‘Magic table’ won’t work; Lamont should try audits

Soon Lamont will have to write a budget, and welcoming “any good idea” will be meaningless, since one person’s good idea is another person’s outrage and the governor is the one who must decide which ideas are good.

Seeking to solve state government’s financial disaster, Connecticut’s Gov.elect Ned Lamont, is summoning elected officials of both major parties, labor and business leaders, his defeated rivals, and other worthies to join him around what Hartford Courant columnist Kevin Rennie mocks as “the magic table.”

“My door is open,” Lamont said the day after his election. “Any good idea, let’s go with it.”

This sounded like an admission that the campaign just concluded had failed to produce any good idea, not even one from the winner himself. But no one needs a magic table to be told those on government’s payroll want more taxes imposed to guarantee their sinecures, that business wants to avoid more taxes, and that everybody else would enjoy more stuff from government if it seemed to be free.

The only good reason for a conference around the magic table would be to invite the recent Republican gubernatorial candidate, Bob Stefanowski, to give the keynote address, since during the campaign he insisted, with only an hour or two reviewing the state budget, he could identify billions in “waste, fraud and abuse.” Stefanowski never got around to it during the campaign, but has graciously offered to help the new governor and should have time now.

Of course during the campaign the governor-elect himself never got very specific about how to budget amid financial disaster. Lamont declared himself both for and against raising taxes and endorsed every nice thing done by state and local government. But almost as much as Stefanowski he acted as if he had never heard that to govern is to choose.

Soon Lamont will have to write a budget, and welcoming “any good idea” will be meaningless, since one person’s good idea is another person’s outrage and the governor is the one who must decide which ideas are good.

So Lamont’s inclusive pose will not take him far before its emptiness becomes apparent. No painless gimmickry will save much money or produce much new revenue for state government. The people Lamont gathers around the magic table will volunteer little sacrifice, and he already knows what they want and don’t want.

Lamont might do better to question the mistaken premises of state government’s expensive failing policies. Indeed, an invitation to do so was thrust at him the day after the election by a report presented to the state Board of Education. Echoing a report issued in 2010, this one found that half the students admitted to the state university and community college systems take remedial high school courses.

That is, they never mastered high school work but were graduated anyway and even sent on to what, despite its remedial courses, calls itself higher education.

The state Board of Education affects puzzlement about this but its cause is obvious: Connecticut’s foremost educational policy, social promotion, the lack of any standards for advancement of students from grade to grade and for graduation from high school. The waste and duplication here are cosmic, yet Connecticut continues to pour money into higher education when primary education is failing.

Urgent audits of that policy failure and the failure of welfare policy to diminish poverty, urban policy to improve the cities, and government employee labor policy to produce efficiency might put the biggest special interests on the defensive and in a more cooperative mood, bringing some real magic to the table.