Progressives have
for some time been in the habit of calling tax receipts “investments.” Governor
Dannel Malloy, who has proposed a thirty year, one hundred billion investment in
infrastructure repair, is Connecticut’s chief investment broker. The term is borrowed
from Wall Street and glows with the promise of a handsome return on the
investment. Naturally, the over-hyped return usually is slender; the bulk of
investments in education, for instance, are absorbed in salary and benefit
payments to teachers and administrators. When a government taxes its citizenry
and invests the tax revenue in various projects, it is moving a bucket of money
from the deep end of the pool and dumpling it into the shallow end of the pool. The
drawing and dumping, it should be noted, does not raise the water level in the
pool. The pool, in other words, is no richer in water after the getting and
spending transactions have been completed. Government, despite what most people
have been told, is not a wealth producing engine; it is a wealth consuming
engine.
Three things should
be noted concerning these “investments.”
First, the
investment is always forced. Wall Street has not yet discovered a way to force
investments from investors. “Government,” George Washington said, “is force.” The
payment of taxes is not a voluntary affair in which an investor bets his
dollars on a promising prospect. If you decline to invest your dollars in a
certain stock for instance, a broker will not haul you off to jail. If you do
not pay your taxes, a forceful government will squeeze the sweat from your
brow. When Governor Dannel Malloy and the Democrat dominated General Assembly
decided to collect and invest tax dollars into a multi-year, multi-billion
dollar infrastructure project, thus binding for thirty years governors or
legislators who might wish to cut spending, the tax brokers did not have to
fear that their investors would decline the order to invest.
Second, Connecticut
is a state in which tax dollars are sometimes – cynics will say “often” -- diverted
to unintended ends. In a brief dictionary of political terms, Connecticut Commentary defined a “lockbox” as "an unsafe safe, ostensibly used to preserve tax money for special purposes, that can be opened with a bent hairpin." Ain’t it true though?
Connecticut’s
government has continually picked its pension lockbox, diverting the targeted
funds to discharge recurring deficits. Gas taxes were supposed to have been
sequestered in a lockbox and used to maintain the state’s now crumbling bridges
and highways. But thieves arrived in the dark of night with their bent hair
pins, opened the lockbox and diverted the funds towards other purposes, which
is why Mr. Malloy now thinks it necessary to charge a one hundred billion
dollar promissory note to the future children and grandchildren of Connecticut,
supposing they all remain in the state to be charged for the sins of their
fathers and grandfathers – yea even to the fourth and fifth generation. You may
force a taxpayer to foot your bills, but you may not force him to remain on the
bill-paying spot. This is how things work in a free America. In a Forbes report listing the top nine states from which
people are fleeing in 2014 to greener pastures elsewhere, Connecticut places
fifth.
Third, the general
public in Connecticut does not trust that its government has invested tax
dollars prudently – and neither, come to think of it, does Mr. Malloy, who has repeatedly
chastised previous governors for having failed to invest tax dollars responsibly
in Connecticut, Inc. Mr. Malloy has been careful not to chastise as forcefully
previous legislatures, the real tax gatherers and distributors of public funds,
because he knows that the last time one of the two Houses of the General
Assembly had been commandeered by Republicans was in 1967. Democrats, members
of Mr. Malloy’s party, have been
running the getting and spending show for nearly a half century. This year,
progressive Democratic spendthrifts in the General Assembly removed pension
payments from the state’s constitutional cap, a nifty piece of budget
legerdemain that both defanged the cap and permitted Democrats to continue
their ruinous spending spree.
That spending spree,
which began nearly a quarter century ago with the imposition of the Lowell
Weicker income tax and has steadily increased by leaps and bounds, shows no
sign of diminishing. Mr. Malloy, the most progressive governor in state history,
has during his brief term in office fathered two additional tax increases, the largest
and the second largest tax boosts in state history. Unfortunately, the business
crowd has noticed the acceleration in spending. Usually whisperingly polite,
the CEOs of major Connecticut corporations and representatives of small
businesses in Connecticut were whipped out of their complacency by progressive
leaders in the General Assembly, Speaker of the House Brendan Sharkey and
President Pro Tem of the Senate Martin Looney, both of whom, bowing to the progressive
zeitgeist, hot-wired into Mr. Malloy’s out of balance budget massive revenue
increases. In an attempt to mollify restive Connecticut
businesses, the Malloy-Sharkey-Looney budget was sent back to the General Assembly closed-shop, there
to be revised by the state’s triumvirate But not by much, Mr. Looney and Mr. Sharkey have assured their political interest
groups.
To restore its place
among states as an economic powerhouse, Connecticut needs permanent spending
cuts and temporary tax increases; what
it will get, after all the revisions have been enacted by majority Democrats,
is a budget loaded with permanent revenue increases and easily revocable
spending cuts. If during a recession – and remember, Connecticut is one of the
few states in the union that still has not recovered from the Bush-Obama
recession – you increase taxes, you must bear the inevitable consequences. Mr.
Weicker said it best: Increasing taxes during a recession is like pouring gas
on a fire. Singed Connecticut taxpayers are begging heedless progressives in
the Governor’s office and the General Assembly to cease and desist.
They are not
listening.
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