Budget’s message not quite so clear

“It sends a message,” Lamont said. “This is a state that every four years was raising taxes like clockwork.” Legislators agreed, with state Sen. John Fonfara saying the tax cut tells the country “that Connecticut is in the game.” It’s enough to make you wonder who we’re trying to impress.

Happy times have returned to Hartford. The state Senate's nearunanimous approval of a two-year budget that has already cleared the House is a sign of state political leadership that is all on the same page. The never-ending forecast of deficits, which not long ago looked to be Connecticut's reality for the foreseeable future, seems like a relic of the distant past.

And there are reasons to be happy. There's more money for K-12 education than had been expected. Funding for nonprofits and higher education is not what advocates wanted to see, but not as low as had been feared at times during budget discussions. There are investments in economic growth that could pay dividends for the state down the road.

The centerpiece is the tax cut, which could result in hundreds of dollars in savings for individuals and families. Considering how many people are one paycheck away from insolvency, and don't have any savings in case of catastrophe, that money could be the difference between getting by and not.

The good budget news is the result of a variety of factors, led by tax receipts that have been higher than expected for years now. The national economy has proven surprisingly resilient, and the pain from the pandemic was not nearly as severe to the bottom line as had been feared. Combined with huge infusions of money from the federal government to soften the pandemic blow, and Connecticut is one of many states with a brighter outlook than it's seen in many years.

And yet it was hard to miss the tone of defensiveness from Gov. Ned Lamont regarding the tax cut in what should be a moment of triumph for the political moderate.

“Don't tell me that doesn't make a difference,” Lamont said Tuesday afternoon, at least tacitly acknowledging that a few hundred dollars, over the course of a year, could easily go unnoticed. It is, after all, the equivalent of maybe a week's rent, or something you might save on your own by skipping meals out for half a year.

Lamont was thinking big picture. “It sends a message,” he said. “This is a state that every four years was raising taxes like clockwork.” Legislators agreed, with state Sen. John Fonfara, co-chairman of the Finance, Revenue and Bonding Committee, saying the tax cut tells the country “that Connecticut is in the game.”

It's enough to make you wonder who we're trying to impress.

Connecticut, after all, is and will remain an expensive place to live. Cutting taxes in this manner sends a message, but it doesn't change the basic math. No one is coming here to save money.

And at the same time, it's easy to count what the money that is going toward cutting taxes could have gone towards. Better pay for teachers. Improved mass transit. Shorter wait times for emergency services. A higher education system that serves everyone. The list is long.

Instead, we're sending a message. The cut in taxes is not nothing, and no one should imply otherwise. There really are people who need that extra money. But in the bigger picture, we need to hope that someone is heeding the message we're sending.