“Better the occasional faults of government that lives in a spirit of charity than consistent omissions of a government frozen in the ice of its own indifference.”
Franklin Delano Roosevelt, whose sweeping New Deal reforms transformed post-depression America, spoke these words in a rousing nomination speech that he delivered at the Democratic National Convention on June 27, 1936. FDR also set a new governance ideal for the Democratic Party: to use a “spirit of charity” in order to create, support, and sustain government institutions, recognizing that they are not businesses or commodities, but a public good.
Democrats in Connecticut hold all of the levers of power, including a veto-proof supermajority in the state house and senate. But despite the state’s $480.3 million General Fund surplus and overflowing reserves, Connecticut Democrats have subordinated the public good to an even “higher” ideal: the fiscal guardrails.
Years of contrived austerity have demonstrated to voters that no public good (indeed, nothing at all!) is more important than aggressively paying off Connecticut’s pension debts and filling up the state’s Budget Reserve Fund, which will top $6 billion this year.
Gov. Ned Lamont, a Democrat and the most influential champion of the guardrails, closed this year’s legislative session with the claim of “no new taxes.” Perhaps this is true on your W-2, and the withholding of state taxes from your salary (already among the highest in the nation) will not change. But our municipal taxes are at record highs, because the fiscal guardrails merely shift the burden of supporting underfunded services away from the state onto local governments.
Despite Connecticut having one of the highest effective state tax rates in the country, the system of guardrails and caps has meant dramatically less support of our state institutions. This only hurts the people who need their services most, who already are under strain from regressive state taxes.
Steep cuts to our public colleges and universities make as much sense as putting regular gas in a Corvette. It may save a few bucks in the short term, but it will result in degraded performance and damage that are far more costly in the long term. Students and their families pay the repair bill with increased tuition on top of their sky-high taxes. State support for UConn, for example, is 30% lower today than it was in 2008; it should come as no surprise that tuition is now 20% higher, and rising.
We should start calling the fiscal guardrails what they are: a regressive tax. “Fiscal guardrails” is too kind a euphemism for a generational wealth transfer that makes today’s taxpayers pay for the sins of previous administrations.
Governor Lamont has made stringent enforcement of the guardrails his signature policy. But he has failed to justify to Connecticut taxpayers how the benefits of making aggressive debt repayments outweigh the costs of harm to our state institutions in the here-and-now.
Keeping our state institutions in a state of perpetual financial crisis means that more time gets spent on budget triage than helping people who need their services. This is hardly a fiscally responsible use of the few tax dollars that the state is actually able to appropriate for the budget.
What was enacted by legislation can be changed by legislation, and the supermajority possessed by Connecticut Democrats removes any impediments to putting constitutional amendments on the table. Our lawmakers cannot continue to pretend as though there is no legal process to make even small adjustments to the caps or to draw funds from the Budget Reserve Fund.
Investing our hard earned tax dollars into debt repayments and amassing huge cash reserves while willfully cutting critical social services is the very definition of what FDR warned us about: a “government frozen in the ice of its own indifference.”
Yonatan Miller lives in West Hartford.