The "figure it out later" approach on policy isn't working: Candelora Column

Push the green button, figure it out later. That, unfortunately, is the legislative approach favored by the General Assembly’s longstanding Democrat majority—and Connecticut has suffered because of it. We need to do things differently. The Hartford Courant highlighted a couple of examples in the last two weeks. One involves what appears to be the collapse of a state-run retirement system, and the other covers their push to offer “debt-free” community college to students planning to enter classrooms this fall. Democrats in 2016 narrowly approved legislation to create the quasi-public Connecticut Retirement Security Authority (CRSA), conceived as an Obamacare-style “exchange” offering retirement savings plans for people who don’t have access to such options through their employer. Naturally, their program is an “opt-out,” meaning that every Connecticut worker—even those that have their own retirement plans already—would see an automatic three percent tax taken from each paycheck until they exited the program. Republicans opposed this redistribution scheme. After all, our state government doesn’t have the best track record when it comes to using money for its intended purpose. Incredibly, in passing their half-baked bill Democrats ignored the fact that our own attorney general opined that it violated federal law. On top of that, Connecticut’s economy relies on the financial services industry they positioned state government to compete with! It’s no wonder our state has an anti-business reputation. It seems as though their ill-conceived program is now collapsing after hundreds of thousands of expenditures. Hefty—and justified—questions about the legality of the concept bogged down its development, and the Courant’s recent report recounted a CRSA board meeting where members faced the reality that this folly is running out of money. The news hit hard for the agency’s executive director, an experienced and widely respected financial services professional, who is now left wondering if she’ll soon be out of a job. Since the last election, Democrats have spent a lot of time talking about offering free community college. In another “figure it out later” vote, they approved a program that would be funded by revenue generated by an online lottery system that, if you can imagine, doesn’t even exist yet. That leaves the governor and state lawmakers to figure out how to cover the roughly $20 million bill during the upcoming legislative session. Writing about the debt-free college program back in September, the president of the Connecticut State Colleges and Universities system told legislative leaders he was growing “increasingly concerned” about the “viability of its funding source as well as the time of the acquiring that funding” in order to launch the program in the fall of 2020. Given all the uncertainty, common sense would say, “let’s figure out how we’ll pay for this before we make the promise to graduating high schoolers.” But that’s not what happened. Instead, state college and university system officials decided last month to scrape together the money to advertise the program. Whether it’s tolls or understanding the plight of overtaxed Connecticut residents, broken promises have become a hallmark of the governor and his legislative team. Much can be attributed to that “figure it out later” mentality. The legislative session starts next month, and I look forward to offering more balanced solutions—that’s how we’ll build a Connecticut that works.