Public workers protected, innocent needy suffer

Another day, another state budget, this one proposed by the Democratic majority of the General Assembly’s Appropriations Committee. It makes tens of millions of dollars in reductions to state government agencies and services, including services to the innocent needy, but there is nothing programmatic about it, no reconsideration of major policies, just across-the-board cuts.

The Senate chairwoman of the committee, Beth Bye, D-West Hartford, said, “There are no sacred cows in this budget.”

But some line items, like education, get cut proportionately less than others even as the need for that education spending is less compelling than services to the innocent needy. If education doesn’t quite remain a “sacred cow,” it is still a cow that gets too much deference, particularly with state grants to municipal school systems, whose enrollments have fallen steadily while their spending has kept rising.

Then there is higher education — the University of Connecticut, the regional state universities, and the community colleges — where extravagance abounds, especially at the first two components, state policy being that even students who fail to master high school should be subsidized in obtaining college degrees.

But the across-the-board approach is how cutting will have to be done in state budgeting until the supplicants with better claims find the courage to criticize the less compelling appropriations and until legislators realize how their having put huge expenses outside the ordinary democratic process – labor and welfare expenses — making them untouchable “fixed costs,” has cannibalized government.

Such political adjustment may take years, and much harm will be done to the innocent needy as those who have achieved “fixed cost” status strive to preserve their privilege despite any indecency. The innocent needy will be cast into the street even as state and municipal governments keep paying raises as only government employees have been given contract guarantees. This will be the price of Connecticut’s corrupted political leadership, and the price of an ever-less educated public that pays ever less attention to what is done in its name with its money.

But at least the government class senses that its privileges are at risk, as evidenced last week by the apoplectic reaction of a state employee union leader to incisive criticism by the Yankee Institute for Public Policy.

Yankee noted that while state employee unions are always clamoring to preserve their privileges by raising taxes on “the rich” — the middle class not finding those privileges worth raising taxes on itself — the unions don’t operate their own dues systems that way. Yankee concluded that union dues are essentially a “flat tax,” with higher-paid union members charged the same as lower-paid members.

Yankee figured that union dues have not been made proportionate to a member’s income because then higher-paid members, having achieved a certain prosperity and seniority, would be more likely to quit to avoid higher dues. The union rationale for this, Yankee noted, is actually the rationale for not taxing “the rich” more, a rationale against the more progressive taxation the unions advocate for the rest of society. That is, as with high-paid and seniority-protected union members, if “the rich” were taxed more they might leave.

Asked about Yankee’s criticism, a spokesman for Council 4 of the American Federation for State, County, and Municipal Employees union, Larry Dorman, sputtered: “The Yankee Institute is a rightwing front group whose goal is to degrade public service, weaken unions, and put even more money in the pockets of rich folks and corporations.”

Maybe so, but how did that sputtering explain the lack of progressivity in union dues?