Connecticut's Department of Economic and Community Development claims to have invented a perpetual motion machine of government finance, though certain arts agencies may claim patent infringement.

The department's perpetual motion machine is tourism promotion, whereby, the department says, the $32 million it has spent since 2012 advertising the state as a tourist destination has produced $393 million in spending by tourists here, purportedly a return on investment of 1,200 percent.

How exactly can the spending by tourists be calculated and attributed to state government's promotion? Does every visitor fill out a form every time he spends money here, reporting whether he was prompted to do so by that promotion, was visiting relatives or friends, or just took a wrong turn on the way to Poughkeepsie?

No, there is no actual data. To justify what it has done and wants to keep doing, the department hired consultants to make this stuff up through unverifiable Internet surveys, confident that nobody would question it.

Years ago advocates of state government subsidies for "the arts" often made similar claims in support of the patronage they received from state government even in the face of its neglect of the ailing and handicapped. Amid such neglect, especially now that it is worsening, government spending on inessentials can seem justified only if it is perceived to be making a profit.

There was no evidence for this claim when the arts people made it, and state government doesn't believe it itself even as it perpetuates the nonsense. For if state government believed it, it would put every dollar it could raise and every dollar it could borrow into tourism promotion, stand back, and watch the 1,200 percent returns cascade into the state's economy and treasury. Soon Connecticut would not need any other taxes at all; tourists would pay for everything.

Besides, if the connection between tourism promotion and increased revenue was so tight, Connecticut's tourism industry long ago would have beat state government to the punch. Commercials for the Indian casinos, the Peabody Museum of Natural History at Yale, Stafford Speedway, and even Frog Rock in Eastford might push ads for erectile dysfunction and incontinence products off the network television news, and the old Shakespeare Theater in Stratford might find profitable use at last, if only with musical comedy.

With such perpetual motion, no help from state government would be necessary; it could attend to the basics.

There is a serious policy question underneath the self-serving nonsense here.

That is, would Connecticut like to become prosperous again because of visitors crowding the natives out of the state's most delightful venues and clogging the state's transportation system, which the governor himself lately proclaimed to be so inadequate? ("Visit Connecticut and get stuck in traffic on I-95 or on a Metro-North train at a broken drawbridge.") Or would Connecticut like to become prosperous again because its residents keep more of the proceeds of their industriousness as public policy starts rewarding productivity instead of anti-social behavior, sloth, and rent seeking by special interests?

If that question isn't addressed, it may not be long before people say about Connecticut what they used to say about New York City: "Nice place to visit but you wouldn't want to live there." Indeed, the latest census figures, showing that Connecticut again is losing population in absolute terms, not just relative to the rest of the country, suggest that people already are saying it, believing it, and acting on it. As mere potential tourists they won't be spending as much in Connecticut as they did living here.