Connecticut Commentary: Red Notes from a Blue State

What does the Republican Party need to do to wrest control of the fate of Connecticut from dominant Democrats who outnumber Republicans in the state by a two to one margin? Pollsters tell us that unaffiliateds slightly outnumber Democrats. Will a change in the party chairmanship do it?

Martin Looney United Technologies (UTC), yet another home grown Connecticut institution, has flown the coop – this time for Boston, Massachusetts, the state’s chief corporate poacher. The day after the announcement had been made, the state’s Democrat spinmeisters were busy putting a happy face on the event. We discover from a Hartford Courant piece that pretty much everyone in the state was surprised by the announcement. Political cuckholds are always the last to know when their best laid plans are torn asunder.

While Connecticut Democrats were busying themselves thumping President Donald Trump during the recently concluded elections – the state’s all Democrat US Congressional Delegation would not shed a tear if U.S. Senator Dick Blumenthal, Speaker of the US House Nancy Pelosi and US Senator Chuck Schumer were to succeed in impeaching him – Trump has delivered the goods to The Provision State. The state’s underperforming economy may finally join the rest of the nation, much of which had recovered from the Great Recession many moons ago, in a splendid recovery – just in time too. Economists in Connecticut have not titled the coming jobs boom The Trump Bump, although a recent Hartford Business Journal (HBJ) report, “ UTC’s 4Q profits jump 73%; CEO Hayes airs separation plans HBJ ” comes dangerously close.

We cannot know yet what a Ned Lamont administration will be like. Fate is always a work in progress. But it seems a reasonable assumption that there will be Democrat Party continuity between the Malloy and Lamont administrations; both Lamont and Malloy are progressive Democrats. Lamont did stress during his campaign that he had run for governor against Malloy, but this was largely a feint for show. Nothing in the Lamont campaign suggests a policy break with Malloy. Moreover, the election results have returned Connecticut to the status quo ante as it existed during Malloy’s first campaign. Republicans had made some inroads to power during the Malloy administration. Prior to the November elections – a stunning victory for the majority party in Connecticut -- Republicans were at parity with Democrats in the Senate and trailing them by a few seats in the House. The election washed out these gains.

Milton Friedman once said, “If you put the federal government in charge of the Sahara Desert, in five years there’d be a shortage of sand.” If you put socialists in charge of countries, you soon will create shortages of toilet paper, which is the case in Venezuela, reduced to rubble by Hugo Chavez and his successor Nicolás Maduro. No one was surprised last week when Bloomberg announced that rich Venezuelans are fleeing the country – now an economic desert – for more profitable ventures elsewhere: “ Wealthy Venezuelans Are Seeking Haven in Madrid. " Something similar is happening in Connecticut. Tax money “invested” by Governor Dannel Malloy in Connecticut businesses is not working to create a welcoming business environment. “Once again, a Connecticut company making a major investment in its digital business has been lured by another state offering tax breaks and the chance to succeed in a big city,” the Hartford Courant tells us. This time it’s United Technologies (UTC)...

“The past was erased, the erasure was forgotten, the lie became truth” – George Orwell, 1984 The “constant sniping and cherry-picking bad news from the good” has given Connecticut Speaker of the House of Representatives Brendan Sharkey heart palpitations. In a Hartford Courant column , Mr. Sharkey writes: “Rather than attempt to establish themselves as credible participants in our state's democratic process, the Republicans will say or do anything in an attempt to gain a political advantage, no matter how harsh or misleading, and without regard to the negative effects their behavior has on Connecticut's economy or its future.

The two most abhorrent but inescapable duties of politicians are: 1) selling themselves or their states to prospective investors, and 2) raising money for political campaigns. Connecticut politicians who do not like dunking for dollars hope to relieve themselves of the second chore through the public financing of campaigns. Whether or not the first is a disagreeable chore depends upon the individual politician and the condition of his product.

The deficit is back. Like an aging coquette, it appears and disappears around corners, smiling fetchingly at us: Here today, gone tomorrow, back again the next day. It appears that the skeletons came out of the closet a few days after Governor Dannel Malloy, the seven members of  Connecticut’s all Democratic U.S. Congressional Delegation, members of the all-Democratic State Constitutional Offices and Democrat legislators who dominate the General Assembly were returned to office. Faced with an “unexpected” state deficit, Ben Barnes, the Head of Governor Malloy's Office of Policy Management, said that Connecticut should perhaps expect chronic deficits in the future, a thunderclap that caught the notice of some papers. Mr. Barnes may have been mistaken by some, if only for a moment, for Jonathan Gruber, an MIT Don dripping with ivy and one of the architects of President Barack Obama’s Health Care initiative. Mr. Gruber is on record as having said in various venues that Ob...

Formal endorsements may not mean very much in the modern political theater, which tends to rely on political hype produced by paid assassins, Twitter feeds and political Facebook sites, but this one might prove to be the exception that proves the rule. Reticent former Governor Jodi Rell has fulsomely endorsed Republican gubernatorial nominee Tom Foley. “For far too long,” Mrs. Rell wrote , “Connecticut has been under one-party rule — not the balanced two-party system our founders intended. Governor Malloy, with the support of the Democrat-controlled legislature, enacted the largest tax increase in Connecticut history — a tax increase that has acted like a brake on the economy.

For every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction – Newton’s Third Law of Motion The best way to persuade someone in Connecticut to vote for you is to buy their vote. Progressives, who nowadays take money from the middle class and give it to one-percenters, do this with a certain reckless abandon: Does anyone truly believe that that Aetna Insurance Company really needed the money given to it by Governor Dannel Malloy to survive? Of course there are problems when the money to purchase a vote in Connecticut is taken from taxpayers who, given the parlous state of the economy after the Democratic hegemon has taken its share, are drowning in high taxes and liberty strangulating regulations. To be sure, the debts of the average Connecticut taxpayer are considerably less than those of national taxpayers following four years on President Barack Obama’s economic death row. But almost always the state taxpayer and the national taxpayer are one and the same person, since ...

In any tousle between business and government, business usually has the last word, and more often than not the word is, “We’re outta here.” Sikorsky Aircraft, a Connecticut company of long standing, has initiated two rounds of job cuts. Early in 2010, Sikorsky President Jeff Pino, “under marching orders to raise the division's profits,” according to a news story , boasted to stock analysts, “We've nearly tripled the amount of direct production labor hours from 2006 to 2009. And for the first time in the history of our company, more than half of our hours are outside of Connecticut. We're very proud of that because outside of Connecticut, as I told you last year, by definition is low-cost sourcing." Having met his goal of a 10 percent profit margin in 2010, Pino presently is aiming for 14 percent by 2014. Playing its strategy close to its vests, company officials declined to share details of the cost saving cuts with Connecticut’s Democratic congressional delega...

“Exit pursued by bear” – Shakespeare’s stage direction in a play In search of lower business costs, Hamilton Sunstrand in Windsor Locks has announced that it will lay off more than 20 percent of its union workforce. The company, a part of United Technologies, plans to move jobs to Poland, not a state contiguous to Connecticut, and other former Soviet block countries where salaries are lower, regulations less punishing and unions but a blip on the horizon. According to a report in the Hartford Courant, “Hamilton President Alain M. Bellemare has told investors at previous earnings announcements that ‘we are laser-focused on executing our cost-reduction strategy’ by doing manufacturing and engineering in developing and former Soviet bloc countries.” Coincidentally, Republicans yesterday presented their no-new-tax budget , which was immediately denounced by Malloy spokesperson Roy Occhiogrosso as a threat to Connecticut’s all embracing safety net. The Republicans plan calls f...