 |
| Twain |
"An honest man in politics shines more there than he would elsewhere” – Mark Twain
Coronavirus – which, by the way, is not the cause of
widespread business shutdowns – has been a boon for some Connecticut politicians
because it has allowed them to solve the problems they have caused.
The United States, and Connecticut with it -- thanks in
large part to former President Donald’s
Trump’s initiatives, which dug the spurs into slow moving pharmaceutical giants
to produce creative and cost effective anti-Coronavirus products – has only
recently moved from phase 1, widespread gubernatorial ordered business shutdowns,
to phase 2, a lifting of crippling gubernatorial sanctions.
With one dramatic exception in the northeast, most governors and inactive legislatures have emerged unscathed from the problems they have caused. The glaring exception is, of course, New York Governor Andrew Cuomo, author of American Crisis: Leadership Lessons From The Covid-19 Pandemic. Cuomo, Lamont’s fishing buddy and mentor, it turned out, was the problem he had caused.
Cuomo had not learned that moving Coronavirus infected elderly New Yorkers into long-term care facilities was a lethally bad idea. Before several of his female employees popped up to accuse him of post #MeToo erotic misbehavior, not to mention appalling manners, Cuomo was on the ropes. Fully 60 percent of all deaths in New York associated with Coronavirus occurred in Cuomo’s nursing homes. Of all Coronavirus super-spreaders in the northeast, Cuomo was by far the worst.
Heading into Connecticut’s plague year, Governor Ned Lamont’s approval rating, cresting at 28 percent, was a slight improvement upon that of his predecessor, Governor Dannel Malloy. A Sacred Heart University/Hearst Connecticut Media survey taken in late October 2018 showed Malloy scraping the bottom of the approval barrel with a rating under 15 percent. A similar poll taken in middle March 2021 showed Lamont with an approval rating of 56 percent. Connecticut’s media has attributed the boost to two factors: After a robust grassroots opposition, Lamont had put behind him a highly unpopular toll proposal; and Connecticut voters had given him high marks on his handling of the Coronavirus pandemic. Lamont’s approval rating on this point – a stratospheric 71 percent – certainly would have helped to elevate Cuomo’s numbers.
However, there is a looming problem. In a political arena that has radically changed, you cannot enter the same stream twice. Given a weakened Republican Party and the progressive insurgency in the General Assembly, which no one disputes, Lamont may not find it possible to convince the leadership in his own party, post Coronavirus, that his way – maintaining taxation at its present level, buttressing Connecticut's resurgent economy with massive infusions of federal funny money, and riding through the Coronavirus storm with a sound, smart sailing, unreformed, political ship – will increase both the public good and tax revenue.
Lamont, in other words, may be preaching to a choir, i.e. moderate Democrats, that has abandoned its traditional choir loft. And the songs pouring from the progressive political choir to the congregants below have changed considerably. Nor are the once “steady habits” in Connecticut any longer the fiscally prudent, socially moderate habits of past Democrat governors and legislators.
Progressives in Connecticut’s General Assembly, perhaps taking their cues from President Joe Biden and national Democrats rhetorically terrorized by far leftists in the Democrat Party, want what progressives always want – MORE! -- more taxes, more spending, less participation from minority Republicans, and the freedom to embrace eccentric policies that reasonable people know are fraught with predictable and disastrous consequences.
Wolfish progressives, lunging for the last tax hens in the coop, intend, according to a piece in the indispensible Yankee Institute, to “double the state’s top income tax rates, subject capital gains to a separate, harsher tax treatment, push corporate tax rates back to their historic high, hike the estate tax, and levy a new statewide property tax.” And in President Pro Tem of the Senate Martin Looney’s progressive caucus, not a murmur is permitted concerning tax cuts or the regulation reform movement that has characterized more business friendly states in the nation to which tax escapees have fled.
Culturally, the post-modern progressives are all graduates of Critical Race Theory, equity dripping like honey from their lips, and Leninist ropes in their hands for sale to the simpleton CEOs who support them, hoping to salve their torn consciences with campaign contributions, little realizing they are to be hanged once the revolution has rolled over obscene capitalists.
Entrepreneurial capital and capitalists can flee the fleecing in Connecticut by sinking roots in less predatory states. Left standing, open-mouthed in a rifled pantry, will be the state’s poor and middle class beggars, their pockets emptied by progressives, both equal in their dependence upon a predatory state.
Comments