The General Assembly adjourned less than a month ago, but progressive activists are already calling for more taxes, more spending, and another round of fiscal recklessness — wasting no time in pressuring lawmakers to tear down the state’s fiscal guardrails.
In a June 25 email blast, Connecticut Voices for Children (CT Voices) — a left-leaning research and advocacy nonprofit — declared that “the urgency of now is too important to rest” and urged lawmakers to “adjust the state fiscal controls even more.”
The group also called for raising taxes on the top one percent, claiming that policies coming from Washington, D.C., are “cruel,” “unfair,” and are “enriching the most powerful people in the country.” Their solution is to put Connecticut taxpayers on the hook to “right some of these wrongs.”
The irony is, Connecticut has already started down that road. This past legislative session, Gov. Ned Lamont and Democratic lawmakers weakened the state’s fiscal guardrails — the very protections meant to prevent reckless tax-and-spend policies. Their final budget deal made three significant changes.
First, it increased the amount of volatile revenue — such as capital gains and investment income — that can be spent rather than deposited into the Rainy Day Fund, undermining the effectiveness of the Volatility Cap. Second, it altered the cap on year-over-year spending growth, giving lawmakers more freedom to grow the size of government. And third, it redirected surplus dollars that would have gone toward paying down pension debt, using them instead to fund new programs and expand existing ones.
Democrats called these changes “tweaks.” But as Yankee Institute said at the time, it was the start of the unraveling.
“Tampering with the guardrails means they’re not really guardrails — they’re really just ‘guard-suggestions,’” Yankee Institute President Carol Platt Liebau warned in an interview with CT Mirror earlier this month. “Every time they’re loosened, it becomes easier for politicians to weaken them again, and the special interests have already signaled they can’t wait for a repeat performance.”
CT Voices claim that further erosion of the guardrails is not about punishing the top wage earners, but “fairness.” They invoke the “American Dream,” yet believe it’s built by confiscating more of your paycheck so the government can decide who gets what.
And they’re not alone.
In a June 25 blog post, The Connecticut Project (TCP), another well-funded progressive group, echoed CT Voices’ campaign to dismantle the state’s fiscal guardrails.
In their own words, Connecticut’s “outdated, rigid spending cap is punishing our state for decisions made in the past.”
Why? Because after the legislature spent less than the cap allowed in 2017–2019, the cap didn’t increase as much in subsequent years.
TCP offered a grocery store metaphor: “[I]t’s always nice to keep your spending under budget. But what if paying $75 instead of $100 on a trip to the grocery store meant your new budget was now $75 moving forward?”
This metaphor, however, is misguided because it assumes government should never be bound by fiscal restraint — where savings are seen not as a success, but as a flaw in need of correction.
The group also stated that the spending cap is just one of four overlapping budget restrictions that were “purposely written to be hard to change.” (Yes — on purpose, for a reason. That’s called financial responsibility.) However, TCP’s statements fails to understand that the spending cap does grow by either the previous year’s urban inflation rate or the average growth in personal income over the past five years.
In short, the spending cap limit is not static as TCP tried to insinuate.
Still, TCP argues that because lawmakers didn’t spend all the way up to the cap during the 2017–2019 budget cycle, today’s spending limit is $1.8 billion lower than it could have been. In other words, fiscal restraint back then is now being framed as a policy failure. And they’re not shy about what they’d do with that $1.8 billion: spend every penny.
“That’s crucial money the state could be using to invest in critical services that help families stay afloat during our cost-of-living crisis,” the group wrote.
The state, meanwhile, has benefited from its fiscal restraint with a current surplus of more than $1.5 billion, which, in turn, is paying down the $80 billion pension debt. Yet TCP is arguing the surplus should be, instead, spent immediately on “early childhood education and emergency rental assistance,” and whatever other priorities the activist class decides are “critical” this month.
In its statement, the group also warned that a “$1 billion budget cliff” is coming in 2026 when federal pandemic funds run out — unless lawmakers take action now to undo the spending caps and keep the money flowing.
“The rules can’t be solved with a temporary patch to one cap,” they declared. “Lawmakers must thoughtfully and responsibly fix the rules to create a budget that works as hard for the people of this state as we do.”
Leave it to Connecticut’s progressive policy crowd to treat surpluses, shrinking debt, and a glimpse of long-term solvency as a problem — not because the policies that produced them failed, but because they worked.
And progressive activists can’t stand it.
Apparently, no amount of spending is ever enough — unless it’s all of it.
Give them a dollar, and they’ll demand five more. Promise restraint, and they’ll call it cruelty. Deliver a surplus, and they’ll treat it as a missed opportunity to grow government.
The guardrails were designed to withstand this kind of pressure. The real test is whether Connecticut’s elected officials will.
