Chris Powell: What’s lurking Ahead for Conn.?

MANCHESTER, Conn.

In an interview the other week, Connectitcut Gov. Ned Lamont sounded unenthusiastic about seeking a third term.

He complained that legislators and municipal officials parade through his office asking for goodies at state government expense even as the Trump administration is slashing away at financial aid to Connecticut, punching big holes in state government's finances.

The aid cuts don't seem well-reasoned, or reasoned at all. They may be merely malicious. But having long been persecuted by Democrats, even as Democrats concealed and dissembled about the corruption and incompetence of their own national administration, Trump now can exact enormous revenge. 

Just as Democrats long have thrived on the patronage power they invested in the presidency, losing that power is going to hurt.

A national recession and even a worldwide one may be coming, possibly triggered by Trump's leap into tariffs.

As a “sanctuary" state with several sanctimonious “sanctuary" cities, including New Haven, Connecticut may expect special hostility from the Trump administration, especially since the hostility is mutual here, as with the three Yale University professors who recently publicized their departure for Canada and attributed it to their detesting Trump. (Since Yale long has propelled Connecticut toward the looney left, these departures may be a good start.)

Lamont keeps saying he thinks that Connecticut is in good shape, but developments contradict him. 

Remarking the other week on the human needs that state government addresses, the governor noted that about 40 percent of the babies born in Connecticut are born to mothers on Medicaid, which, among other groups, provides medical insurance for the indigent. But he didn't grasp the bigger significance of that data.

That is, people who can't support themselves shouldn't be having children -- or else these are people who recently have fallen out of the middle class as times get harder.

Homelessness in Connecticut is rising again along with rents and housing prices, which have been driven up by inflation and state government's failure to clear the way for less-expensive housing. 

Connecticut's food pantries are experiencing much heavier demand. 

Student proficiency in the state keeps declining as schools graduate illiterates and near-illiterates without prompting concern from many in authority. The failing, insolvent and poorly managed school systems in Hartford and Bridgeport are undergoing financial audits by a state education bureaucracy that seems almost as large, inscrutable, and disconnected as the failing school systems themselves. But the educational  results  of those school systems are  not  being audited.

These developments don't suggest that Connecticut is in good shape. They suggest that parts of the state are sliding deeper into poverty and ignorance.  

The more that the Trump administration slashes federal financial aid to state government, the more cautious the governor properly becomes about state spending. But the legislators, municipal officials and special interests parading through his office with their hands out still can't imagine financial restraint. They think that state government has a large budget surplus and they want to spend it regardless of whether big cuts in federal aid will have to be covered. But they refuse to see that the surplus is only technical, the flip side of state government's still grossly overcommitted pension funds.

That is, the surplus is really just money borrowed from pension obligations, money that, if spent, will increase the heavy tax burden of the pension funds.

Lamont is often portrayed as a moderate Democrat. But he is moderate only insofar as he fears that overspending will produce state budget deficits and tax increases that will alienate voters. He is firmly part of his party's far left in toleration of illegal immigration, transgenderism, racial preferences and manufacturing and coddling poverty.

Other than the blindly ambitious, who would want to be governor amid what lurks ahead?

Even so, Trump's slashing of federal aid just might be the tonic that Connecticut needs to force audits of everything in state government and compel hard but necessary and ultimately beneficial choices. As long as state government remains a pension and benefit society for its employees -- the only people whom state government  guarantees  to take care of -- it won't even be trying to serve the public. 

Chris Powell has written about Connecticut government and politics for many years (CPowell@cox.net).