There will be time, there will be time
To prepare a face to
meet the faces that you meet – TS Eliot
Connecticut is running out of time to prepare a face to meet
the faces it will meet. The whole world is watching, as kids in the sixties
used to say when, caught in the grip of an unwanted war, TV cameras showed them
sticking flowers in the barrels of national guard rifles warding them off .
Clever politicians may hide behind their own designer masks,
but the face Connecticut presents to the world and other states cannot be
hidden. The question politicians in Connecticut should be asking, and acting
upon, is this one: What is the face Connecticut has been presenting during the
last few decades to revenue producers? Is it attracting or repelling the
entrepreneurial capital the state desperately needs to finance both its
operations and its best prompting from the angels of its better nature?
Consider a recent story in a Hartford paper titled “Lamont tells Connecticut businesses he
opposed ‘mansion tax.’” The mansion tax is the latest sunburst from
Martin Looney, the most progressive President Pro Tem of the State Senate in
Connecticut history.
The Looney state property tax will be levied on the assets of
rich millionaires in Connecticut. The mansion tax, we are told in the story,
will “funnel more money to municipal governments… It will raise $73 million a
year as part of a package to provide property tax relief for cash strapped communities
like his hometown of New Haven.”
The quickest and most efficient way of shuttling money from
state coffers to municipalities is to reduce any tax and allow people in
municipalities to retain their own assets. Doing so would avoid the trip a
dollar makes from the municipality to the state and back again – minus
administrative costs – to the municipality. But this method would short circuit
the progressive afflatus and considerably reduce the political influence of
progressive redistributors. One imagines Looney gagging on such a solution as
being too simple, workable and efficient.
The new mansion tax drew an immediate response from
millionaire Governor Ned Lamont “I don’t support it. I don’t think it’s going
anywhere, and I don’t think we need it,” Lamont told “Chris DiPentima,
president of the Connecticut Business & Industry Association” on a webcast
conference call.
Lamont, we are told, issued his comment “a day after a
public hearing among state legislators who called for a separate 5% surtax on
capital gains, dividends and taxable interest.” In addition, the progressive
legislators want to increase the personal income tax rate for high earners
making more than $500,000 a year and couples earning more than $1million
annually.
In addition, progressive lawmakers – nearly half the
Democrat caucus in the General Assembly are progressives – “support reducing
the Connecticut estate tax exemption of $2 million and [eliminating] the
current cap on payments that would yield higher” revenue payments from
millionaires in the state who foolishly decide to remain on the spot, there to
be cudgeled and deprived of their assets by tax greedy progressives.
This concerted attack on wealth accumulation in Connecticut
is designed, consciously or not, to drive creative revenue production out of
the state the way St. Patrick once drove serpents out of Ireland and, in the
long run, the effort will succeed. Millionaire snakes will slither out of
Connecticut on their way to enrich competing states.
Seen from outside the state, what does the face of
Connecticut look like?
Well, it is among
the highest taxed states in the nation; business flight is rampant; out of
state companies have gobbled up Connecticut home-grown companies such as,
United Technologies, now merged with Raytheon Technologies, headquartered in
Arlington, Virginia; Sikorsky, now owned by Lockheed Martin, headquartered in
Bethesda, Maryland; Aetna Insurance Company, now a subsidiary of CVS Health;
Colt firearms, bought by the Ceska Zbrojovka Group, a Czech company; and
its seems likely that The Hartford, a company that once insured Abe Lincoln’s
home in Illinois, will in the near future be bought by Chubb, incorporated
in Zürich,
Switzerland.
This is not a fetching portrait of Connecticut's face, but it
is an accurate one.
When the Coronavirus high tide recedes, very quickly now, it
will leave on the shore the wreckage of Connecticut’s economy that had been apparent
to everyone before the Wuhan China virus arrived in our state. Connecticut, if
it is to remain competitive with other states, must address a legion of
problems that cannot be settled by politicians more interested in saving their
seats than their state. The state’s spending spree, unchecked since 1991, must
be addressed. Taxes are too high, and politicians much too clever and committed,
body and soul, to unchecked spending, neither of which advances the public
good.
Comments