Forbes magazine asked last March “Can
Connecticut Be Saved?” The bone-crushing statistics provided were
telling: “Connecticut’s job-growth rate is a meager 1.1%, compared with the
national average of 5.1%. According to the Connecticut Department of
Labor, the state’s unemployment rate is 5.5%, compared with a national
average of 4.9%. Connecticut ranks among the top 10 states for net
out-migration, losing 140,571 taxpayers in that same 10-year time period. And
this trend can be tracked over several decades. Between 1992 and
2014, Connecticut lost $12.36 billion in annual adjusted gross income (AGI).”
Last July the Mercatus
Center placed Connecticut number one among states having the worst
fiscal conditions in the nation. So then, what can be done to pull Connecticut
from its tailspin?
Some solutions are national; others may best be applied by
states and municipalities. We can begin by rethinking political solutions that
solve nothing for people and everything for politicians. In the “politicians”
category, we should include, in addition to lean and hungry active politicians,
those who operate on the borderlines of politics. That subgroup would include
Big Unions and Big Business, the hobgoblin of progressive Senator Elizabeth
Warren’s progressive mind. Big Business has been able to escape the prehensile
claw of the tax man by hiring Harvard educated accountants and lawyers to
mitigate tax impositions by taking advantage of loopholes in what must be the
most complex tax code in history.
One of the richest men in America, Warren Buffett, announced
several years ago he had paid less in taxes than his secretary. Although
capital gains taxes went up for Buffett and others in his asset class in 2013
from 15 to 20 percent, he still paid less than his secretary. The answer to
this embarrassing disparity is simplicity itself. “Simplify,” said Henry David
Thoreau after he had spent some time at Walden Pond; it was his personal flag,
his answer to a world that had become needlessly complex – simplify!
Revert to a flat or fair tax, eliminate all the tax
write-offs, and tell all the tax dodging professionals and their accomplices in
the national legislature to pay their fair share or go to jail. In a system in
which everyone pays the same rate, tax scofflaws are more easily identified; a
progressive note can then be introduced at the distribution end: social
security for Buffet’s secretary, but none for him.
On the other side of the political barricades, unions are
lighting political bonfires. Here in progressive Connecticut especially,
powerful unions have exerted an inordinate influence on left of center
politicians. Connecticut over the years has provided a political safe-space for
public employee unions. Solution: enact right to work laws; cut salaries and
benefits for new hires until parity is achieved with private sector employment;
end binding arbitration, which has obscenely inflated public employee benefits;
and refuse to allow union leaders to hold Connecticut budgets hostage to
contract negotiations between Governor Dannel Malloy, a zealous union supporter
who has marched on union picket lines, and union leaders whose efforts in
contract negotiations do not and cannot enhance the public good.
How do we know state employee salaries and benefits are
disproportionally high?
Many of us, even politicians who operate across partisan
lines, are pretending not to know. More than two years ago, the Yankee
Institute commissioned a comparative study of private and public compensation
in Connecticut, “Unequal
Pay: Public vs. Private Compensation in Connecticut."
Here is a key finding of the study, according
to a story in the Hartford Courant: “A key finding: although the
average private-sector worker in Connecticut earned a slightly higher salary,
the average state employee received benefits worth nearly twice that offered to
workers not on the government payroll.”
It’s a safe bet that the Courant story had been widely
distributed among politicians in the General Assembly who are blissfully and
purposely ignorant of any study commissioned by the Yankee Institute, however
enlightening. Their ears full of progressive wax; they are insensible to this
kind of bad news, because hearing it creates a disposition to reduce inequities
by reducing public employee benefits for new hires, thus saving the state about
$1.44 billion to $2.48 billion annually, according to the study. Here is a more
recent communique from Yankee on overtime pay for public employees: “CT
Overtime Likely to Reach $240 Million.
At some point, wise heads must learn to read the writing on
the wall; that is half the battle. Foolish men and women always give themselves
permission to indulge in foolishness. The beginning of wisdom in these and
other matters begins with a revocation of that permission. No one in the wide
and wicked would has a right to impose his foolishness on those easily seduced
by fools.
Comments