Skip to main content

Thinking Dangerously

“Seeking to create more Connecticut jobs, “the lead line ran, “the state Senate voted unanimously Friday night for tax cuts for manufacturers and incentives for movie-production companies.”

The tax cuts for manufacturers and incentives for movie production companies, senators reasoned unanimously, were necessary because businesses in Connecticut are going south – no pun intended – and start struck legislators have realized that the best way to encourage start-up industries is to create a climate in which industries do not feel preyed upon by rapacious state governments.

For Connecticut, this is a revolutionary perception and a significant admission. Practically speaking, it means that the proclivity of our state legislature to tax everything that breaths is, as the film stars might say, a real drag: Less taxes good, more taxes bad.

Economists who graduate from one of our state’s ivory league colleges might put it this way, “Whatever you tax tends to disappear” – including state businesses and millionaires. And unfunded mandates, the labyrinthine regulatory structure favored by local in-the-closet socialists, count as taxes.

So, should we assume that state legislators have had a Damascus Road experience? May we now count them among he converted?

Don’t bet on it.

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

The Blumenthal Burisma Connection

Steve Hilton , a Fox News commentator who over the weekend had connected some Burisma corruption dots, had this to say about Connecticut U.S. Senator Dick Blumenthal’s association with the tangled knot of corruption in Ukraine: “We cross-referenced the Senate co-sponsors of Ed Markey's Ukraine gas bill with the list of Democrats whom Burisma lobbyist, David Leiter, routinely gave money to and found another one -- one of the most sanctimonious of them all, actually -- Sen. Richard Blumenthal."

Powell, the JI, And Economic literacy

Powell, Pesci Substack The Journal Inquirer (JI), one of the last independent newspapers in Connecticut, is now a part of the Hearst Media chain. Hearst has been growing by leaps and bounds in the state during the last decade. At the same time, many newspapers in Connecticut have shrunk in size, the result, some people seem to think, of ad revenue smaller newspapers have lost to internet sites and a declining newspaper reading public. Surviving papers are now seeking to recover the lost revenue by erecting “pay walls.” Like most besieged businesses, newspapers also are attempting to recoup lost revenue through staff reductions, reductions in the size of the product – both candy bars and newspapers are much smaller than they had been in the past – and sell-offs to larger chains that operate according to the social Darwinian principles of monopolistic “red in tooth and claw” giant corporations. The first principle of the successful mega-firm is: Buy out your predator before he swallows

Down The Rabbit Hole, A Book Review

Down the Rabbit Hole How the Culture of Corrections Encourages Crime by Brent McCall & Michael Liebowitz Available at Amazon Price: $12.95/softcover, 337 pages   “ Down the Rabbit Hole: How the Culture of Corrections Encourages Crime ,” a penological eye-opener, is written by two Connecticut prisoners, Brent McCall and Michael Liebowitz. Their book is an analytical work, not merely a page-turner prison drama, and it provides serious answers to the question: Why is reoffending a more likely outcome than rehabilitation in the wake of a prison sentence? The multiple answers to this central question are not at all obvious. Before picking up the book, the reader would be well advised to shed his preconceptions and also slough off the highly misleading claims of prison officials concerning the efficacy of programs developed by dusty old experts who have never had an honest discussion with a real convict. Some of the experts are more convincing cons than the cons, p