While the weather may have been rather pleasant on January 8th, the new Connecticut legislative session opened that day with a rather ominous fiscal cloud overhead. According to the Office of Fiscal Analysis, the expected revenue for the year has once again been lowered, resulting in a projected $70 million deficit for FY2013.
A recent CT Mirror article paints an even more worrisome picture, reporting that “the built-in gap in the next state budget still exceeds $1 billion, despite emergency cuts by Malloy in November and a special deficit-mitigation session by lawmakers in mid-December.” In other words, if the state continues on this path Connecticut residents can expect a combined deficit totally upwards of $2 billion in the next two years.
In an attempt to eliminate this deficit, the state has warned cities and towns that they will likely see cuts in state aid, which municipal leaders warn will lead to increased property taxes.
At a January 16th meeting of the Connecticut Conference on Small Towns House Speaker J. Brendan Sharkey announced that it is “probably unlikely that we’re going to be able to hold cities and towns harmless again this year.”
For the past two years municipalities have been spared the pain of budget cuts, with their share of the pie (approximately 14.8 percent of the current budget) remaining unchanged.
This information may come as no surprise to the informed citizen, but what may alarm and infuriate some is Sharkey’s reasoning for the cuts to municipal aid. He remarked that the state is “running out of bullets” that it can use to cut the deficit.
If this is true, then where did all the bullets go?
One bullet was shot last year when the legislature implemented historic tax hikes on income, sales, corporations, and so-called luxuries. These increases were expected to net an additional $2.5 billion, but the legislature “shot wide”, resulting in an almost $95 million revenue shortfall in FY2012.
Shot two, which would have been logically aimed at state employees, was “jammed in the chamber” in August of 2011 when Malloy signed a four-year no-layoff clause with state unions.
And then, of course, there are the bullets that no politician is ever willing to fire: shots aimed at meaningful spending cuts in areas like employee pensions and healthcare, Medicaid, and welfare programs. Rather than reform these programs and fix the tax code, politicians instead take aim at the weakest and smallest aspects of spending.
So, when Brendan Sharkey says that the state is out of bullets with which to erase the upcoming deficit he is being somewhat disingenuous; the bullets are there, but no one is willing to fire them.
Rather, legislators seem to be hoping that taxpayers, in the words of Harry Callahan in the 1971 film Dirty Harry, have lost track of how many shots were fired “in all this excitement”.
Maybe they have lost count, but if legislators are going to once again refuse to fire the shots the state needs they should ask themselves one question come election time: “Do I feel lucky?” Well, do ya, punk?