The Republicans Are Coming, The Republicans Are Coming!

Stefanowski

Bob Stefanowski, the likely Republican Party choice for governor, has been reborn since he last ran against Governor Ned Lamont.

The last time out of the shoot, Stefanowski lost to Lamont by a nose in the gubernatorial race. Political savants suggested, numerous times, that Stefanowski lost because he was too conservative for deep blue Connecticut. He had made a serious mistake by placing at the center of his campaign a vow to do away with the state’s income tax, a campaign ploy used by former Governor John Rowland, soon abandoned after Rowland had achieved office. Stefanowski said his plan was largely aspirational and indicative, suggesting to voters that he was seriously considering permanent reductions in taxes.

As a Republican, Stefanowski believes, along with most liberal Democrats during the Camelot era of President John Kennedy, that reductions in marginal taxation will “lift all the boats.” In addition, Kennedy told an audience at the Economic Club of New York in 1962, the reduction in marginal taxation he was recommending would flood tax coffers with new funds produced by an expanding economy.

Kennedy warned at the time that excessive taxation and spending in the post-World War II period had exerted “too heavy a drag on growth in peace time; that it siphons out of the private economy too large a share of personal and business purchasing power; that it reduces the financial incentives for personal effort, investment, and risk-taking. In short, to increase demand and lift the economy, the federal government's most useful role is not to rush into a program of excessive increases in public expenditures, but to expand the incentives and opportunities for private expenditures.”

After the Kennedy plan had been adopted following his assassination, both federal and state coffers were enriched by a massive inflow of taxes from new and expanded business activity, and the tide did lift all the boats.

There has been no mention in Stefanowski’s current campaign of dumping the Weicker income  tax that has been the chief engine of Connecticut’s wildly inordinate spending spree. The state’s 2023 budget, currently topping out at $24.2 billion, was a modest $7.5 billion during the last pre-income tax year of Governor Bill O’Neill. Connecticut’s taxes finance current state operations, a good part of which is on autopilot. Connecticut boasts a state debt of some $58 billion, the bulk of it accumulated in the state’s post income tax years.

Stefanowski’s current campaign is broad and granular, and even commentators in Connecticut who generally lean left have taken notice. A Hearst columnist who reliably produces copy that would pass the stiffest left of center litmus tests, having "met Stefanowski for the first time," noted that he came away from his interview “convinced that [the] Democrats' best hope to win in November is to quickly recruit a new candidate for governor.”

The right of center Stefanowski still has aspirations to clip spending, a San Juan Hill the state employee union supported Democrat Party is determined not to die on. Stefanowski has made his mark this campaign season on a zero based budgeting proposal, a budget fix that reviews all spending in Connecticut, including fixed-costs expenditures – with a view to reducing budget items whenever possible.

However, the chief problem faced by Democrats this year is not only state budget reductions but rather reductions in household budgets due to inflation, which reduces the purchasing power of the dollar, price increases, due to an abundance of demand and an insufficiency of supply, and an overgrown permanent government of costly unelected bureaucrats that, a king’s crown upon its head, governs athwart the will of the people as expressed, among other venues, in boards of education meetings, still open to the public and mostly transparent.

To put it briefly, working taxpayers are poorer. The more income that is moved from private wallets to public purses, the richer and more inventive receiving politicians and the unelected bureaucracy becomes and, conversely, the poorer working taxpayers become. Money finances creative activity, and it is creative activity that lies at the center of free market economics. Therefore, the more creative the government, the less creative are those in the free market who are better positioned to allocate investments. State government, sitting on a surplus nest egg of some $2.3 billion has survived an economic undertow that has consistently moved scarce cash from hard pressed taxpayers to government coffers.

To put the matter in Kennedyesque terms, the rising tax tide in Connecticut has beached all the boats but our glittering and overbearing political yacht.