When a dollar moves from a private wallet to a public
treasury, it is a tax.
This year will be a tax bonanza for Governor Ned Lamont’s
administration. Some projected tax increases have not yet been written in legislative stone, but it is possible that tax increases in the Lamont administration may exceed those of the preceding administration. Malloy raised taxes in two
installments during his two terms in office; taken together, his two tax
increases may represent the largest tax boost of any administration in state
history. Malloy’s low approval rating upon leaving office – 25 percent -- is
traceable to tax impositions, a bristly, autocratic character, and the failure
of his policies to stem chronic deficits.
The above definition of a tax allows us to regard the
elimination of tax credits and the extension of taxes to other goods and
services as tax increases. Business taxes, as we know, are transferred to
consumers in the form of higher prices for goods and services; business taxes
therefore are ultimately consumption taxes. The illusion that businesses pay taxes
is an imposture that figures greatly in the propaganda of progressives who
imagine they are doing a favor for the middle class by taxing companies. Tolls
are taxes. Legislative raids on so called dedicated funds and lock-boxes
represent, in the long run, tax increases, because the raided funds must be
replenished sometime in the future. Bonding is the taxation of future
taxpayers.
Connecticut’s enduring problem is that the gap between
spending and getting continually increases. That increase is due in large part
to an indisposition among Democrats who dominate the General Assembly to
control spending. So long as it is possible to increase taxation, governors and
legislators needn’t worry about curbing costs. Those in Connecticut who are
responsible for having increased the bottom line of their budgets threefold
since the state income tax was passed into law in 1991 are making prudent
political decisions in raising taxes rather than reducing costs. Unlike
clamorous state worker unions, the great mass of voters in Connecticut is
unorganized and not as able to exert political influence on legislators and
governors.
The Lamont administration insists that taxes put into the
tolling lock-box will be inviolate. But legislators already have plundered the
transportation fund lock-box by intercepting the funds before
they reach their appointed destination and dumping the money into the general
fund to pay for the extravagant cost of government, which increases in direct
proportion to its extension.
There are two ways to deprive bank depositors of their
funds: You can rob the bank, the lock-box in this instance, or you can hold up
the stagecoach delivering the bank deposits. That is what the Lamont
administration appears poised to do. In the past, lawmakers have withheld part
or even all of General Fund revenue scheduled to be placed in the state’s
Special Transportation Fund (STF), a sleight of hand called “a diversion.” From
2010 to 2017, the
legislature diverted more than half a billion dollars from
the STF fund. The Malloy/Lamont administration is ready and
willing to continue the practice so that it may more persuasively argue that
the impending crisis, an empty STF fund, necessitates toll taxes.
The efficient cause of this legislative pilfering is the
disinclination on the part of progressive politicians to control increases in
the cost of state employee labor. A deficit is the difference between revenue
and expenditures. When you remove from the solution tool-box serious
consideration of one of the causal elements of deficits -- permanent, long term
reductions in spending -- you get ever increasing taxation that leads, in the
absence of spending cuts, to chronic deficits. This is the precipice upon which
the entire state now stands peering into a dizzying abyss.
And the whole world outside the state is watching and
waiting to see whether politicians are inclined to fix a problem that has only
been worsened by repeated tax increases.
Progressives understand the principle that underlies
conservative thinking on taxes: whatever you tax tends to disappear. Indeed, their
policies are an affirmation of the principle. That is why Connecticut
progressives have imposed a tax on what they call fossil fuels. This year, when
heating oil and natural gas tanks are filled, consumers will be paying about
$20 more in taxes for their product.
Connecticut Democrats say they are imposing the tax because
they want to encourage people to move to cleaner forms of energy such as solar
and wind power. An additional tax on fossil fuel will drive up the cost of the
product and make it less desirable, i.e. more expensive. That is the underlying
rationale behind so called “sin taxes” on alcohol and cigarettes for example.
The use of fossil fuel has become an ecological sin. Tax it enough and people
will become virtuous and choose to heat their homes with so called “cleaner”
forms of energy, however expensive, impractical and impossible the transition
may be.
In fact, most of the showy rhetoric surrounding tax
increases is a sales device. Democrats in Connecticut cannot cut spending
without cutting their own political throats. They MUST raise taxes, and there
are loads of sinners in the state, many of whom have already disappeared.
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