Connecticut Commentary: Red Notes from a Blue State

Lowell Weicker CTMirror has put to bed – “debunked” – one hopes forever, the notion that the 1991 Weicker income tax was intended to be temporary. No doubt most people, when the tax was enacted, knew in their bones that nothing is so permanent as a temporary tax.

The reader will find below three self-interviews that are meant to serve as a prologue to a longer piece – “Connecticut Down.”  The first is set a little more than a month after Governor Ned Lamont had been sworn into office; the second is set just before Lamont presented his budget to the General Assembly; and the last is set a day after the Lamont/Looney/Aresimowicz budget was passed by the state Senate.

Q: I have lots of questions. A: I’m sure I do not have lots of answers. Q: I’ll ask the questions anyway. A: You always were persistent, an indispensable virtue among good reporters. Q: You were a reporter once, right?. A: No, a columnist. Reporters dig up the truffles, columnists make use of them in their pâtés. Q: When did you start publishing Connecticut Commentary? A: About 2004, thirteen years after then Governor Lowell Weicker destroyed the character of Connecticut, once a magnet for companies seeking to escape the withering hand of autocratic government, by instituting his ill-advised income tax. Q: And you were writing columns back then as well. A: Before then. I’ve been fulminating for more than 35 years. The income tax, a new revenue stream saved the Democrat dominated General Assembly the necessity of pruning back spending over the long term. It resulted in a catastrophic, uninterrupted increase in spending, the efficient cause of the...

Hillary Clinton, who lost the presidential election to current U.S. President Donald Trump, has been effectively sidelined as a national leader of the Democrat Party. Clinton, whose emails the Chinese were reading in real time when as Secretary of State she typed them out on an unsecured private server, likely will not make an appearance in Connecticut as a supporter of Democrat gubernatorial hopeful Ned Lamont. But all is not lost. Lamont, running against Republican gubernatorial candidate Bob Stefanowski, has received a fulsome endorsement from former President Barack Obama, whose political star still twinkles in the dark heavens.

Hilaire Belloc’s " Advice to the Rich " –  Learn about the inwards of your motor car... And remember that you will shortly die. Belloc is here reminding the rich, who often are busy and therefore distracted from the practical knowledge necessary to live a happy and joyous life –“Learn about the inwards of your motor car ” – that the end of life is not heaping up money; Belloc’s accompanying admonition, equally important, is a gentle reminder that God does not always sleep -- “and remember that you will shortly die.” An unapologetic Catholic, Belloc supposed that both the rich and the poor, when their time in this vale of tears had run out, would fall into the hands of the living God. In the modern world, most dramatically in Europe, the living God has been mythologized, and no post-religious European need any longer worry that the Christian God of the beatitudes – “Blessed are the poor, for they shall be called the children of God” – is a jealous God. So, scr...

Connecticut, as everyone who has been leaving it knows, is in a bad way. How bad is it? The state is still recovering from a recession that had ended elsewhere in the nation in June 2009. For eight years, we have been hobbling along and are now the only state in the nation that has yet to recover from the recession – which is, as everyone who has been leaving the state knows, a slowdown in business activity. There are two very good reasons why Connecticut has been so laggard: 1) Governor Dannel Malloy’s first tax increase, the largest in state history, and 2) Governor Malloy’s second tax increase, the second largest in state history. But then, we were forewarned.  Lowell Weicker did caution us during his campaign for governor that raising taxes in a recession would be like throwing gas on a fire, only a few months before he instituted his income tax, over the heated objections of a Republican Party rump in the General Assembly. When Weicker was met by the largest rally...

The usual gubernatorial campaign in Connecticut begins with brave platitudes and ends, once office has been achieved, with whimpering platitudes. We recall a triumphant Governor Lowell Weicker warning during his gubernatorial campaign that instituting an income tax in the midst of a recession would be like “pouring gas on a fire,” then, having achieved office, hiring as his Office of Policy Management Director Bill Cibes, who ran an honest but losing Democratic primary campaign by agitating for an income tax. Before you could say, “Let’s pour gas on the fire,” Connecticut had its income tax. State businesses have taken note of the ungovernable growth in spending and now have their eyes fixed on the exit signs.

Leading Democrats in the state – Governor Dannel Malloy, Speaker of the House Brendan Sharkey, President Pro Tem of the Senate Martin Looney – have opened a multi- pronged attack on the state’s clean election program and its watchdog, Connecticut’s State Elections Enforcement Commission (SEEC). The effort to defang the state’s clean election laws began with an attempt by the Malloy administration to overleap a provision that prevents potential campaign contributors who do business with the state from polluting elections with campaign contributions to politicians who are in a position to advance their interests. The Malloy administration had produced a mailer  that was clearly a Malloy campaign ad. The administration added to the document a fine-print fig leaf concerning polling information and then argued that the small print polling notice transformed the Malloy campaign ad into a federal product that fell outside Connecticut clean campaign law regulations. The Repu...

Early in February, the faculty of Connecticut’s four state universities – Connecticut Central State University (CCSU), Eastern Connecticut State University (ECSU), Southern Connecticut State University (SCSU) and Western Connecticut State University (WCSU) – wrote a letter to the relevant chairs and co-chairs of the General Assembly’s education committees critical of Gregory Gray’s attempt by pedagogical fiat to “change the way we teach and deliver education to our students.” Mr. Gray is the President of Connecticut’s State University system. “Many education pundits,” the educators wrote, “now suggest the teacher is no longer the center of learning, and that students learn more from one another than from the faculty. . .this re-alignment means faculty must become ‘facilitators’ of learning. It's imperative that WE. . .[change] our pedagogical approach immediately.”

Managing Editor of the Journal Inquirer Chris Powell notes in a recent column that Connecticut’s constitutional cap on spending has over the years been easily surmounted by governors and legislators determined to spend money. And indeed, spending has spiraled in the state. Governor William O’Neill's last pre-income tax budget was about $7.5 billion. Connecticut’s current biennial budget is hovering around $40 billion, and the Democratic dominated General Assembly has not yet finished tinkering with it. By broadening the sales tax while reducing the sales tax rate and removing from under the spending cap pension payments for state workers, progressive magicians in the General Assembly are now in the process of transmuting a multi- million dollar deficit into a multi-million dollar surplus. Spending in Connecticut has tripled within the space of four governors, one of whom was independent Governor Lowell Weicker, the father of Connecticut’s income tax.

CTMirror asks in a recent story “Is it time to overhaul Connecticut’s tax system?” The progressive wing of the Democratic Party, now in the ascendency in Connecticut, has been trying to “reform” the tax system ever since it was last reformed in 1991 by then Governor Lowell Weicker, the father of Connecticut’s income tax. In the course of its story, CTMirror quotes William Cibes, identified as “state budget director under Weicker and also co-chairman of the finance committee in 1989-90,” on property taxes. Mr. Cibes recently testified before the General Assembly’s Finance, Revenue and Bonding Committee, which in the next few weeks will endorse a measure “that could launch a top-to-bottom analysis of how Connecticut taps taxpayers’ wallets.” Mr. Cibes testified that “high property taxes are a major reason why Connecticut’s tax system is broken. So property tax relief would lessen the economic burden on businesses, municipalities and individuals… Property taxes are relatively s...

  In 1991, then Governor Lowell Weicker was facing a stubborn billion dollar deficit that had been left on his doorstep by retiring Democratic Governor William O’Neill, an opponent of a state income tax that had first been publically proposed by Bill Cibes in a Democratic Party primary. Running for the Democratic Party nod against Bruce Morrison, Mr. Cibes argued that the deficit and Connecticut’s parlous economic climate made it impossible for the state to raise the sales tax, then among the highest in the nation, or business taxes. An income tax was inevitable. ''The public,” Mr. Morrison retorted, “should beware of people who want to increase their taxes and call it reform.”

The budget submitted by Governor Dannel Malloy to the Democratic dominated General Assembly and approved by the legislature – although a pending deal between Mr. Malloy and state union workers requiring union givebacks of $1.6 billion had not been affirmed by the unions at its passage – is best seen as the inevitable political end piece of the first Weicker budget. The presumptions underlying Governor Lowell Weicker’s 1991 budget parallel Mr. Malloy’s. Indeed, the two budgets, as well as the political maneuvering involved in passing them, are nearly mirror images.

There is no termination date on the tax increase contract between taxpayers and the Malloy administration – because there is no written contract. Some of the items in the contract to be signed by the State Employees Bargaining Agent Coalition (SEBAC), the state union coalition negotiating contracts with Governor Malloy, do have a termination date. For instance, the salaries of state union members, frozen for two years, will unfreeze thereafter and increase by 3% during the following three years. In such precarious times, it must be liberating for state workers to know that the “shared sacrifice” of salary givebacks has a termination date affixed to it. Actuaries hired by the Malloy administration tell us that the temporary salary freeze will save the state $ 448,402,275, according to a budget fact sheet given out to the state’s media. Because the freeze terminates after two years, the savings to the state is itself temporary, while the salary increase of 9% over three years will be...

Is there anyone in the state’s Democratic dominated legislature who can say “No?” Apparently not. During the next budget cycle, the state will be facing a deficit that is about 20% of receipts. The size of the deficit has alarmed some in the Media and some in the legislature. Governor Jodi Rell may be unsettled, but her alarm has not itself reached alarming proportions. Rell, a lame duck governor, is due to leave behind at the completion of her term her office and its attendant responsibilities. The principal Republicans and Democrats vying for the position of governor are: former ambassador to Ireland Tom Foley, present Lieutenant Governor Mike Fedele and Oz Griebel on the Republican side; and on the Democratic side, Ned Lamont and former Mayor of Stamford Dan Malloy. Over at the Journal Inquirer, Managing Editor of the paper and its chief political columnist Chris Powell warns darkly that anyone fortunate or unfortunate enough to become governor next November will have to make ...

The day after the mid-term elections in which Republicans in Connecticut appeared to have staged something of a come-back, evidence that the party is not cold-stone dead, Ned Lamont announced he was forming a committee to explore a run for governor. The following day, his announcement was wreathed in headlines. The Hartford Courant ran a top of the fold front page story: “ Ned Lamont May Run For Governor .” Is there any significance to the timing? If one is going to throw one’s hat “near the ring,” as one publication put it , a post election period is not a bad time to do it. The T.S. Elliot poem, “The Lovesong Of J. Alfred Prufrock” comes to mind: “There will be time, there will be time To prepare a face to meet the faces that you meet;… Time for you and time for me, And time yet for a hundred indecisions And for a hundred visions and revisions, Before the taking of a toast and tea.” The attention grabbing headlines suggest that Lamont’s entrée into the race will change...

Ned Lamont -- the Greenwich millionaire who with an assist from former governor and senator Lowell Weicker, the father of Connecticut’s income tax, Bill Cibes, the godfather of Connecticut’s income tax, and Tom D’Amore, for many years Weicker’s top aide, ran and won a primary against Sen. Joe Lieberman but lost the general election -- has now resurfaced with the three above mentioned gentlemen in tow. Mr. Lamont has launched a broadside against Governor Jodi Rell on a popular blog site called Connecticut Local Politics . Gov. Rell presently is in camera with Democratic budget leaders. The governor and Democratic legislative leaders are desperately trying to come up with a budget that a) does not sink the good ship Connecticut with yet more burdensome taxes and regulations, and b) is acceptable to state workers and union leaders, the state’s permanent shadow government. These two goals may be irreconcilable, but that is not the point of Mr. Lamont's most recent broadside, pe...

Connecticut’s state income tax is Lowell Weicker’s baby pretty much in the same sense that, say, Fords are Henry Ford’s baby. He’s the guy who twisted knuckles and toes to get the thing past. Weicker now wishes to disassociated himself from the inevitable and logical consequences of the tax, and to this end he has given an interview to Ted Mann of the Day of New London in which he claims that the current deficit of $9 billion, give or take a billion, is the result of human nature and not a foreseeable consequence of his tax. Who knew, after all, way back in early 1990, that the tax designed to discharge a deficit of a little more than a billion in a $7.5 billion budget would metastasize, leaving the state, only two governors after Weicker gave birth to it, with a budget more than twice as large and a debt more than three time as large? In a rare humorous moment from Weicker, the father of the state’s income tax claimed that his lieutenant governor, Eunice Groark, mothered the state’s m...

“There is no panacea to solve our current problems,” writes Bill Cibes who, along with Lowell Weicker, the father of Connecticut’s income tax, ushered in the father of all panaceas. “Hard decisions must be made that employ every available option to balance the state budget while doing no harm to the most vulnerable among us and preserving the foundations of future prosperity,” Cibes wrote in a Courant column, “How To Solve Deficit, Restore Sound Footing,” in tandem with Ned Lamont, the come-from-nowhere Greenwich wunderkind who won a primary against current Senator Joe Lieberman several years back. Cibes is not new to Connecticut politics. He ran for governor on an income tax platform several years ago and was soundly defeated. Refusing to take “No” for an answer, Cibes consented to become then Governor Lowell Weicker’s Office of Budget and Management chief. And – surprise! – a few weeks into his term, Weicker graced the state with its current non-performing income tax. The tax was so...

It’s always worth while having a look back before stumbling forward into a precarious future. Those who have memories will remember that moment, just before Connecticut’s state income tax became a reality, when arguments were being made in various quarters in favor of the income tax. The pro-tax folk had three sharp arrows in their quiver. The primary tax revenue engine, the sales tax, was said to be subject to the vagaries of the market place. In good times, the sales tax flooded state coffers with the mother’s milk of politics, money. But in bad times, the flood dwindled to a trickle, leaving legislators in the unenviable position of having to settle upon spending cut, never a bright prospect for those legislators who wish to be all things to all men. This budgetary punning was something the two most well known Democrat governors, Ella Grasso and William O’Neill, did with glum pusses. It was a time when the income tax was but a glint in former senator and governor Lowell Weicker’s ey...