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| Looney |
Martin Looney, for six years the President Pro Tem of Connecticut’s State Senate, has made in the pages of CTMirror the strongest and least convincing case in favor of a new state property tax.
The state needs a new tax because it has, like Mr. Micawber
of Charles Dickens’ David Copperfield, spent more money than it has taken in. Any
half-literate state senator will be familiar with Micawber’s recipe for penury and prosperity:
“Annual income twenty pounds, annual expenditure nineteen [pounds] nineteen
[shillings] and six [pence], result happiness.
Annual income twenty pounds, annual expenditure twenty pounds ought and
six, result misery."
The state of Connecticut, prone to debt, is not a person.
The state can always rely on its productive citizens to bail out improvident
legislators – through taxation.
Its citizens, finding themselves in the Coronavirus era with
diminished resources, cannot rely upon the state to trim its spending
sufficiently to reduce its debt load. Micawber, chronically in debt, found
himself in a similar pickle and ended up in debtors’ prison, as did Dickens’
father. When Charles Dickens was
12 years old, his father, John, served some time in Marshalsea Prison for having incurred a debt of 40
pounds and 10 shillings, about $5,906 in today’s inflated currency.
Debtors’ prisons, with a few
minor exceptions – dead-beat dads may still face prison if they do not
abide by court ordered payment schedules – have been consigned to the ashbin of
history. If this were not the case, some improvident legislators might be
consigned to the modern equivalent of Marshalsea Prison, and the Devil take the
hindmost. For some unaccountable reason, Micawber’s rule of personal
responsibility does not apply equally to those who govern and the governed.
While the governed, especially in hard times, watches its pennies like a
pinch-penny accountant, some prodigal legislators, throwing caution to the
wind, tend to spend other people’s money like drunken sailors. Looney, a
progressive spendthrift, is one of these.
Perhaps in order to satisfy his own progressive
constituency, Looney has now put forward his property tax scheme. Naturally,
only the rich will pay the tax – for the time being.
The very first income tax, signed into law by President Abe
Lincoln to pay off the Civil War debt, was a temporary tax levied on the millionaires
of Lincoln’s day. Progressives, who do not believe in “trickledown” theories of
wealth production, according to which lower level workers share in the
prosperity of wealth producers through product improvement and job production –
a rising economic tide, said President of Camelot John Kennedy, lifts ALL the
boats – do not believe in the trickledown theory of progressive taxation. That
is because they have not studied the historic progress of the income tax, which
has now trickled down from Lincoln’s temporary tax on the super wealthy of his
day to middle class workers. Wage taxation now consumes about 25-30 percent of
a middle class worker’s net pay, and the Civil War ended in 1865.
Looney’s solution to debt – always raise taxes, never offer
permanent long-term spending cuts – impoverishes only productive taxpayers, who
have been reeling under the weight of trickle down progressive taxation since
1991, the year Maverick Governor Lowell Weicker forced an income tax through a brutalized legislature. Since 1991, spending in the state has increased
threefold. The last non-income tax balanced budget in Connecticut was $7.5
billion. The present barely balanced budget is three times larger.
The Weicker income tax, once flat, has been progressivized
three times – in 2009, 2011 and 2015. According to Internal Revenue Service
data, the Yankee Institute has reported, a
significant proportion of high income earners have exited the state, resulting
in “a net loss to Connecticut of more than $12 billion in adjusted gross income
between 2012 and 2018 due to outmigration; 64 percent of that loss came from those earning over $200,000 per
year.”
Soon a load of Trump dollars will be released to Connecticut.
CTMirror
has given us a picture of the coming political scrum. It will be like witnessing
a load of dolphins released into a Great White Shark tank.
The sniff of federal dollars has re-awaked Looney’s primeval
constitutional obligations – this after nearly a year of revenue reducing autocratic
governance by Ned Lamont, during the course of which Looney’s state Senate went
into deep, historic hibernation. Ruling Democrats have extended Lamont’s
extraordinary emergency powers, due to
elapse on February 9, forward to April 20, with the understanding, Looney has
said, that “The legislative branch will continue to exercise its constitutional
and statutory authority to appropriate any and all funds distributed to the
state of Connecticut where federal law allows for such discretion.”
One wonders whether any of the incoming funds will indirectly
offset payments to depleted slush funds such as the state
pension “lockbox”, pilfered for 30 years and more by Looney’s Democrat
majority in the General Assembly to pay for
its improvident spending. One needn’t wonder at all whether the incoming
federal funds will spur Looney and others to reform the General Assembly’s spending
habits.
They won’t. Once a shark, always a shark.
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