Something similar is
happening in Connecticut. Tax money “invested” by Governor Dannel Malloy in
Connecticut businesses is not working to create a welcoming business
environment. “Once again, a Connecticut company making a major investment in
its digital business has been lured by another state offering tax breaks and
the chance to succeed in a big city,” the Hartford Courant tells us. This time
it’s United Technologies (UTC), which recently “spun off” Sikorsky, an iconic
Connecticut company sold a few months back to Lockheed Martin, headquartered in
Bethesda, Maryland – which is more remote than Hartford, Connecticut, for the
time being the headquarters of UTC. “United Technologies Corporation is
looking to expand into New York City,” according to the Courant story, “UTC Picks New York City For $300 Million Expansion.”
Pouring over
Malloy’s past campaign memorabilia, one finds Malloy inveighing against New
Jersey Governor Chris Christie, a Republican infested with noxious conservative
notions. But the Governor of New York, a state now pirating Connecticut jobs,
is Andrew Cuomo – progressive Democrat. Job pilfering is not hampered by
political predispositions. Connecticut’s income tax, Malloy’s two massive tax
increases, the state’s regulatory miasma, a predisposition to settle any state
debt through revenue increases, increased borrowing or – a default position for
the Big Spenders in the General Assembly – transferring debt to municipalities,
all this has leveled the economic playing field between Connecticut and
competing, contiguous states. Put it this way: Connecticut government is not
UConn women’s basketball team. The state’s government, never willing to bite
the spending bullet, has become, to employ a phrase made memorable by former
President Barack Obama, a JV team, unable to compete with other states that
know – Connecticut has a spending problem.
“Antsy” might be a
suitable word to describe the Courant’s present unsettled state. Mention the paper
in the local bar or diner and the response is instantaneous: The state is what
it is because the Courant is what it is. From 1991, the year that Governor
Lowell Weicker draped an income tax about the necks of Connecticut citizens,
abolishing a competitive no-income tax edge that had attracted businesses from
contiguous states, until very recently, the paper’s prescription for deepening
debt was to raise taxes, a solution that satisfied both state public employee
union representatives and politicians who did not want to alienate their deep
pocket political contributors. The political slogan – Connecticut doesn’t have
a spending problem; it has a revenue problem – was hammered out in the paper’s
editorial smithy and soon found its way into the Democratic Party’s arsenal of
campaign weaponry. Result: increased spending, increased taxes, increased debt
and increased business and entrepreneurial flight.
Following a recent
U.S. Census Bureau report, the Courant discovered that Connecticut is losing
population: “The Census Bureau previously reported that nearly 30,000 more
people moved out of Connecticut than moved in from July 2015 to July 2016. The
most recent data show that the Hartford and Bridgeport metro areas together
lost a net total of about 20,000 residents to other metros. The New
Haven-Milford metro area lost about 6,800.”
Things are getting serious,
and the state’s serious problems demand a serious response: “It’s up to the
state’s civic leaders to halt the exodus and make Connecticut a place [where] people
want to live. Loss of population means loss of jobs, loss of tax revenue, less
money for schools and social services, depressed real estate prices, more
pressure on government to raise taxes — and potentially fewer representatives
in Congress, all of which would provide even more encouragement for people to
leave the state.”
The Courant’s
editorial ends on a note of cautionary doom: “Time is running out.”
Indeed, unmentioned by
the Courant as possible contributory causes to this the winter of our discontent are
excessive borrowing to pay down debt, the raiding of so called lock-boxes and
dedicated funds to balance perpetually out of balance state budgets, costly “remedies”
imposed by courts on legislators to achieve racial balance – defined as classes
that are 25 percent white – in Hartford schools, the constant and unremitting appeasement
of state employee unions by dominant Democrats in the General Assembly, the
reflexive resort to tax and fee increases to balance budgets, inflated revenue
projections to liquidate budget deficits on paper, and – most especially – the absence of serious
attempts to cut spending permanently.
Cut spending, cut regulations. Time is running out.
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