Connecticut Commentary: Red Notes from a Blue State

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...

Anyone hoping to hammer into a coherent ideology Mark Twain’s robustly critical admonitions on politics and politicians is bound to be disappointed. Here is Twain on the Congress of his day: “An honest man in politics shines more there than he would elsewhere.” That is taken from A Tramp Abroad, written in Hartford, Connecticut . Twain wrote most of his important novels in Hartford, including The Adventures of Tom Sawyer ,  The Prince and the Pauper ,  Life on the Mississippi ,  Adventures of Huckleberry Finn and  A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court. Towards the end of his life, tragedy became the uninvited guest at Twain’s table. He lost his beloved wife, both a spiritual anchor and a literary censor. Twain did not believe writers should self-censor. Olivia Clemons was concerned about her husband’s place in the world, as all good wives should be, and worked to keep his combustible politics from bursting into flame – at least publically -- and sing...

It’s more than a whisper. Hartford, Connecticut’s capital city, already is bankrupt; no one as yet has bothered to read the last rites over the corpse. The city’s formal announcement of bankruptcy can be deduced from the math, and there is no quarreling with math, as Mr. Micawber, a character in Charles Dickens’ David Copperfield , well knew: “"Annual income twenty pounds, annual expenditure nineteen pounds, nineteen shillings and six pence, result happiness. Annual income twenty pounds, annual expenditure twenty pounds ought and six, result misery."

Last week, Connecticut’s Supreme Court overturned on process grounds a jury's decision that the state of Connecticut should pay $18.3 million to Computers Plus, a company that once operated out of East Hartford. The jury found that the state – specifically, then quick-to-sue Attorney General Richard Blumenthal -- had defamed the owner of the company and violated her due-process rights. The jury’s multi-million dollar award should be taken as an indication of the depth of the state’s perfidy in driving Computer Plus out of business on a fraudulent claim of wrongdoing.

State police spokesman Lt. Paul Vance, the keeper of the Sandy Hook secrets, condemned leaks in the investigation of the mass murder of Newtown students, ‘but won’t say they’re acting to root them out,” according to a story in the Journal Inquirer . “If that law enforcement source does not attribute their name to that information,” Mr. Vance said of an unnamed source in a Hartford Courant story that references the medical records of Sandy Hook shooter Adam Lanza, “then that information is suspect.” Indeed, most of the information that has seen its way into print from sources other than Mr. Vance has been questionable, to say the least. It has fallen to Mr. Vance to make certain that none of the authoritative information included in a twice delayed criminal report comes to light anytime soon.

The national economic fender bender should introduce a welcomed dollop of sobriety into budget discussions between Connecticut’s major parties. The Democrat camp, which for several years has argued for a more steeply progressive rate on the incomes of Gold Coast millionaires, has put away its rhetoric, at least for the time being. The millionaires are hurting, and their pain is being felt by redistributionist mayors and congresspersons at the state capitol. Connecticut’s revenues have been diminished by, in Democrat parlance, the parlous financial conditions of the greedy CEOs of Wall Street who are now suffering a well deserved comeuppance. Unfortunately, their setback means that the revenue that poured into state coffers for the last decade and more from dubious financial transaction on Wall Street is no longer trickling down to the big spenders at the state capitol. Obviously, something must be done. At this point, Micawber’s economic theory kicks in. “Annual income twenty pounds,...

2) Every action has a consequence – the one we want. Of course, we know this is not true. An action may have two consequences – or more. When one strikes with a cue ball the triangle of balls in billiards, all the balls move, some in unwanted directions. Translated from billiards to politics, this means that when I raise a tax to satisfy a need, my action may have unintended consequences. I may satisfy the need and create a dependency that may prove to be unappeasable; or the tax may create another problem; or raising the tax may have been an inefficient solution to the problem; or … There is also a point of diminishing returns that comes into play when taxes are raised. At some point, and at some wage levels, even a reasonable tax may be the straw that breaks the camels back. Just as one might not be able to afford a new Jaguar, so one might not be able to afford high priced taxes. What happens when a taxpayer cannot pay the tax? Pretty much the same thing that happens when a renter ...