Only cuts of monumental proportions can reform Connecticut

Seeking the Republican nomination for governor in the primary Aug. 10, Lt. Gov. Michael Fedele has signed the “taxpayer protection pledge� sponsored by Americans for Tax Reform, a pledge to “oppose and veto any and all efforts to increase taxes.� The gubernatorial candidate endorsed by the Republican state convention, Thomas C. Foley, hasn’t gone quite that far but promises to oppose tax increases unless they are balanced by tax cuts.

The third contender in the Republican primary for governor, Nelson “Oz� Griebel, echoes Fedele and Foley about the need to cut spending, starting with perks of state employment, but can’t help wondering aloud whether taxes will have to be raised to improve the state’s transportation network.

In any case, it’s plain that the three Republicans are far more opposed to raising taxes than the two contenders in the Democratic primary for governor, convention-endorsed Dan Malloy and challenger Ned Lamont. Malloy, the more candid when he is pressed, concedes that he’d probably have to raise taxes to fill two-thirds of the likely revenue gap that will face the next state budget, a gap around 20 percent. Lamont says he thinks he’ll need less than Malloy in new taxes but his lack of specifics inspires little confidence.

So the Republicans would raise taxes far less than the Democrats, if at all. But of course that is only part of the story.

An equal part of the story is the enormous spending cuts that will be required by any restraint on taxes, cuts that will go far beyond long-term changes in the state employee pension system, about which the Republicans like to talk and about which even the Democrats will talk a little because such changes wouldn’t affect anyone on the payroll now.

Since there won’t be much time to rethink the many faulty and expensive premises of state spending before a new budget must be proposed and enacted, cuts are likely to be made across the board with more regard to politics than humaneness. Any no-tax-increase budget devised before the election might horrify people as much as tax increases would.

Being already effectively bankrupt, Connecticut might avoid painful cuts only if the next governor commanded or persuaded everyone drawing his livelihood from state and municipal government to provide their current services for 20 percent less compensation. The economy is so bad that substitute employees and vendors probably  would be available at a 20 percent discount. But any attempt at economizing so dramatically might make the General Assembly even more the tool of the many dependent groups, leaving the governor with only his veto power and his willingness to run the state by executive order in the absence of a budget.

In turn, of course, the veto power will depend on a firm anti-tax minority in either house of the General Assembly of one-third its members plus one. So this year’s legislative election may be almost as important as the election for governor.

Connecticut’s government class is so smug and oblivious that only horrifying cuts will get its attention. Only once a horrifying budget is in place or, without one, only once the governor is ruling by decree and making such cuts arbitrarily will state government feel compelled to examine its most expensive faulty policies:

Employment policy. Under current law nearly all public employees must be unionized and their contracts placed outside the democratic process through binding arbitration. As a result, public employees are compensated far better than the average worker, their compensation takes priority over everything else in government, and government becomes little more than a pension and benefit society for its employees, whose operation is what government does best.

Poverty and urban policy. Despite billions in state spending over the last five decades, there are more poor people than ever in Connecticut and its cities have disintegrated even as they have been loaded with redevelopment projects and social workers.

Education policy. More equalized spending among school systems, underwritten with billions of new state appropriations, was supposed to equalize academic achievement. It hasn’t even come close. But Connecticut’s educators are the best paid in the country.

Drug policy.  For decades drug policy has filled Connecticut’s prisons with members of minority groups and has provided excellent employment for police, prosecutors, judges, and guards at a cost of hundreds of millions each year without any decline in the use of illegal drugs. State government is glad to imprison half the young men of color as long as the other half can be hired to guard them.

Chris Powell is managing editor of the Journal Inquirer in Manchester.