Legislative session seemed more delusional than it was liberal

According to The New York Times, the Connecticut legislative session just concluded was the most “activist” and “liberal” session in memory as the state’s first formally Democratic governor (remember Lowell Weicker?) in 20 years got to work with another overwhelmingly Democratic General Assembly to enact the biggest tax increase in the state’s history.But a better way of describing the session might be “delusional” — and not because of the seemingly liberal bills that got the most attention, like those requiring paid sick days for certain workers, a ban on discrimination against people who have undergone sex changes and decriminalization of small amounts of marijuana. Those things are of little consequence. The mandatory paid sick days law will apply only to bigger service businesses, mainly waiters at large restaurants and nursing home workers, even as compensation of the latter is already determined mostly by state payments for the care of welfare patients. And nothing state government does will much affect the degree of drug use. The marijuana legislation will just spare courts some cases they strive to get rid of anyway and avoid giving some young people a criminal record. The important question of policy — whether drug criminalization works generally and ever could work as more than an employment program in criminal justice — wasn’t asked. Asking it would really have been liberal, or simply rational.A more serious and longstanding item in the liberal agenda, repeal of capital punishment, failed in the face of the trials of the perpetrators of the Petit family murders in Cheshire, as their acknowledged guilt in that atrocity overcame ideology for a couple of liberal senators, who temporarily withdrew support for repeal.No, the legislative session was delusional mainly for its wholehearted acceptance of Gov. Malloy’s pretended concessions from the state employee unions and his proposal to spend nearly a billion dollars to turn the University of Connecticut Health Center in Farmington into a bioscience center.For months the governor misled the state into thinking that he was asking the unions to give back compensation they were already getting. As it turned out, he sought only to slow their compensation’s rate of increase, and while he calculated his deal with the union leadership as being worth $1.6 billion in savings over two years, most of his calculations were only guesses involving policies that had not been undertaken before. The Legislature’s nonpartisan Office of Fiscal Analysis concluded the other day that less than 40 percent of the savings can be supported by any actual data. With his concessions agreement, the governor who campaigned on imposing Generally Accepted Accounting Principles on state budgeting ended up pulling numbers out of the air as casually as any of the predecessors he delighted in criticizing — and the Legislature happily obliged him by postponing GAAP implementation until the next biennial budget.As for the bioscience center, what would be the second biggest bonding project in state history was rushed through the Legislature without deliberation and even without much understanding of what a bioscience center might be apart from the construction jobs involved, supposedly thousands over a few years. Apparently the construction jobs were enough — just as the UConn Health Center generated a lot of construction jobs in the 1970s before becoming a white elephant and chronic money loser, and just as the Adriaen’s Landing redevelopment project in downtown Hartford generated a lot of construction jobs before coming to rest in the middle of the worst commercial real estate vacancy rate in the state.Similar results may be expected from the Malloy administration’s great transportation initiative, construction of a bus highway between Hartford and New Britain, for which no demand can be seen. If, as it seems in Connecticut’s new political arrangements, construction jobs can rationalize anything, at least pyramids and ditches, upon their completion, would not require perpetual subsidy. More practically, many schools throughout the state could use renovation. Ordinary road and bridge maintenance, which Connecticut long has neglected, also might employ many construction workers and actually achieve some social benefit without inflicting the need for permanent subsidy. But all that would be just … ordinary.Liberal or delusional, this legislative session may have succeeded mainly in spurring interest in residential real estate in Florida. Chris Powell is managing editor of the Journal Inquirer in Manchester.