Not really much opportunity in Connecticut outside of government

Gov. Malloy and the other Democrats in charge congratulated themselves a couple of weeks ago on the orderly conclusion of the 2011 session of the General Assembly. Everything the majority wanted to do got done in time.But as it all was facilitated by the largest tax increase in Connecticut’s history, this orderliness wasn’t much of a challenge or a virtue. Rather, it was the consequence of a betrayal. For in his campaign last year the governor said he aimed to cover one-third of the huge state deficit by spending cuts and two-thirds by tax increases, and in the end there were no cuts at all. The new budget raises spending by 2 percent, there will be no reduction in the state work force and the budget abounds with padding. For when the governor’s agreement of pretended concessions with the state employee union leadership fell $400 million short of what had been budgeted, the gap was instantly bridged not with spending cuts or further tax increases but with easily revised cost estimates elsewhere.The agency consolidations just enacted are only cosmetic, saving little and irrelevant to policy, but Malloy touted them in his valedictory to the legislators. It seems that anyone enjoying a normal lifespan in Connecticut may live through three or four reconfigurations of the agency regulating public utilities, and Malloy has just arranged another one, but the state still has the highest electricity costs in the country. Saying goodbye to the legislators, the governor also claimed credit for reforming the administration of higher education, which indeed was bloated. (The state university system’s “chancellor emeritus” lectures budget skeptics against eating Connecticut’s “seed corn” even as he collects an annual pension of $110,000.) But the overwhelming waste is the university system itself, its functioning mainly as remedial education for students who failed high school but were graduated anyway and so have to take high school classes over again, this time in college.Democratic leaders say voters soon will forgive the tax increases and be glad of state government’s restored solvency. Maybe or maybe not. While the first election after the legislative session of 1991, the session that enacted the state income tax, a session closely analogous to the session just concluded, returned a General Assembly with exactly the same Democratic majority as the one that enacted the income tax, the governor who insisted on the tax, Lowell P. Weicker Jr., was so unpopular that he decided against re-election in 1994 and even left the state for a while. Upon enactment of the income tax — the biggest tax increase in the state’s history — Connecticut entered 20 years of recession. An even bigger tax increase may extend that recession for another 20 years, especially since, as it turned out, the solvency that the income tax was to ensure to state government forever didn’t last long. Instead the new tax revenue was consumed mainly by continuing to improve the compensation of public employees and to remediate social problems that only get worse. Perhaps most insensibly, spending by the state Department of Children and Families has risen to almost $900 million per year as the department superintends 4,700 neglected children, or almost $190,000 per neglected child per year, which would make a pretty good family income.DCF almost surely will cost even more next year, as, unlike Weicker, who had little interest in government besides the opportunity it provided to strike righteous poses, Malloy is a dervish of energy seemingly devoted to remediation — which unfortunately has nothing to do with solving problems. For the more state government remediates, the more it finds itself having to remediate.Perhaps conscious of the political price Weicker paid for rescuing the government class while letting Connecticut sink, Malloy promised the departing legislators that he would reconvene them in special session in the fall to address economic development and job creation. Yes, state government’s draining more than another billion dollars per year in taxes from the private economy will rationalize still more remediation by government. The governor’s big idea is the First Five initiative — vast special subsidies for major employers locating in the state. Malloy told the legislators he hoped that it would become “the First 50 or maybe even the First 100,” as if Connecticut can afford to subsidize everyone except those who are already here paying the subsidies.That is the compelling question facing Connecticut: whether there ever again will be a future in the state for anyone not employed by the government or receiving its patronage or welfare benefits. Chris Powell is managing editor of the Journal Inquirer in Manchester.

Latest News

South Kent School’s unofficial March reunion

Elmarko Jackson was named a 2023 McDonald’s All American in his senior year at South Kent School. He helped lead the Cardinals to a New England Prep School Athletic Conference (NEPSAC) AAA title victory and was recruited to play at the University of Kansas. This March he will play point guard for the Jayhawks when they enter the tournament as a No. 4 seed against (13) Samford University.

Riley Klein

SOUTH KENT — March Madness will feature seven former South Kent Cardinals who now play on Division 1 NCAA teams.

The top-tier high school basketball program will be well represented with graduates from each of the past three years heading to “The Big Dance.”

Keep ReadingShow less
Hotchkiss grads dancing with Yale

Nick Townsend helped Yale win the Ivy League.

Screenshot from ESPN+ Broadcast

LAKEVILLE — Yale University advanced to the NCAA men’s basketball tournament after a buzzer-beater win over Brown University in the Ivy League championship game Sunday, March 17.

On Yale’s roster this year are two graduates of The Hotchkiss School: Nick Townsend, class of ‘22, and Jack Molloy, class of ‘21. Townsend wears No. 42 and Molloy wears No. 33.

Keep ReadingShow less
Handbells of St. Andrew’s to ring out Easter morning

Anne Everett and Bonnie Rosborough wait their turn to sound notes as bell ringers practicing to take part in the Easter morning service at St. Andrew’s Church.

Kathryn Boughton

KENT—There will be a joyful noise in St. Andrew’s Church Easter morning when a set of handbells donated to the church some 40 years ago are used for the first time by a choir currently rehearsing with music director Susan Guse.

Guse said that the church got the valuable three-octave set when Harlem Valley Psychiatric Center closed in the late 1980s and the bells were donated to the church. “The center used the bells for music therapy for younger patients. Our priest then was chaplain there and when the center closed, he brought the bells here,” she explained.

Keep ReadingShow less
Picasso’s American debut was a financial flop
Picasso’s American debut was a financial flop
Penguin Random House

‘Picasso’s War” by Foreign Affairs senior editor Hugh Eakin, who has written about the art world for publications like The New York Review of Books, Vanity Fair, The New Yorker and The New York Times, is not about Pablo Picasso’s time in Nazi-occupied Paris and being harassed by the Gestapo, nor about his 1937 oil painting “Guernica,” in response to the aerial bombing of civilians in the Basque town during the Spanish Civil War.

Instead, the Penguin Random House book’s subtitle makes a clearer statement of intent: “How Modern Art Came To America.” This war was not between military forces but a cultural war combating America’s distaste for the emerging modernism that had flourished in Europe in the early decades of the 20th century.

Keep ReadingShow less