State budget director Ben Barnes told New Haven city officials three weeks ago that if the insolvent city is going to apply for a financial bailout from state government like the one Hartford got this year, they should apply sooner rather than later. That's because later might leave the bailout's terms to a new state administration, presumably less sympathetic and Republican.

A bailout for New Haven might be much more expensive than the $500 million in debt state government has assumed for Hartford, since New Haven's debt is estimated at $2 billion, the highest per-capita municipal debt in the state.

Of course state government is already choking under its own unfunded liabilities.

This week Barnes' boss, Gov. Dannel P. Malloy, announced that he had found $10 million for a study of imposing tolls on state expressways, an appropriation the General Assembly refused to make this year, legislators being up for re-election while the governor is retiring. The study will allow the next governor, at least if he too is a Democrat, and the next legislature, if it has another Democratic majority, to put tolls in place quickly, relieving pressure on the state budget and facilitating a bailout for New Haven.

Thus the governor is arranging to tie the hands of his successor and insulate his party's main constituencies, the government and welfare classes, against democracy. First there was his 10-year extension of the master state employee union contract, whose job and salary protections now will last until 2027; then the bailout of Hartford, a corrupt and incompetent Democratic stronghold whose many government dependents might have had to sacrifice if the city had gone into reorganizational bankruptcy as it should have; and now the bailout for New Haven, another Democratic stronghold, and tolls.

Ned "Insincere" Lamont

Perhaps sensing that all this may be a bit too much to take, the convention-endorsed candidate for the Democratic nomination for governor, Ned Lamont, this week struck a pose contrary to the candid positions he has taken in favor of tolls and raising the sales tax. Lamont began broadcasting a television commercial complaining about taxes.

"Most years," Lamont says in the ad, "my small cable company paid more to Connecticut than General Electric." So should GE have been taxed more so that it might have been encouraged to leave Connecticut sooner than it did? Yes, current tax policy had little to do with GE's departure, but the company surely expected that state government's unfunded liabilities promise an eternity of tax increases for anyone remaining in the state.

And hasn't Lamont's party been in charge of Connecticut's tax policy for eight years?

"The middle class is getting slammed," Lamont adds. "Working families have paid enough."

But then who does he think will be paying the tolls and higher sales taxes he supports?

The ad reeks of insincerity.

Union rule stinks 

Also reeking this week were the bathrooms at a city beach in West Haven, which is also insolvent and under state supervision. A hazardous materials company had to be hired to restore the bathrooms. Because of its insolvency, the city has laid off employees, which triggered a provision in their union contract against hiring part-timers to maintain the bathrooms on weekends.

Again and again in Connecticut subservience to the government employee unions trumps democracy. 

Chris Powell is a columnist for the Journal Inquirer in Manchester.