Free lunch and abortion
NO DELIVERY FAILURES YESTERDAY.
9 February—If you missed Ned Lamont’s biennial budget performance at the Connecticut Capitol yesterday (as I made it a point to do), here’s a link to the whole 892-page exercise in politically expedient bullshit:
https://portal.ct.gov/OPM/Bud-Budgets/2024-2025-Biennial-Budget/FY-2024-2025-Biennial-Budget
Ned didn’t disappoint or surprise. Neither did the big-mouths of both parties. Same old, same old yet again yet again. The Democrats predictably bitched that the proposed budget didn’t have enough to waste—whoops, make that spend—on social programs; and the Republicans predictably bitched that it didn’t have enough reductions in spending and taxes.
Both sides are, as usual, merely playing to their bases. The Democrats just want to buy votes wherever they can find them, which is invariably wherever they distribute their alms; and the Republicans, knowing full well they can’t do anything at all with Connecticut’s seemingly invincible Democrat trifecta, are just posturing to keep up appearances.
The brand-new overpaid University of Connecticut president, whoever the hell she is at the moment, portending things to come, complains that the new budget doesn’t give her grossly mismanaged and overadministrated party school enough to even cover expenses, thus forcing already shamefully overpriced UConn to raise its tuition yet another 19 percent. Talk about dead wood.
Abortion ought to be an enumerated right in the U.S. Constitution along with privacy. (Count on an amendment to that effect being passed the same time the Second Amendment is repealed.) But the very idea proposed in this shameful budget for Connecticut to actually pay for transportation, lodging, and other expenses associated with access to abortion care and contraceptives for out-of-state women who can’t get them in their home states is positively ludicrous and totally unacceptable. Fair is fair and nice is nice, but enough is enough and too much is too much.
Free lunch is a liberal welfare-state mantra. And Ned Lamont and his pals intend to continue it for all the pupils in Connecticut schools for at least a little longer. And you can bet it will go on and on and on ad infinitum, ad absurdum. Because free lunch gets the votes they need to stay in power.
The self-serving pols don’t care that there’s really no such thing as free lunch. The free-lunch eaters certainly don’t care as long as they’re fed. And those who have to pay can’t do a thing about it.
The most entertaining part of the online budget is the “slide presentation” whose introduction boasts:
“The Governor’s budget is about inclusive opportunity. For the first time in over a generation, Connecticut has enjoyed strong economic and population growth. More taxpayers, a growing economy, and bipartisan fiscal discipline have resulted in four consecutive budget surpluses—soon to be five.”
Inclusive opportunity!? Totally meaningless woke cant.
Not that we expect truth or accuracy from the Lamont administration (or any others of its mendacious ilk) at the best of times, but for starters the budget surpluses are almost all due to federal COVID handouts and whatever bipartisan fiscal discipline may have materialized is in spite of the profligacy of Lamont’s party faithfuls.
Connecticut’s “strong population growth” has actually been 28th in the nation, less than one percent in ten years. And Connecticut’s “strong economic growth” has been at an annualized rate of only 1.8 percent over the last five years, putting the state at 43rd out of the 50. Evidently strong to King Ned means not at the very bottom.
So the only way to describe Ned Lamont’s budget document—a work of fiction with only minimal verisimilitude that must have cost taxpayers a super bundle to produce—is pure bullshit.
Yes, this disquisition opens and closes with bullshit because that’s precisely what the budget is . . .