Connecticut’s economic boom in recent years has enabled the state legislature to perform a particularly dazzling trick: increasing spending while cutting taxes. It has even added the impressive extra flourish of large state surpluses. The current projected surplus for this year is $400 million. But as state lawmakers convened the 2001 session of the General Assembly this week, their bag of tricks was almost empty.

The spending programs put in place in recent years, along with long-term commitments to cut taxes and the expected economic slowdown in the months ahead, are going to present the legislators with a particularly daunting challenge. They must live within their self-imposed spending cap, which is tied to the rate of inflation.  Limiting spending with a surplus building up all around them may put strains on their resolve to adhere to the spending cap. Already there is talk of exempting some types of spending from the spending cap – most notably spending on education. This trick should be of particular interest to Newtown, which had its school funding from the state trimmed by nearly a half million dollars last year.

Before we get our hopes up, however, we should remember that state Democrats expanded their majorities in both the state House and Senate last November. Funding for education is one of the many issues where policy closely follows partisan paths. This year, Democrats favor a school funding plan that would increase aid to cities and highly populated towns by about $120 million. Republicans are lining up behind a plan that would divert extra money to the suburbs and small towns amounting to about $40 million.  Given the calculus of the legislature as it is currently configured, we can expect to see still more money head away from Newtown and toward city schools. Perhaps the best we can hope for is a year without further cuts to state support of Newtown’s schools.

We would like to remind our lawmakers in Hartford, as they embark on a new session, that notwithstanding their own experience on the state level, there has not been a great deal of new spending on the local level in recent years. And there certainly haven’t been any local tax cuts. The magnificent fiscal feats in Hartford, made manifest in large surpluses, have been underwritten increasingly by local property taxpayers who are becoming less and less dazzled by the tricks in the legislature as they write out bigger and bigger checks to the local tax collector.

We are reluctant to recommend that lawmakers abandon their spending cap. Will Rogers noted accurately that people have come to feel the same when the legislature is in session as when the baby gets hold of the hammer. Restraint should be hallmark of every legislative session. Given the state’s increasingly poor track record of supporting schools in Connecticut’s suburbs and small towns, however, this year the legislature should pull a rabbit out of its spending cap for the sake of quality education in Connecticut. That would be a trick we could all applaud.