and the insurance pool gambit have the appearance of victories and those have been hard to come by of late as Rell enters the final few months of her lackluster term.
Take a victory lap, governor. There may not be another chance.
A Voice In The Woods
In the run up to the Aug. 10 primary, the clamor of candidates saying little is approaching the level of cacophony.
Yet there recently came a single voice advocating actually spending more state money on a program that seems certain to boost the state’s economy.
Democrat Dan Malloy walked out on the limb and suggested the state had gone way too far in cutting its spending on tourism marketing. He suggested spending $15 million to lure tourists here. That would be more than triple what the state had been spending for tourism promotion before last year’s bizarre decision to cut back to a single dollar for the effort.
There’s a strong case that tourism marketing is a good investment for a state. We’re delighted to see a candidate go beyond the populist sound bites and actually provide a thoughtful policy suggestion to help the economy.
It would be great if other candidates follow suit.
Pension Math
A study by a finance prof at Northwestern University says the state’s pension fund will become insolvent by 2019. That has both union and state officials howling because of both its budgetary and political implications.
Instead of trying to kill the messenger or wasting time trying to assign retroactive blame, we should use this calculation as a wake-up call about the worst case scenario.
Despite the howls from the state’s labor unions, let’s get cracking on shifting to a defined contribution system. The alternative is allowing the pension mess to spiral into a cataclysmic system failure.
