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The default position of Connecticut’s majority Democrats on the matter of getting and spending has not changed within the past three decades: Tax cuts, infrequently imposed, should be temporary and bravely endured, while tax increases, deployed for the most part to satisfy imperious state employee union demands, should be permanent.
The recent temporary suspension of Connecticut’s 25 cents per
gallon excise gas tax conforms to the default position of Democrats who have
controlled Connecticut’s General Assembly for the last 30 years: The tax is to
be suspended – operative word – “temporarily” from April to July 1.
Connecticut Democrats, it should seem obvious, are reading
from a national Democrat script.
The increase in the price of gas, they say, is due chiefly
to the Russian war of aggression in Ukraine and the greedy oil barons they
accuse of having profiteered from an economic slowdown imposed as a result of Governor
Ned Lamont’s necessary shut down of Connecticut’s businesses.
The debate in the General Assembly on reducing Connecticut’s
excise tax on gas centered upon whether the reduction should be temporary or
permanent.
“Rep. Sean Scanlon, a Guilford Democrat who co-chairs the tax-writing
committee,” one newspaper noted, “said many
constituents have been hurting from the rising prices at the pump, which was an
average of $4.32 per gallon Wednesday.
“Our constituents did not start a war in Ukraine,’' Scanlon argued.
“Our constituents did not contribute to the global supply chain. ... This is a
great first step that we can make to give them some affordability, some relief.
... At least we’re doing something.”
The newspaper correctly noted, “The tax cuts are possible
partly because the state has large budget surpluses in two separate funds due
to increased federal stimulus money and capital gains taxes from Wall Street
increases, paid largely by millionaires and billionaires in Fairfield County.”
In the State Senate chamber, also dominated by Democrats,
Will Haskell of Westport rose to the occasion. Haskell argued that the gas tax
cut should not be permanent because providing permanent relief would deliver a
“debilitating blow’' to the state’s plans to spend millions of dollars to fix
roads and bridges. The paper quoted Haskell: “Gas prices are high, but not because
of taxes. It’s because of [Russian leader Vladimir] Putin.”
The federal government – which prints money, borrows money,
and acquires money through excessive taxation – is flush with funds now being
distributed by the Biden administration to various political receptacles, some
say for political purposes. In many instances, states are using the funds to
offset business slowdowns caused by, some argue, imprudent decisions made by
governors and federal officials that have produced a worker shortage. Common
sense tells us that if you provide a long-term living salary to workers not to
work, they will not work.
High business taxes, an increase in the supply of money
flowing from private pockets to the public purse, and labor shortages have
produced too few goods, resulting in inflation – too many dollars chasing too
few goods.
The high price of goods and services may also be attributed
to a continuing effort on the part of progressives in the United States to repeal
a central law of a free market economy, the law of supply and demand, which
holds that when demand is a constant and supply is diminished, prices on all
goods and services rise. The rise in prices has less to do with the greed of
billionaire CEOs than a Darwinian survival-of-the fittest-impulse in over-regulated
markets centrally directed by Washington politicians. Large business can
survive a large regulator drag on profits. Higher taxes and an increasing
regulatory burden swamp smaller businesses and, of course, make it much easier
for the larger fish to swallow the minnows.
The empty shelves in Russian stores during good old days of
the Soviet Union were attributed by underpaid “workers of the world” in Russia
to central planning. In the so called “captive nations,” the necklace of states
now threatened militarily by Russian President Vladimir Putin, workers used to
joke among each other, “We pretend to work, and they pretend to pay us.”
The Democrat Party program runs against the grain of good
sense. Every worker in the United States knows that personal debt should be
discharged by responsible debt holders willing to cut spending and pay down the
debt.
Temporary reductions in taxes are insufficient to pay down a
debt in Connecticut that has swelled over the years to about $57 billion. And given past
performance, no one in the state can be certain that increased taxes will be
put to such purposes by an administrative apparatus, growing daily, that had in
the past raided various Connecticut lockboxes to pay for current
expenses.
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