Says short term savings costs everyone in long term
State Representative Gary Holder-Winfield (D-94), who represents New Haven in the Connecticut General Assembly, has joined with activists and other legislators in saying that the state must resist the minority legislative Republican attack on our clean election system.
When Gov. Rell called for a special session to address the rising state budget deficit, her press release said, "Some will question why I am calling the Legislature into session five days before the next regular session is slated to begin." She is right about that. I am one of those people who question this. To paraphrase a different press release from the Governor's office, "This is an overtly political maneuver by the Governor. At a time when our state faces significant economic challenges, it is unfortunate that Governor Rell is spending her time on a partisan political ploy rather than trying to help create jobs or help Connecticut families."
The second press release was actually about Secretary of State Susan Bysiewicz's proposal to discourage commerce; the trading of open U.S. Senate seats behind closed doors. Yet the concern with the how open U.S. Senate seats are filled is closely related to one of the larger concerns with Gov. Rell's call for a special session, both are about citizen participation.
Special sessions do not require public hearings. Information about the special sessions might leak out in the press, if we have any press left in the state, but bills being considered for special session do not appear on the General Assembly website with as much time for public comment as bills considered during the regular sessions.
At a special session, the bills are introduced by the Speaker of the House and the Senate President. If the proposed special session is called, the bills will be introduced by Rep. Amann, who will cease to be a member of the house five days after the session. It seems as if the only person excited about the special session other than Governor Rell is Speaker Amann.
There are the special costs of having a special session. These are compounded by having the special session in January. Lobbyists badges expire on December 31st. Either the ethics office needs to grant some sort of waiver allowing lobbyists who had registered for 2008 to lobby at the special session, or the ethics office needs to open early enough to let any lobbyists that want to register before the session to do so. I suspect that the same applies for members of the press.
If this were such an emergency, Governor Rell could have called a special session to start much earlier and provided time for citizen input. Yet it seems as if the real issue, like with how an open U.S. Senate seat would be filled, is that Governor Rell appears to distain citizen input. Perhaps that is part of the reason she is seeking to raid the Citizens Election Programs funds as part of her special session.
If you believe that citizens should be involved in our state government, if you believe we should be spending tax payer money on things other than a special session for the Governor, then I urge you to contact your state legislators and urge them to just say no to a special session starting five days before the regular session is scheduled to begin.
In 2002, President Bush sought the Authorization for Use of Military Force Against Iraq Resolution. We were told that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction, and that if Congress did not act quickly, something horrible would happen. Well, Congress did act quickly, and something horrible did happen.
With the recent financial crisis, we were told that if Congress did not act quickly on a $700 billion bailout bill, something horrible would happen. Well, again, Congress did act quickly, and we are yet again, trying to clean up the mess afterwards.
One would think that we, as a nation, would learn that when legislative branches act quickly, without proper deliberation or feedback from citizens, we get stuck with a mess.
Politicians, on the other hand, don't like it if people stop and think about whatever bill they are pushing. People might organize and the politicians might not get their pet project.
Last night, we saw this played out in Connecticut. Yesterday, Rep. Amann and Sen. Williams introduced Bill No. 7601- An Act Concerning Deficit Mitigation, and in the dark of the night, it passed both chambers, with little or no public input.
We can argue about whether the cuts were too big, too little, cutting in the right places, or the wrong places, and what role the rainy day fund should have in this. As a matter of fact we should argue about this. We should encourage everyone to join in a spirited discussion of how the State Government should best spend its money during these difficult times.
Unfortunately, the General Assembly did not chose to give the citizens that opportunity. I hope you let your State Legislators know your opinion about budgets passed in the dark of the night.
In the debate, McCain rattled off some conservative talking points on government spending and talked about a spending freeze. Dave Sirota fact-checks:
MCCAIN CLAIM: "We have to do is get spending under control in Washington...How about a spending freeze on everything but defense, veteran affairs and entitlement programs"
MCCAIN CLAIM: "We need very badly to understand that defense spending is very important and vital, particularly in the new challenges we face in the world, but we have to get a lot of the cost overruns under control."
FACT: Minutes later he said we need "a spending freeze on EVERYTHING BUT DEFENSE, veteran affairs and entitlement programs."
It's worth really focusing in on the fact that John McCain's campaign was running around - proudly! - boasting about the fact that they intend to follow up a $700 billion bailout for Wall Street and $800 billion in tax cuts for the rich with an across-the-board spending freeze. That means, in real terms, less money for your local police department. Less money for the FBI. Less money for Head Start. Less money for Pell Grants. Less money for infrastructure. Less money for everything except failed banks and endless wars.
It's no accident that Matt ends with that line. McCain represents the great hope for the military-industrial complex that Eisenhower warned about. Now I have no illusions that any Democratic president, including Obama, will do anything to end the dominance of the military (and that includes contractors) in the US budget.
But let's be clear, McCain is running on the conservative philosophy, handed down from Reagan to Bush I to Bush II, that by opening the Treasury to the likes of KBR, Blackwater, Lockheed Martin - and now AIG, Goldmann-Sachs and JP Morgan, the government can run up a deficit and use this as an excuse to starve off social programs. This is what Tom Frank calls the conservative wrecking crew at work. If you follow that link, there's a (non-embeddable) video where Frank drives around the lavish DC suburbs in Northern Virignia, giving a vivid illustration of how much cash is flowing from our government, through lobbyists and Congress, to these companies. By having his campaign run by lobbyists, McCain has sent a clear signal that this culture will live on even in a failing economy, despite his attempt to self-brand as a reformer. I don't think the public will buy this. If Obama makes good on his promise to make Republicans own their record of failure, McCain has a much tougher road ahead of him.
Bush's war is costing us $315 billion at last count. A staggering amount, of money, but people have a hard time contextualizing large numbers. (This is part of the reason the public has a hard time understanding things like astronomy and evolution, but that's for another topic). Once you get past everyday numbers (mortage payments, taxes, yearly salary) sums of money above a million can be hard to relate to each other. I stumbled across a great presentation that gives you a sense of the scale (hat tip to Crooks and Liars) by using stacks of dollar bills. Here's just a taste:
The stack for billions of dollars dwarfs the above images, as you can imagine, but you have to see it for yourself.
On a related note an artist by the name of Chris Jordan makes giant images of waste material with a unique approach:
This new series looks at contemporary American culture through the austere lens of statistics. Each image portrays a specific quantity of something: fifteen million sheets of office paper (five minutes of paper use); 106,000 aluminum cans (thirty seconds of can consumption) and so on. My hope is that images representing these quantities might have a different effect than the raw numbers alone, such as we find daily in articles and books. Statistics can feel abstract and anesthetizing, making it difficult to connect with and make meaning of 3.6 million SUV sales in one year, for example, or 2.3 million Americans in prison, or 426,000 cell phones retired every day. This project visually examines these vast and bizarre measures of our society, in large intricately detailed prints assembled from thousands of smaller photographs. My underlying desire is to emphasize the role of the individual in a society that is increasingly enormous, incomprehensible, and overwhelming.
You may have seen Jordan on Moyers or Colbert recently. As one example of his work, this is an image of 60,000 plastic bags:
Each one of those little tiny colored squares is one plastic bag. here's a zoom view:
and another zoom:
The top image, again, represents 60,000 plastic bags. The vast majority of those go to landfills (or wind up blowing around and stuck in a tree somewhere). What is the meaning of 60,000? That is the number of bags consumed in the US - not weekly or hourly or each minute - but every FIVE SECONDS. Scary, scary stuff - in the time it takes to, say, dial a phone number or write your signature in cursive, it's that many bags used.
(A good piece for those looking to understand the budget as the legislative session comes to a close. Bumped. - promoted by mattw)
Back in the early 1990s, Connecticut was in the middle of a massive budget crisis that ended with the establishment of the state income tax.
They were tough times, and people wanted state government to be held accountable for spending. And the legislature responded by offering a constitutional amendment that created what is now known as the "spending cap."
Of course, everyone supports preventing runaway spending of the taxpayers' money. And the choice given to voters on the ballots was a strong statement of a sentiment that no one could oppose:
Shall the constitution of the state be amended to impose a limit on state expenditures?
Unfortunately, the simplicity and common sense of what the people overwhelmingly voted to approve as part of the State Constitution has been undermined by the complexity, unintended consequences and Constitutional instability caused by the details of the Constitutional amendment, itself. And this was a failure of the politicians who created these details.
In the Fall of 2001, my daughter was diagnosed with a cancerous brain tumor. Through the miracle of modern medicine -- including 14 hours of surgery and more than a year of chemo and radiotherapy -- the wonderful doctors and nurses at Connecticut Children's Medical Center saved her life, and today she's happy and healthy.
I can't say exactly how directly federally funded research contributed to her recovery, but I'm sure it was instrumental. One organization that was a tireless advocate for children with cancer was the National Childhood Cancer Foundation, now called CureSearch.
CureSearch has put out an alert regarding threats to federal cancer research funding. If you feel so moved, I urge you to use their online tool to send letters to our members of Congress, and then follow up with a personal e-mail to your representative.
We're all concerned with the war, of course, but even in the midst of crisis, life -- and the hard work of saving lives -- goes on.
Here's a nice little tidbit to chew on before tonight's SOTU address. I was doing some reading for my class entitled "Political Psychology" (at a medium-sized liberal arts university outside Boston) and came across the following:
"Within belief systems, certain constraints are purely logical. For example, one cannot believe that government expenditures should be increased, that government revenues should be decreased, and that a more favorable balance of the budget should be achieved all at the same time."
Somebody get scholar Philip Converse over to the White House.
While I understand that there are greater costs to the War in Iraq than monetary amounts can show, it is one valid measure. It has been said that budgets reflect our priorities.
In my town, our annual school budget is $55 million and our share of the cost of the war in Iraq is $87 million (about 1.5 times the school budget).
We all know that not everybody wants to think about the war in terms of human suffering. Many have grown spiritually numb to any number of dead "enemies." My hope is that this financial accounting is just another perspective that can be used to crack the wall of apathy in the world out there. Perhaps it will motivate some people to do "one more thing" to stop the madness. Perhaps it can help shake another person out of complacency and complicity.
The bottom of each flyer shows the calculation including the key census data used to perform the allocations (described below the fold).
It is my hope that these will be distributed around the state. With an earlier version (when the cost was much lower), I stood outside the polling place for our town budget referendum and handed out a few hundred copies.
A Courant editorial on the new state budget explains how sausage gets made.
In the end, the Republican governor agreed to give up her campaign to phase out the death tax, which sends the well-to-do running to other states, if Democratic lawmakers gave up a tax credit to help the working poor.
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