Governor Ned Lamont likes to talk shop with businessmen. A
Hartford Courant story, “Gov.
Ned Lamont tells Connecticut businesses he’s ruling out ‘broad-based’ tax
increases,” will not please Democrat progressives in Connecticut who
seem fully prepared to eat businessmen and businesswomen for lunch. The large
and overbearing contingent of progressives in the state's Democrat Party caucus cannot
be satisfied with sentiments such as this: “I’ve been pretty clear. I have no
interest in broad-based tax increases,” Lamont told president of the Connecticut
Business and Industry Association (CBIA) Chris DiPentima. And, he hastened to
add, “Every governor, Republican or Democrat since, or including, Lowell
Weicker, has done that and it did not solve the problem.”
The problem is, of course, lavish, continuing, long-term spending -- and consequent increases in taxes. Taxes in Connecticut have been permanent, while cost cutting measures have been temporary; this is because the force driving spending is more powerful than the force that would, were it applied, reduce long-term costs permanently. If one discharges deficits by reducing such costs, tax increases would be unnecessary. And the prospect of unnecessary tax increases would reduce the influence of – just to pick one snout at the public trough – Connecticut’s imperious public employee unions. But reducing the influence of the state’s public employee unions would deprive Democrats of funds and worker bees they rely open to win elections.
Lamont was not prepared to tell DiPentima that, during the remainder
of his first term as governor, he would deploy his considerable resources to
remove SEBAC, a union political organization and lobby group that some have characterized
as Connecticut’s fourth branch of government, from collective bargaining with
the state on salary and pension contracts. Some have argued that such contracts
give union leaders a Keystone pipeline to the wallets of Connecticut taxpayers,
in the process shifting from the General Assembly to Connecticut courts control
over a taxing authority that belongs constitutionally to the legislative branch
of government. Why aren’t state employee salary and benefit packages set
unilaterally by the General Assembly, which alone is constitutionally authorized
to take in and disperse tax money?
One may be certain this is not a discussion Lamont will be
having anytime soon with President Pro Tem of the Senate Martin Looney or Speaker
of the House Matt Ritter, neither of whom are disposed to cut off their union related campaign funds to satisfy their less binding constitutional responsibilities.
Over a long period of time in Connecticut, dating possibly
from the unlamented Weicker administration, Machiavellians within the Democrat
Party have discovered that it does not matter a whit whether they employ a Big
Stick on the backs of business men and women or whether such contributors are induced to
open their pockets to Democrats through special preferments; both methods may
be deployed at the same time without diminishing campaign contributions from Connecticut’s
larger businesses. The Big Stick lashes are generally offset by Big Business preferments
– tax carve-outs, low or no interest loans, taxpayer money bribes to induce
large companies to remain with their necks on the tax butcher-block in Connecticut,
an offer they can’t refuse that is usually overridden by some other low-tax,
business hungry state.
Former Governor Dan Malloy’s Office of Policy Management
director Ben Barnes, once asked by a courageous reporter why he wanted to raise
taxes on hospitals, replied in the accents of infamous bank robber Willie
Sutton when asked why he robbed banks, “Because that's where the money is.”
The state's revenue stream has been swollen by Connecticut-based
financial firms, but these firms have wings on their heels and may move, at the
drop of a tax hatchet, to other less predatory states. Lamont may have discovered
this disposition on the part of financial firms during an occasion pillow
conversation with his wife Annie, who is a successful venture capitalist and
the moneymaker in the family.
For these reasons, Lamont may be genuinely indisposed to
kill the goose laying Connecticut’s golden tax eggs. On the other hand, union
leaders, who have twice refused attempted Lamont cutbacks in their court
supported salary and benefits contracts, are barking for MORE spending, as always, and
the Democrat dominant General Assembly is barking for MORE taxes, as always.
For now, Lamont has drawn a red line on “broad based tax
increases.” Lamont has a veto power he has not yet promised to deploy on behalf
of a beleaguered CBIA or businesses destroyed through governmental edicts. Democrat
leaders in the House and Senate know they have majorities nearly large enough
to overcome vetoes.
“The game,” as Sherlock
Holmes might say, “is afoot.” Pity there is no Coolidge on Connecticut’s
political horizon.
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