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Posts published in “Guest”

Government Unions Target Fiscal Sanity in Connecticut

Connecticut taxpayers, saddled with a pension system for state workers and teachers marked by decades of underfunding, glimpsed a ray of hope in 2017 when legislators embarked on a path toward accountability and fiscal discipline by enacting “fiscal guardrails.”

Now, state unions under the umbrella of the State Employees Bargaining Agent Coalition are clamoring for the removal of the fiscal guardrails that were constructed to prevent the same unions from driving taxpayers over the cliff. The staggering state debt of more than $80 billion, including unfunded pension debt from the state workers’ and teachers’ pension funds, bonded debt, and health-care liabilities, was the result of years of irresponsibility and political horse-trading with state unions that were all too eager to negotiate benefits without a sustainable funding plan.

Read in National Review

For a CT constitutional amendment, enshrining the “fiscal guardrails”

Omitted from Gov. Lamont’s 35-minute State of the State budget address Feb. 7 was a two-word phrase that hangs over every important issue and initiative that will arise in the critical short session of the General Assembly this year.

February 26, 2024

“Fiscal guardrails,’’ may not mean much to the public outside of Hartford, but it casts a long shadow over the business in the Capitol over the next three months. If on May 9 we can look back and see that our elected leaders preserved our budgetary restraints and chose to live within our means, then this session will have been a success.

Republicans have doubled down in support of the fiscal guardrails they have long supported and that were finally adopted in 2017 into state law in overwhelmingly bipartisan fashion. We have proposed codifying the state’s existing budgetary constraints — spending and borrowing caps, and use of excess revenue restrictions, known as the volatility cap — into our State Constitution.

Read in Hartford Courant

CT Gov Lamont’s ugly tactics draw outrage

Gov. Ned Lamont continues to baffle. He often portrays himself as a leader above grimy politics and then he goes and spoils his pose by acting like a lifelong hack. This month the contrasts were at their sharpest and most disappointing.

February 23, 2024

At the start of February, Lamont replaced Robert Rinker from the position the former union leader held on the State Contracting Standards Board, or SCSB. Rinker and others like him are essential to the efficient and honest operation of important parts of state government. They make sure state officials are abiding by the rules.

Rinker was a model member, which means he made Lamont and his administration unhappy by telling the truth. The SCSB has raised issues about contracts for the cost of the State Pier project in New London.

Jean Morningstar, a Democrat appointed to the board by former Gov. Dannel P. Malloy, said she was “outraged and disgusted” by Lamont’s move, calling it “politically motivated” and “personal.”

Read in Hartford Courant

A Conservative Billionaire’s Unrestricted Gift to Harvard

The Supreme Court struck a symbolic blow to Harvard University this June by declaring its racial admissions preferences illegal. It remains to be seen what stratagems Harvard will use to try to continue engineering racial diversity. One thing is certain, however: the university will pay no price in reputation or in philanthropic support for the Court’s rebuke.

To understand just how confident Harvard can be in its irresistible appeal to donors, consider one of its recent windfalls. In April 2023, hedge-fund manager Kenneth Griffin bestowed $300 million on the university, close to the largest single donation in the institution’s history.

Griffin’s cumulative giving to the school now totals over $500 million, spread between the education, law, and business schools, as well as other entities. In exchange for this latest gift, Harvard renamed its graduate division the Kenneth C. Griffin Graduate School of Arts and Sciences.

Business as usual, you may think; another billionaire plowing treasure into an institution whose values are, at best, in tension with American traditions and, at worst, antithetical to them. But Griffin is a conservative.

Read in City Journal

Read excerpt in The Wall Street Journal

Read here on The Red Line

Harvard Discriminates Against Middle-Class Kids

Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard exposed how Ivy League admissions favored not only blacks and Hispanics but also the children of affluent alumni and donors at the expense of others—especially Asian-Americans.

Three economists found that for high-school graduates between 2010-15, a legacy or a child of a donor or faculty who ranked in the top 20% of his high-school class was four to six times as likely to be admitted as other students with similar qualifications.

Harvard claims its legacy preferences serve a “community-building function” and that scrapping the practice might jeopardize alumni “generous financial support.”

Read in The Wall Street Journal

Read here on The Red Line

Debt Isn’t a Crisis

The other day Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen warned that the refusal by Republicans in Congress to raise the debt ceiling would cause a “constitutional crisis” that might cripple the economy and financial system as the government ran out of money and defaulted on some of its bonds.

May 17, 2023 - Scroll down for second part of two-part column

Nonsense. Because it retains the power of money creation, the federal government can never run out of money. It can create money to infinity. The government prefers not to create money so frankly, since it might be inflationary, but the government has the power.

Read in Journal Inquirer - 2nd of two-part column

Read here on The Red Line

Republicans Are Right to Demand a ‘Dirty’ Debt Limit Bill

President Biden portrays House Republicans as hostage-takers for demanding that deficit savings accompany any debt limit increase. He maintains that “clean” debt limit bills reflect typical Washington practice.

The president's position is the one that actually represents the departure from Washington norms and precedents.

For decades, the debt limit served as a legitimate tool for both Republicans and Democrats to address budget deficits. Indeed, of the eight largest deficit-reduction laws since 1985, all eight were attached to debt limit bills.

Read in Daily Beast

Read here on The Red Line

CT’s investment performance badly lags nation

If Connecticut had even average annual investment performance from its underwhelming pension funds, our tax burden would dramatically decrease.

Connecticut’s previous treasurers provided this state, consistently, with one of the single worst investment track records of all 50 states, as our Yale research team found through an original, comparative 50-state analysis of state pension fund investment performance.

Read in CT Insider

Read here on The Red Line