When the onset of Spring Fever coincides with a busy news week, there can be only one result: short-attention-span writing and reading.
Really, Chris Dodd? Really.
The announcement that recently-retired U.S. Sen. Chris Dodd is becoming the CEO of the Movie Picture Association of America comes as no great surprise. And that’s as telling as it is a shame.
Dodd had downplayed the persistent rumors that he and the association were in a mating dance. He said he didn’t want to be a show pony for an organization. He said he planned on abiding by both the letter and the spirit of the law barring members of Congress from lobbying former colleagues for two years.
Instead, he took a job as the trophy front man for a group that has just two functions — public relations and lobbying. Certainly he’ll refrain from being the one making the pitch on Capitol Hill, but when everybody knows the pitch is coming from Dodd’s office, nobody is really being fooled.
It’s a sad final act for a career that once was deeply steeped in public service.
Jobs and taxes
The line of special interests seeking exemptions from Gov. Malloy’s wholesale attack on tax breaks winds around Bushnell Park.
The auto dealers deserve praise for being the first to try to quantify the jobs implication of lifting a tax break for its industry. It’s a good strategy — linking the hot issue of jobs with the fallout from proposed tax changes. But is the car dealers’ case either credible or a winner?
We’ll say “no” on both counts.
The association’s analysis suggests taxing the auto trade-in transaction will cost the industry more than $1.5 billion in revenue and force the elimination of 730 jobs? Perhaps events will prove the auto dealers correct, but at first blush it’s hard to see that many transactions either moving across the state line or not happening at all.
Every supplicant in that long line should build a similar worst-case analysis. And lawmakers should listen carefully. Not because a well-written analysis should cause them to rethink wiping out any particular exemption, but rather because it’s a nice reminder of the pain the lawmakers could have spared everybody if they’d taken on hard budget issues years earlier.
A drama on two stages
With Republican governors in places like Wisconsin and Ohio providing political cover for Gov. Malloy’s more reasoned requests for state employee union givebacks, a significant scene in this national drama is playing out in New Haven.
There, Mayor John DeStefano, a Democrat who keeps winning re-election with labor’s help, is being pilloried as a union buster because he dares to speak the truth: His municipality simply can’t afford the status quo in employee compensation.
Back in Hartford, Malloy is scoring points with labor by saying public employees shouldn’t be demonized and speaking up for the concept of mandated sick time. But is it anything more than sugar-coating the bitter pill? He can afford to be gracious if it’ll help the unions cough up the $2 billion he needs. And he can commiserate with labor over sick time if he can muster enough votes to block it in the Senate.
The sick-time bill has been effectively gutted by a provision that allows personal and vacation time to be counted toward the mandated allotment. That takes a lot of the economic sting out.
What we’re now quibbling about is whether Connecticut will become the first state to buy the concept of mandated sick time. That’s a win labor wants badly but it’s a win Malloy can’t deliver if he wants to reshape the state’s reputation as an anti-business environment.
Only 15 weeks until summer.
