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| Fonfara |
Governor Ned Lamont has gotten his $46 billion budget. The State Senate vote in favor of the Lamont bi-partisan budget was 31-4, four conservative Republicans dissenting, while eight Republicans were in favor, including two top GOP leaders, according to a Hartford paper.
State Senator John Fonfara of Hartford, who favors heavy taxes on “the
rich”, was a voluble dissenter on the left and, following passage of the
budget, he and Lamont publicly bumped political heads.
Fonfara pulled out his political stops on the Senate floor.
Playing to a no doubt appreciative leftist gallery, Fonfara said, “We live in a
state of incredible concentrated wealth within a handful of families,” referring
to the state’s multimillionaires and billionaires. He continued, “We can make
those investments and not change the lives of those who are asked to contribute
a little more... The status quo, the status quo budget, leaves us with status
quo results.”
This produced a mannerly rebuff from Lamont, who took
exception to Fonfara’s “status quo” remark.
“For somebody who has been in this building for 30 years,”
Lamont said, referring indirectly to Fonfara, “talking to somebody who has been
in this building for 30 months — trying to make a difference for the state — I
take exception to those comments. I think this is an incredibly important,
transformative budget. I think it makes a big difference in people’s lives,
especially the lives of people who have been hardest hit by the pandemic, especially
in the lives of Black (sic) and brown people, the likes of which hasn’t been done for
30 years. And I think you’re finally getting it done right now, and I’m really
proud of the folks in the building doing it.”
The head-butts between Fonfara and Lamont are nothing new.
Fonfara has pushed aggressively for increases in business taxes
and a steeply progressive tax on Connecticut’s rich, a staple these days in both
national and state Democrat politics. He strongly favors an upcharge in the
capital gains tax – a boost in the income tax, Republicans claimed – both measures
tossed about in closed door Democrat caucus budget discussions and unalterably
opposed by Lamont early in the state’s virtual legislative session.
The end of session, fraught with minimal suspense, would not have been complete if an irremovable urban Democrat politician had not played at least one race card.
Fonfara – who, incomprehensibly, voted in favor of a
budget bill he condemned in the strongest possible terms -- said that
Connecticut’s “policies are a knee on the neck of the Black (sic) community and other
under-served communities of our state. We can do better, and we must do better.
When our policies fail to address [the needs of cities like Hartford] in a
sustained way,” Fonfara lectured Democrats and Republicans in the General
Assembly who had just passed the massive $46 billion bi-partisan budget, “it’s as
though we have …” here, Fonfara hesitated bit, but plunged on, “…our policies
are a knee on the neck of the Black (sic) community and other underserved communities
of our state. We can do better, and we must do better.”
If the repeal of Newton’s Third Law of Motion -- every force
on a body produces an opposite and equal force – were to be brought up in Connecticut’s
General Assembly, Fonfara would vote in favor of the measure. The whole
progressive scheme rests infirmly on the notion that any and all progressive
political force should never be attended by a countervailing political force. There
can only be one consequence to a progressive measure – the one the progressive
wants, and no other.
This is ahistorical, infantile nonsense. We’ve known for
years that companies are tax collectors, not tax payers. The free market, not
having yet been repealed in the United States through post-modern socialist demagoguery, permits
rich corporations to pass along to consumers of products and services all costs
they accrue, including the cost of taxation and artificial boosts in the costs
of labor. And these Newtonian unintended
consequences grievously impact the poor in cities, not the rich embedded in Connecticut’s so called “Gold Coast”, many of whom continue to finance the political
campaigns of bumper sticker wielding progressives, even when the the
consequences of unthinking giving are richly displayed before them.
Fonfara appears to believe that the imaginary rich "Gold Coast" knees pressing the necks of the poor in Hartford can be removed only when champions
of the poor such as Fonfara press their knees onto the necks of yacht owners in
Greenwich.
This is the politics of envy writ large, and the problem
with appeals that stoke envy is that the construction of a politics of envy has
never, in the whole history of the world, ended in justice to the poor. It has
ended always, without exception, where it began -- in envy and the destruction
first of republican government and later of the entrepreneurial middle class.
Does Fonfara really mean to suggest that Connecticut's Capital
city, Harford, run by Democrats for the last half century, lacks compassion? If
compassion rather than competence were gold, Hartford’s streets would be paved
with gold.
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