Budget squabbles don't help state or UConn

By: Editorial Board

Posted: 3/20/09

Connecticut currently faces a massive budget deficit - a $1.35 billion gap between planned state governmental expenditures and actual state tax revenue. Such a mighty challenge calls for a courageous, intelligent response from state leaders. Connecticut needs a fiscal Churchill - but it'll be lucky to get a Chamberlain.

The gap isn't really surprising. The massive blow the American financial industry has suffered is going to hit Connecticut particularly hard, given Connecticut's massive financial industry and the hordes of (formerly) well-off highly-taxed Fairfield County-ites on whom the state budget relied.

But what is surprising is the incredibly childish way in which Gov. Jodi M. Rell and the state's Democratic legislators have handled the looming deficit.

Rell has proposed combating the deficit by asking state employees to voluntarily agree to salary concessions and - with Democrats' consent - draw cash from funds allocated for purposes ranging from energy conservation to stem cell research. These are precisely the sort of new-industry babies Connecticut needs to maintain its competitive edge right now, rather than throw out with the bathwater in a time of need.

What Rell hasn't proposed is any tax increases. Rell's "tax abstinence-only" approach to balancing Connecticut's budget aims to cut "bureaucratic bloat" while praying that Connecticut receives at least $2 billion from the federal stimulus package to salvage the budget gap - though, even if Connecticut does get that much cash from the federal government, there's still little chance of bridging the projected 2-year deficit, which some hypothesize may run as high as $8 billion.

In response to Rell's unwarranted optimism, the legislature's Democrats have shot back with a blast of amateur apocalypticism.

After having failed to find $220 million in cost cuts, Democrats voluntarily offered three plans on March 9 that would cut $2 billion. The Democrats' plan proposes to close two prisons, two state parks, two of UConn's regional campuses, six community-technical colleges and one of the Connecticut State University system's four campuses - as well as eliminate $200 million a year in cost-sharing funds for local township public education.

And, of course, the Democrats' proposed cuts came with the addendum that the Democrats found them inarguably unacceptable. In an excellent use of time in the face of impending crisis, our legislature has seen fit to dawdle with self-avowedly useless fearmongering, a fact Rell's spokesman rightly pointed out.

But the purported belief that enough palatable cuts could be found to repair the deficit without tax increases was a shell game from the beginning, too, as Senate Republican leader John McKinney of Fairfield correctly noted in mid-Feburary. Obviously, it's the one group in Connecticut's political ecosystem willing to admit a shred of truth - the legislature's Republicans - who have absolutely no control in the fight between the Republican Rell and the Democrat-controlled legislature. Once again, Connecticut's finances find themselves in able hands.