Commentary –

Democrats Happy To Complain Idly As Rowland Delivers Bad News

By Chris Powell

Hearing their protests about the spending suspensions being imposed by Governor Rowland, you might think that leading Democratic state legislators would want to rush the General Assembly back to the Capitol in special session to undo his work or to rewrite the state budget more to their liking. After all, social program costs are running far ahead of what was budgeted, tax revenue is falling below expectations, and, to help keep the budget in balance, the governor is holding back spending on newer social programs.

But no. While the Democrats, with comfortable majorities in both houses, could seriously challenge the governor’s priorities for cutbacks, they don’t want a special session; they seem to want only to complain idly that Rowland, a Republican, is heartless. For as the budget shortfall for the fiscal year ending next July approaches $100 million and is thought likely to go as high as $300 million, about two percent of the budget, the Democrats must know that there will be no glory in merely rearranging the bad news. Rowland has mused about saving money by postponing repeal of the state inheritance tax, but as hard times bear down on Connecticut, that’s probably as close as anyone will get to raising taxes.

Thus the question becomes (if anyone really wants to press it) just a matter of finding someplace else to cut, which will only generate complaints someplace else, winning friends only at the expense of making enemies.

The governor may be fairly criticized for some of his discretionary cuts, particularly in programs aimed at the neediest, like new mental health programs. And yet where is the Democrat who would rescue those programs by arguing that Connecticut might do without certain expensive policies that, while not budget line items themselves, greatly inflate line items, policies like binding arbitration of public employee union contracts and criminalizing drugs?

So many Democratic legislators were so insistent on raising spending substantially that it required a special session of the legislature a few months ago to get the party’s caucus to accept the current budget, even with a five percent increase in spending that was especially generous amid indications that the economy was declining. And if a five percent increase was unbearably tight for the Democrats a few months ago, a special session to deal with the consequences of recession might be hell.

Indeed, Rowland may have begun his discretionary cutting with those new social programs precisely because such cutting reflects the legislature’s own priorities – last in, first out. That is, if, as Democratic leaders say, those new programs are so much more important than others, what took the Democrats so long to enact them? And, to cushion them against being cut to accommodate declining revenue, why didn’t the Democrats economize elsewhere?

The answer, of course, is that there is not much of a political constituency for treating mental illness. (Even the state Agriculture Department and the Permanent Commission on the Status of Women have more politically effective constituencies.) That is why the state closed its mental hospitals and sent the mentally ill to wander downtowns across the state talking to themselves. Connecticut’s prescription for mental illness is fresh air.

While Rowland himself has not fought any epic battles for fiscal restraint and instead has gone with the flow of good times, which nicely coincided with his election in 1994, he still may have more of a political talent than the Democrats for recognizing the flow, which, even before September 11, but much more so in the month since, has been toward sterner times. The federal government can print money to meet any exigency, to bail out the airline industry and others, all in the name of reviving the national economy, but any money raised and spent by state and municipal government has to be real, and it can’t be obtained without imposing a keenly felt burden on the people.

Besides, even as they push the federal government back into deficit spending, President Bush and Congress can be tough with the international terrorists against whom the country has gone to war. To be tough in tough times, governors have to do it with budgets. Agonizing over a world of hard choices may win votes in Democratic conventions and primaries, but it may not give the greater public the impression that someone other than the incumbent might do better at taking charge.

A Democrat who could go through the budget and show specifically how the Rowland administration has been neither especially prudent financially nor humane, and who could come up with a bottom line no greater than the current one, would be interesting and instructive – if only for his having to repudiate much of his own party’s work in the legislature. For example, the governor’s pet project, Adriaen’s Landing, still another reshuffling of downtown Hartford, would not be eating up hundreds of millions of dollars in bonding money better reserved for school construction and renovation, mental hospitals and assisted living facilities, and group homes for the retarded, hundreds of whom have languished on a waiting list for years, if most Democrats in the legislature hadn’t voted enthusiastically that way.

An interesting Democrat might even come close to getting elected – if only he could figure out how to get nominated.

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