Our Mutual Interests

With the inauguration Wednesday of Connecticut’s new Democratic governor, Dan Malloy, legislators and local officials staked out their starting positions for the great struggle over public finances that will follow the governor’s first major milestone: his budget message to the General Assembly on February 16. One of every five dollars the state expects to spend in 2011-2012 will be money it does not have. This practice of spending money that is not really there has put a $3.67 billion hole in Connecticut’s budget before the debate even begins. Anticipating all the cost cutting and “revenue enhancement” (new taxes) that must be shoveled into that hole in the coming months, municipalities, public employee unions, the business community, and every other special interest with a stake in the game has the same general objective: to make sure their own sacrifices are few and their benefits plentiful. It is their specific objectives that will spell trouble for the new governor and for the electorate trying to live under the weight of an indebted state.

It is the nature of interest groups to separate into camps to promote or defame proposed legislation, according to specific benefit or threat to that interest. For example, this week the Connecticut Conference of Municipalities unveiled its legislative agenda, which includes making a temporary increase in the local real estate conveyance tax permanent and enabling towns and cities to levy “local-option taxes” on hotels or meals or other local services. State employee unions, for their part, have already secured a promise from Mr Malloy to consider their proposals for streamlining state government as a means to avoid further contract concessions. The Connecticut Business and Industry’s public policy wish list includes reduced health care costs in the context of the private sector marketplace. Each, on its own, is a worth goal.

The trouble is we do not live in a world that long tolerates discrete interests. Our society, and all the people and institutions in it, are interdependent, and a system of legislating and governing based on yielding or resisting pressure from groups pushing exclusive interest over mutual interest is doomed. Local taxes on real estate and restaurant meals may help balance the municipal budget, but they only add to the burdens of fragile local economies. Letting unions set the agenda on smaller government is a dubious exercise in navel-gazing. And abandoning health care to the dictates of insurance and health care industry balance sheets will leave our health care system right where it is now: sick and getting sicker.

Our new governor’s greatest challenge may be to get first selectmen and mayors to care more about the profitability of local businesses and industries, union bosses to take up the cause of taxpayers, and corporate CEOs to worry as much about local public services as the next stockholders’ meeting. It sounds like a hard sell, but if the rise and fall of states, nations, and civilizations throughout history has taught us anything, it is that in the long run mutual interest trumps exclusive interest. Successful businesses depend on good schools, which depend on taxpayers with steady and well-paying jobs, which depend on successful businesses. There are countless other interdependencies, both obvious and subtle, that feed the health of our competitive and democratic system. The biggest challenge, in the end, may be to clear the air of polemics long enough to recognize our mutual interests and then work for them together.