Democrats on the General Assembly’s Finance, Revenue, and Bonding Committee think they have the solution to state government’s budget difficulties — just raise taxes another billion dollars per year, about 5 percent of the budget. This, the Democrats figured last week, will not only allow everything in state government to trundle on just as before, eliminating any pressure to set better priorities, but also provide for dedicating a portion of sales tax revenue for grants to municipalities in the name of “property tax relief.”

The committee didn’t hold a public hearing on its tax increases — public hearings are for legislation designating an official state appetizer and such — as a hearing might have prompted someone to note that “property tax relief” in Connecticut is like the furniture store that has been running a going-out-of-business sale for 40 years. That is, for decades now state government has been appropriating ever-more money in the name of “property tax relief” and yet property taxes have gone up steadily anyway.

This is largely because of the state’s system of binding arbitration for government employee union contracts, which holds that if a municipality has any money at all, it can afford to pay more to its employees and indeed must pay more, even if it has been trying to save money for another undertaking or would like to reduce taxes.

That is, the more money state government gives to municipalities, the more they must spend on their employees. There is never any property tax relief. Like "aid to local education,” “property tax relief” is just a euphemism for coddling the government employee unions, which control the state’s dominant political party, the Democratic Party. This is a system not of municipal finance but of public financing of political campaigns — one party’s campaigns.

Governor Malloy, whose own budget proposal would raise taxes but not as much as his party’s legislators would like, would finance raises for state and municipal employees largely by cutting spending on the most innocent needy. The governor complains that the finance committee would tax too much. He also rejects the budget proposal of the legislature’s minority Republicans to restore funding for the needy by extracting concessions from the state employee unions. Of course the unions won’t volunteer concessions; concessions could be extracted only by a determined governor. Malloy is determined but only to keep the unions happy.

Still, circumstances may let the governor pose as the moderate in the budget controversy, “triangulating” in Bill Clinton style between the rabid spenders of his party and the Republicans for whom saying “take it from the unions” is far easier than doing so. Ironically the governor, who is already relying on the Republican minority to sustain his veto of a Democratic bill to prevent the state university board from closing a branch campus without legislative approval, soon could be relying on the Republicans as well to sustain his veto of a Democratic bill raising taxes.

The most likely outcome seems to be a tax increase larger than the governor proposed, smaller than the Democratic legislators want, but enough to keep the raises flowing to the government class while telling the neediest that it’s starting to get warm outside so they can manage without help a while longer.

Also last week U.S. Sen. Chris Murphy got enthusiastic about the “Promise Zone” status that, at his instigation, has been awarded by the federal government to an especially impoverished neighborhood in Hartford, which now is to get priority consideration for federal grants.

This also invokes the everlasting “going out of business” sale of the proverbial furniture store, insofar as the social disintegration of Hartford, once the most prosperous city in the country, correlates almost exactly with the era of federal grants. Hartford actually has been a “promise zone” for decades — as in “promises, promises.”

 Chris Powell is managing editor of the Journal Inquirer in Manchester.