If the level of spending in Connecticut continues to
increase at a rapid rate – and that will assuredly happen if Connecticut
continues to pursue a course all too familiar ever since former Governor Lowell
Weicker forced his income tax down the throat of a somewhat resistant
legislature in 1991 – and if the underside of the getting and spending coin
continues to remain face-down on Connecticut’s table, then tax increases are inescapable,
a boon to cowardly and lazy politicians.
Why are tax increases in Connecticut inevitable? That is a question rarely addressed by the General Assembly
or by Connecticut’s media, even though the answer to it is as plain as the nose
on Pinocchio’s face.
The “cut spending” side of Connecticut’s getting and
spending coin so rarely is turned face-up in budget discussions for two
reasons; 1) the “moderate” wing of the Democrat Party -- a union bought
organization intent on self-preservation that, like some greedy landlord holds all the political
property in the state -- has completely collapsed, and 2) tied to the
administrative state, progressive Democrats have found it much easier to raise
taxes, since spending cuts would alienate support from those who have been
propping up the corpse, and the ruling party has received considerable support
from crony capitalist businessmen in the state who much prefer tax extensions
on the state’s vanishing middle class. Weicker raised taxes and declined to run
for governor again once his income tax began to pump additional dollars into
Connecticut’s swelling treasury; Governor Dannel Malloy raised taxes in both
his first and second term, and then declined to run for a third term in office.
Governor Ned Lamont has inauspiciously opened his administration with massive
tax increases, and his solution to deficits is Weickerish -- tolls are Lamont’s
income tax.
Naturally, a swelling stream of spending will follow in the
rut of taxation, and before long a future legislature will be discussing yet
again whether consumption tax increases are more or less damaging to
Connecticut’s economy than income tax increases, the subject of Phaneuf’s
latest piece in CTMirror. The discussion is a magic trick. Connecticut’s taxes are punishing both
consumers of products and services AND people blessed – temporarily – with real
property and assets. The “either-or” proposition is a false flag. No one in
Connecticut’s gluttonous government is proposing to decrease asset taxes as
consumer taxes increase. And no one in the legislature is volubly supporting a
no-net-tax increase measure requiring a pledge from legislators that every tax
increase must be off-set by a corresponding tax decrease.
The real “either-or” that hangs ominously over Connecticut
like a Damoclean sword is this: either more costly and inefficient top-down
government that threatens republican governance -- or greater freedom at a
micro-governmental level and a re-invigoration of the doctrine of subsidiarity,
which holds that government closest to the governed governs best. The doctrine
of subsidiarity is the core principle of representative government. At a micro
level, a father or mother governing the affairs of a household will do a better
job of it than Lamont or the two minor political deities who control
legislation in the General Assembly, Speaker of the House Joe Aresimowicz and
President Pro Tem of the Senate Martin Looney, both progressives. But how is
dad or mom to govern their own affairs when they are put at risk by socialists
who want to plunder them, bring up their children, balance their checkbooks and
through a deprivation of assets – high taxation – deprive them of
self-governance?
Avowed socialists like Bernie Sanders, and others within the
progressive wing of the Democrat Party playing with socialist fire, are
especially good at seizing the whole economic loaf for the purpose of
magnanimously distributing crumbs to the poor.
U.S. Senator Dick Blumenthal and other Democrats chiefly
concerned with their own welfare, always in permanent election mode, is an
artist among more ham-fisted political actors. A millionaire by marriage, a
graduate of Harvard and Yale, he mingles as often as possible with the
struggling masses, the sweat of the working classes dampening his brow.
A recent photo in a newspaper – Blumenthal has never been
camera shy – really is worth a thousand words. It shows the senator on a strike
line with Stop & Shop protestors, in an exultant pose, waving his fist in
the air and mouthing some solidarity slogan, his arm draped around a union
worker sporting a sign that reads “Please do not patronize – Stop & Shop on
strike – Local 371 UFCW AFL-CIO.”
If union demands are met, the successful strike will result
in store closings and consequent unemployment for staff that believes their
wicked employers intend to replace workers with less demanding, non-unionized
robots. There is no indication in the story that Blumenthal has ever personally
stopped to shop at Stop & Shop. A candid photo showing him selecting fruit
from one of the bins at the store or ordering a half pound of mortadella from
the store’s cold meat counter would be news indeed.
Comments