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| Connecticut legislature |
“Saying Gov. Ned Lamont’s plan is not enough, Senate Republicans are calling for $1.5 billion in tax and electricity relief in an election year,” the Hartford Courant tells us in its February 12 report, “GOP unveils $1.5B tax cut plan.”
Republicans are calling for tax cuts. Democrats are calling
for tax relief. The two are entirely
different. A tax cut is an uncollected tax that leaves dollars in the accounts
of taxpayers who are, free market Republicans will insist, better able than
tax-hungry bureaucrats to decide how dollars should be allocated. The
difference between a tax cut and a tax
rebate or credit, preferred by state
Democrats, is the same as the difference between a price reduction and a
temporary price discount. A rebate must be collected before it can be rebated.
But a tax cut leaves dollars at the disposal of taxpayers. Rebates and credits
can be easily redistributed by the tax collecting authority, but it is not
possible to redistribute an uncollected tax.
Rebates and credits are instruments in the regressive
toolbox utilized to redistribute wealth, and wealth distribution often involves
so called slush funds from which politicians may draw to satisfy political
constituencies.
Senate Republican leader Stephen G. Harding of Brookfield,
it should be obvious by now, has no intension of pulling his campaign punches.
Harding told a Hartford Courant reporter “that he recently received a bill for
more than $1,000 per month. He has a home with electric heat and two young
children in the state with electric rates [in Connecticut] behind only Hawaii
and California.”
Taxpayers struggling to pay increasingly costly energy bills
will sympathize.
“Harding said,” according to the paper, “that Lamont’s answer
to the public on the third highest electric rates … was here’s a $200 campaign
bribe for you to take and walk away and pretend there’s not a problem … We have
a $4 billion-plus rainy day fund. The people of the state have essentially been
overtaxed by that much. … Two hundred dollars is not an answer.”
This should have been a “BINGOI” moment for economically
savvy reporters in Connecticut. A state surplus,
is by definition – the amount of money collected by the state that represents a
tax overcharge. If a company selling widgets overcharged a customer for the
widget, one would hope that a morally alive company would return the overcharge
to its customer. Governments, particularly progressive governments, are
unruffled by such moral considerations. They have only to increase spending and
the moral problem, along with a portion of the surplus, magically disappears.
WTNH Hartford reported that
Republican Caucus leader Harding “contrasted the GOP’s proposal with the one
unveiled by Lamont during last week’s state of the state address. The Lamont
plan calls for $200 tax rebates for most individuals and $400 rebates for most
families. The rebates would be a one-off deal, a fact that has led Republicans
to paint the proposal as little more than an election-year play for support.”
Illustrating the difference between rebates and tax cuts,
Harding added, “What we’re [Republicans are] saying is: here’s a billion and
half dollars year after year after year.”
The reporter noted, “Standing in the way of the Republican
proposal are two sets of numbers. The first is the numerical disadvantage the
GOP faces in both chambers of the General Assembly. The party is outnumbered more than two-to-one in the House and Senate,
meaning its agenda-setting power is dwarfed by the Democratic majorities
[emphasis mine].”
Half of successful campaigning is telling voters what they
already know. But correcting what the public perceives as a problem requires a
majority of foot soldiers in the legislature, and Democrats for decades have far outnumbered Republicans in the
state’s General Assembly, and in the governor’s office, and in the state’s U.S.
Congressional Delegation; all the members of the state’s Supreme Court have
been placed in office by the Democrat Party; and the unelected administrative
apparatus in Connecticut owes its allegiance and its jobs to ruling Democrats.
Connecticut has become a one party state. We know from
history and current experience that all dominant one party states throughout
history have been notoriously corrupt and self-serving – in a word,
anti-democratic. In politics, as in life, self-preservation is a prime
directive because the polis is a life cultural organ. In politics, as in life,
when no one is watching, when the tribunes of the people are snoozing over
their computer terminals and secondary parties have been effectively checked,
absolute power reigns absolutely.
A famous caricaturist was asked by one of his victims why he distorted facial features so grotesquely. He answered, “What is the point of having absolute power, if you are not prepared to abuse it?”
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