Chris Powell of the Journal
Inquirer has done it again.
Another excellent editorial
which helps to define our state….
Don’t miss a word as Powell
ends his editorial appropriately stating
“The government employee
unions run his party,
the
majority party, and thus the whole state and that's that”.
**********
Malloy had no choice with budget cuts,
and he doesn't want ...one
By Chris Powell,
the managing editor of the Journal Inquire Sept 23, 2015.
As the pretense of a reviving economy crumbles and Connecticut and the
country sink deeper into recession, Governor Malloy has imposed $103 million in
emergency cuts on the state budget.
State hospitals will see a loss in financial aid of about
$190 million, since the reduction in state aid to them will prompt cuts in aid
from the federal government as well.
As they already have absorbed big cuts from the Malloy
administration, the hospitals are complaining bitterly. But the hospitals can
recover the money by raising charges to patients with medical insurance, so the
cut in aid is really another hidden tax increase on that insurance. Besides,
while nominally nonprofit, most hospitals still pay their executives
extravagantly, as a spokesman for the governor noted Tuesday, even though the
governor himself just arranged the appointment of his chief of staff to a cushy
state college administrator job paying $335,000 per year.
Since state aid to municipalities is being cut as well, also
complaining bitterly are municipal officials and legislators most sympathetic
to municipal employee unions, like House Speaker Brendan Sharkey, D-Hamden.
Sharkey says cuts in municipal aid should not have been made until the
legislature had more time to consider the recommendations of a committee
appointed to propose efficiencies in municipal government, whose prospective
savings were built into the budget before they were specified and quantified.
But the legislature has had decades to find efficiencies in
municipal government -- or, rather, to figure out how to cut costs on the
municipal level without taking anything away from municipal employee unions,
whose members consume as much as 75 percent of municipal budgets. (Just how
much can towns economize on heating oil and toilet paper in municipal
buildings?) The prospective savings from the study committee were really just
another "employee suggestion box," the savings provision inserted
into the governor's first budget to make it look balanced long enough so the
General Assembly could go home before it was discovered that there were no
suggestions and no savings, just a deficit needing to be covered.
Bitter complaints also come from nonprofit social service
agencies, which are to suffer more aid cuts too. The head of the Connecticut Association
of Nonprofits calls the cuts "unconscionable."
But none of these complaints is worth anything because no
complainer offers any alternative for the governor. For awful
as the governor's cuts may seem, they are exactly what state law requires when
revenue falls short.
That is, state law exempts nearly all of government's
biggest costs, personnel, from emergency cutting by the governor and municipal
officials. The compensation of most government employees is set by union
contract and not alterable without union consent. Further, state law sets these
union contracts through binding arbitration, which makes the union interest
equal to the public interest.
State law thereby proclaims that the highest objective of
government in Connecticut
is not service to the public but only the contentment of government's own
employees.
Public health and safety, the mentally handicapped,
neglected children, the deranged and addicted, education -- you name it -- in
Connecticut, if it's not compensation for a government employee, it is a mere
incidental. Yet there are no complaints about this.
The Republican minority leader in the state House of
Representatives, Themis Klarides
of Derby, more
or less acknowledged this on Tuesday as she urged the governor to seek
concessions from the state employee unions so the emergency cuts could be
mitigated.
But if the governor ever wanted public service to come ahead
of government employees, he would have asked for such concessions on his own.
The government employee unions run his party, the majority party, and thus the
whole state and that's that.
-----
Chris Powell is managing editor of the Journal Inquirer.