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The Lamont Budget And the Democrat Left

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.

Comments

Marty G. said…
State and Federal laws, regulations, set asides and quotas for the past 50 years are a form of reparations that must be recognized as such. Mr. Farfalla forgets that citizens and companies are highly mobile. If he wants Socialism so bad Venezuela is a short plane ride away.

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