While reviewing the Yankee Institute’s most recent opinion piece advocating for the protection and expansion of the fiscal roadblocks, it’s important to recognize the broader agenda at play. The Yankee Institute, alongside the Reason Foundation, is pushing forward the goals of Project 2025 into Connecticut, a vision funded by David and Charles Koch, who are also the largest backers of the Reason Foundation.
Their efforts are designed to impose harmful fiscal policies that stifle investment in our communities, all under the guise of ‘fiscal responsibility.’
The roadblocks were designed on the heels of the Great Recession, when revenue collection collapsed and debt soared. Today Connecticut enjoys an era of record surpluses. Crisis-style budgeting dictated by the roadblocks persists, even while no fiscal crisis exists. The Yankee Institute report endorses policy that jeopardizes critical services and economic growth in our state and deepens some of the most extreme racial and economic disparities in our nation.
The Yankee Institute has celebrated the $170 million savings in debt payments, a figure that represents less than 1% of the annual state budget, and has required the siphoning off of $1.5 billion annually from critical community investments. Even prior to the ARPA-era surpluses, Connecticut has already established a fiscally responsible plan to address pension debt without requiring these additional multi-billion-dollar payments, while forcing further suffering in our communities.
In fact, over the last four years, this equates to 21% of funding that has been siphoned away from critical programs to save $170M in debt payments. Public schools across the state are suffering from tragic understaffing and underfunding, which threatens our ability to compete in an increasingly global economy.
Even worse, expiring ARPA municipal aid led many cities and towns to lay off staff- including 400 board of ed employees in Hartford. The most recent ALICE report shows that two out of five households face poverty, a 13% increase from 2019 and people experiencing homelessness has also surged 13%. Austere budgeting increasingly hits the most vulnerable populations in the state– children, the elderly, those with developmental or physical disabilities, and those at or near the poverty line.
In recent years, the hard working members of my union, District 1199 have seen the devastating impacts of Great Recession-style budgeting in the midst of historic state surpluses. In the privately owned but publicly funded nursing homes where 6,000 of our members provide care, staffing is often 50% of pre-pandemic levels, often because at $20 per hour wages are simply too low to recruit. In-state programs for at-risk youth, the very children the Yankee Institute report claims to champion, DCF workers report dangerously-low staffing for children suffering trauma from abuse, sex trafficking, and acute mental illness. Addiction treatment workers in DMHAS report months-long waiting periods for treatment when waits used to be measured in days.
Most painful for our members, 1,500 group home caregivers for developmentally disabled adults struck against poverty wages last year. The wage for most of the strikers, predominantly working class women, was $17.25. Among them were workers without steady housing.
After 21 days picketing the State Capitol, lobbying legislators and the governor, and engaging in civil disobedience, strikers won $150 million in state funding– but only enough to raise wages for most workers to $18.50. Recently strike leader, Yvonne Dimmet told me that despite 39 years seniority at one agency and 20 at another, she had worked 110 hours a week to pay her bills. Life enriching services like educational and day programs have been cut due to the manufactured budget crises and many group homes are badly in need of repairs.
1199 members and patients are far from the only constituencies impacted. Childcare workers, paraprofessionals, community college students facing library closures and canceled courses– in short, the workforce, students and educators our next generation– are too often themselves fighting poverty as publicly funded workers left behind by rigid adherence to the roadblocks laid in 2017.
Meanwhile, the Yankee Institute, which is a megaphone for Project 2025’s anti-investment agenda, is pushing for an even more drastic ratcheting down of Connecticut’s fiscal policies, advocating for an additional $400 million to be diverted from desperately needed programs – a 28% jump. Connecticut residents cannot afford another $400M in cuts to our programs and infrastructure. We are struggling now and instead of throwing a life preserver, the Yankee Institute wants to push us further downstream.
This recommendation is not only harmful but also ignores historical economic trends. The longest gap between recessions has been just under 11 years, but the Yankee Institute’s plan requires 14 years of nonsensically rosy economic projections.
We cannot allow the future of our state to be dictated by ideologically driven fiscal roadblocks. Real fiscal responsibility includes investing in our communities —fixing our public schools, addressing housing insecurity and healthcare unaffordability, and maintaining infrastructure— not siphoning away money to fund pension payments at the expense of those who need it most.
You don’t make extra payments on your mortgage when your roof is leaking. You fix the roof.
There are holes in the roof and the house is flooding– and the flood won’t be stopped with patchwork. Connecticut elected officials must meet the moment with needed and significant investments in health, education, and other human needs that have now suffered from almost 20 years of neglect.
Rob Baril is President of SEIU 1199 New England.