Ever since former Editorial Page Editor of the Hartford
Courant Carol Lumsden left her position at the paper, the Hartford Courant has
been renting out its editorial page to other left of center newspapers. At the
beginning of February, the paper, summoning up courage, displayed a Courant editorial on tolling. It
was, as one might expect, left of left of center.
“The time for half-measures is over,” the Courant bravely
announced. “Connecticut residents spend way too much time alone in their cars
and we’re destroying the planet in the process.” Cars and their owners are now
planet destroyers, don't ya know. Perhaps Connecticut’s environmentally woke General Assembly
can be convinced to outlaw the use of cars by these murderers, a measure that
would “vastly expand mass transit, provide green options like bike paths in
cities and work to actualize a future where cars play less of a role in our
daily lives.”
For nutmeggers who have not yet jumped the hedge and moved
to, say, Tennessee, tolls very well could be the state’s salvation. “Not to
toll cars is more than just leaving money on the table,” the Courant advised, “it’s[a] failure to plan for the future.”
For fifty years, with the exception of about four years of
sanity, the General Assembly has operated on the Courant’s progressive
principle – do not leave any money on the table. Scoop it all up. And never
mind that the people’s money is best left in the hands of the people, who spend
it much more wisely and profitably than Connecticut’s legislature, which reacts
to serious cost cutting pretty much the way the Devil reacts to
Holy Water.
The Courant vigorously backed the Lowell Weicker Jr. income
tax and two massive taxes imposed by former Governor Dan Malloy, now serving as
Chancellor at the University of Maine’s higher education system. Positions of
this kind have often been used in politics to break the fall of hard charging politicians.
Tax-wise, Malloy should feel right at home in Maine. Like
Connecticut, Maine has a progressive income tax, rates being set between 5.8 to
8.15 percent. Like Connecticut, Maine’s state worker-teacher retirement system
is underfunded. Maine is about $6.5 billion in arrears, a real piker. Connecticut’s much less frugal state
and local unfunded retirement
obligations top out at $124 billion. Maine is noted for its lobsters and its
ocean coastline. Connecticut is noted for its fleeing population, people voting
against the state’s tax load with their feet, and its relocated governors.
While Malloy is strutting his stuff in Maine, the state’s last Republican
Governor, Jodi Rell, formerly of Brookfield, now calls Florida her home. Florida
has no income tax and is to Connecticut expats what fly paper is to flies.
Connecticut’s media as a whole has never met a tax it did
not fall in love with at first sight, and it approves of the much revived
Lamont-Looney-Aresimowitz tax grab. Lamont and Looney are respectively the
Democrat heads of the state Senate and House. Hearst Media Group – which now
comprises the New
Haven Register, Connecticut
Post, Greenwich Time, Stamford Advocate, The Norwalk
Hour, and 14 weekly newspapers, including The Darien Times, Fairfield
Citizen, New Canaan Advertiser, The Greater New Milford
Spectrum and Westport News – has succumbed, probably for
business and ideological reasons, to the blandishments of the state’s ruling
regime.
The Courant also hopes that Connecticut eventually will be
able to make sense of its gambling operations, in part yet another tax drain. “But,”
the Courant notes without a hint of irony, “before legislators approve one
[more] expansion [of its gambling monopoly] they must be armed with actual data about how it would affect
Connecticut’s economy - and what the market will truly handle.” Reliable data
on tolling has yet to be released, and those who favor tolling haven’t the
slightest idea how much additional taxation, direct or indirect, the taxpaying
market in Connecticut can bear without unleashing destructive consequences –
such as decade long recessions, business flight, the shift of market decisions
from the public square to the Capitol building in Hartford and – most
destructive of all -- an indisposition on the part of Big Spenders in the
General Assembly, whose appetite for tax dollars is insatiable, to make permanent, long term cuts in spending.
Connecticut’s approach to governance during the last half
century has been one long, uninterrupted, perversely unrepentant, progressive flight
from reality. And we have now arrived at a point in which the triumph of
administrative state propaganda over common sense and right government is
complete and unchallenged by a slothful media.
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