Bipartisan budget key to restoring state’s economy
Divisions among the legislature’s Democrats are making adopting a budget for the next two years more difficult than it ought to be.
Gov. Ned Lamont likes his budgets done in the spring — before the legislature adjourns its regular session in early June. It announces to the world that Connecticut can get its business done without brinkmanship and drama. They like it that way in tony Greenwich.
The immediate challenge for Lamont is that he has a lot of Democrats in the legislature and many do not see the world the same way he does. The 20 Senate Democrats are more fractious than their 97 Democratic colleagues in the House.
The Senate Democrats want to raise a load of taxes because the insatiable appetites of state government come first. They would, in the words of Margaret Thatcher, “rather the poor were poorer provided the rich were less rich.”
Leaders among the House Democrats are less ideological and are happy to go along with Lamont on a budget with few tax increases as long as the budget is salted with money for friends, allies and favorite projects. There appear not to be enough House Democrats ready to go along with Lamont’s more sensible tax and spending plan to pass it, so a stalemate looms.
One challenge for Lamont is that he is more popular with the public than with left-wing legislators. His first year as governor, 2019, was not a success.
Last year, the Greenwich Democrat earned the public’s approval with his modulated leadership during the coronavirus pandemic. That accomplishment did nothing, however, to improve his weak legislative affairs team because the legislature adjourned for the year last March.
This would be an appropriate time for the governor to explain how the assumptions he made in the two-year, $46 billion budget
proposal he unveiled in February have changed.
There will be a lot of federal coronavirus recovery money flowing into the state, and tax receipts are up. Connecticut businesses, we now know, face almost $1 billion in unemployment benefits obligations.
We also know that the legislature has no intention of allowing the public to enter the Capitol complex between now and its June 9 adjournment. Democratic leaders have abandoned any pretext of heeding the science of bigger safe gatherings.
I’m sorry to tell you this: They don’t like the public. The idea of the needy masses appeals to them as long as they are somewhere else. Legislators are especially happy not to have their reveries interrupted by lobbyists and others administering regular doses of reality in the hallways of power. They can shut us out but not shut us up. We are at another critical moment. The state is still far from reaching the number of jobs it had before the 2008 recession. Connecticut leaders often mistake short-term upturns for longterm trends. Beleaguered Republicans in the legislature should go to Lamont and offer to pass his balanced budget with no tax increases.
Lamont knows all about sudden economic reversals of fortune. It’s part of his heritage.
Ten days before the historic Oct.
29, 1929, stock market crash that is marked in history as the start of the Great Depression, Thomas Lamont, the governor’s great grandfather and founder of his family fortune, wrote a 20-page letter to President Herbert Hoover.
As the crisis gathered its destructive force that grim October, Thomas Lamont, “acting head of J.P. Morgan and the leading financier in the nation,” according to Kenneth Whyte’s book, “Hoover: An Extraordinary Life in Extraordinary Times,” reassured the nervous president, “advising faith in the markets and proclaiming it wonderful that small investors were continuing to put their life savings in stocks.”
Hoover wrote at the time that the letter was “fairly amazing.” Indeed.
The governor’s ancestor continued to cheer lead as the market kept falling. On Black Thursday afternoon, Lamont proclaimed, he and other moguls had confidence in the market and the economy. Mercy, he was grievously wrong.
The American economy is the world’s most remarkable, a model of innovation and resilience. Connecticut’s has been neither in the last 30 years. A bipartisan no-tax increase budget will help to restore those attributes to Connecticut’s economy.
You need not be Thomas Lamont to know that.