Connecticut Commentary: Red Notes from a Blue State

April is the cruelest month, breeding/ Lilacs out of the dead land… T.S. Eliot, The Wasteland On May 22 nd of April, the cruelest month, Governor Ned Lamont took a bow during his daily Coronavirus briefing, this time at Gay City State Park in Hebron. Front page headlines in the Hartford Courant blared: “Extremely Good News: State reports lowest single-day increase in [Coronavirus] cases since late March; June 20 eyed for phase 2 of reopening.” The governor advised Connecticut residents desperately in search of normalcy, “I used to say stay home. Now I say go to a little-used park. Go to one of the ones that aren’t on the mainstream. Go there with your family. Keep your distance, if you see a group of people coming up. That’s what spring is about, and we are going this (sic) all together.”

In the course of writing political columns, a bad habit I’ve been nurturing for more than 30 years, people have sometimes ask me, with a note of desperation in their voice, will things in Connecticut ever change? These people generally are either conservatives or libertarians and therefore immune to the usual political nonsense. The Democratic Party has been in charge of the state roughly since the Mesozoic Era. Will we ever sniff change in the air, they wonder? It’s a serious question: What will it take to shake people in Connecticut from their lethargy – to wake them up before the plane we’re all traveling in finally crashes into the mountain? We’re perilously close to that. Only a month ago, the Connecticut Business & Industry Association (CBIA) released its 12th annual survey of businesses in the state , and the news was bleak. The organization surveyed 377 in state companies and found that 82 percent had a negative or somewhat negative opinion of Connecticut as...

The Connecticut Business and Industry Association (CBIA), it must be admitted, knows a thing or two about Connecticut’s businesses and industries – perhaps even more than members of the state’s General Assembly, a majority of whom regularly pass bills and restrictions on companies in Connecticut, sometimes heedless of the real-world unintended consequences of such legislation. CBIA, one of the largest statewide business organizations in the country, boasts 10,000 member companies. In business for more than 175 years, CBIA represents the collective voice of Connecticut’s industries crying in a parched wilderness.

On April 18, Connecticut Business And Industries Association (CBIA) threw its best punch, a stunning article and accompanying graph titled “ State Spending: Time to Change Direction .” It should be noted that CBIA, an association of business groups in the state, is not a part of the right wing conspiracy to save Connecticut from left wing pirates. The association wears a velvet glove and speaks to legislators, mostly left of center Democrats, in muted excessively polite tones. The graph itself (reproduced below) is worth a thousand words.