If you can hold the line on taxes, you will have created an
impetus within the laggard General Assembly for real, long-term cuts in
spending, and it is spending, not insufficient revenues, that is driving state
debt. The pantry at the Yankee Institute is full of ideas for permanent spending reductions, none of them palatable to progressive Democrats in the General
Assembly. To no one’s surprise, rational cuts in spending will upset the status quo apple cart.
Most people in Connecticut might be surprised at some of the
commuters riding in the cart. Progressives, of course, have their tickets
punched, so they think, for the next fifty years. The central tenet of Connecticut
progressives in the General Assembly, nearly all of them tied to the iron and
inflexible apron strings of the state’s employee unions, is that government is
good and more government is better; in order to finance this greater good,
additional taxes will be necessary. That has been the operative principle among
Democrats ever since former Governor Lowell Weicker drove an income tax
pipeline from salaried workers' pockets to tax consumers in 1991. Big spenders
in the General Assembly were very grateful to him, and Weicker had one of those
personalities that luxuriated in public arousal.
Like Obama, he was determined to save the peasants despite their hearty resistance
to his bizarre ideas.
For fifty years and more, progressives have marched under
the same banner, emblazoned with their operative motto: Connecticut does not
have a spending problem; it has a revenue problem. After Governor Dannel
Malloy, traveling in Weicker’s oversized shoes, had imposed on Connecticut’s
once vibrant economy both the largest and the second largest tax increases in
state history, his economic guru, Ben Barnes, was struck by a bolt from the
blue: while taxes had been increasing steadily, spending also had been
increasing proportionally. Imagine that – while the horse plodded steadily
ahead, the carriage to which he was attached followed in his train.
The distance between the horse and carriage and the debt
looming on the horizon becomes more and more distant. That distance is measured
in dollars, not miles. Presently, Connecticut owes the future $81 billion in
long-term liabilities, a good chunk of which is owed to state employees in
benefit payments. But, not to worry – to relieve the strain of payments, the
Malloy administration has pushed them further into the future, increasing the
distance between state government and any permanent solution to debt.
Back to the apple cart – who is sitting in the cart? Who is
getting the free ride? The true answer is – anyone who has escaped the tax
whipping. People at the lower end of Connecticut’s economic scale will receive
no lashes, but neither will people at the upper end, for reasons that have been
made plain to us by billionaire Warren Buffett, who STILL is paying less in
taxes than his secretary. Buffet’s secretary is a middle class worker; her back
receives the tax lash.
It was President John Kennedy who inaugurated so called “trickle-down
economics” two years before he was assassinated. The Kennedy tax reform – raise
the tide that lifts all the boats by cutting tax rates – was luminously
presented by the president to the Economic Club of New York.
His program – increase revenue by reducing tax rates, thus spurring business
activity that would in its turn increase the flow of revenue to the federal
government – was so successful that his successor, Lyndon Johnson, was able to
use the flood of new revenue to finance his Great Society programs. Even
functional economic illiterates understand that business expansion increases
tax revenues.
While the tax tide has been increasing
for decades in Connecticut, revenues have been decreasing. “Lower Than Expected Tax Collections From Wealthy Lead To Growing State Deficit” the Hartford Courant has recently reported. A receding tide lowers all the
boats. “Budget officials were projecting a growth rate of 2.7 percent for
withholding taxes for the fiscal year, but the revised number is now 2.2
percent.” That figure shouts to all ears that Connecticut has become a no-growth state. Estimated tax payments in Connecticut “’are down approximately 9
percent year-over-year, 90 percent of that variance is due to the top 100
taxpayers with the remainder of filers trending flat,’ the fiscal office said
Monday.”
It is just these kinds of events, combined with a studied
ignorance of eternal truths – the tax pond has been drained dry; the more they
have, the less I have – that form the powder kegs of revolutions from below.
Arrogant ruling aristocracies give way, when the peasants are lashed enough, to
just the kind of revolution that led Sam Adams, the father of the American
Revolution, to write to patriots in Boston and the world: “If ye love wealth
better than liberty, the tranquility of servitude than the animating contest of
freedom, go home from us in peace. We seek not your counsel or your arms.
Crouch down and lick the hand that feeds you, and may posterity forget that ye
were our countrymen.”
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