Lamont Stares Down Progressive Democrats

Lamont wins -- Courant

If Governor Lamont has his way with progressives in the Democrat dominated General Assembly – a big “if” – he is likely to position Connecticut, with respect to contiguous states, as an economic powerhouse.

The Hartford Business Journal reports, “As he prepares for the 2023 legislative session, Gov. Ned Lamont said he is considering several tax policy proposals next year, including allowing the expiring corporate business tax surcharge — an extra cost the business community has long lobbied against — to sunset.

“Lamont, in a Monday [December 12] interview with the Hartford Business Journal, also said he is considering a middle class income tax cut, likely targeted at people who earn up to $150,000.”

What is the point in taxing a person or a business one dollar and returning to both thirty cents, after having apportioned seventy cents to budget reduction and special interests that will help progressive  politicians return to office to continue the endless getting and spending process?

The free market runs on both money and creativity. Taxes diminish both. The easiest and most painless way to spur the economy is by leaving creativity to a creative free market and leaving money in the hands of purchasers seeking to satisfy their own needs.

Lamont’s political guru, former Senator and Governor Lowell Weicker gave progressives a great boon in 1991 by instituting an income tax that, at the beginning of his first and only term as Governor, unsurprisingly produced a surplus. In succeeding years, both the surplus and Weicker’s initial “flat-tax” disappeared because flat taxes are held in contempt by progressives.

Lamont has now proposed -- to The Hartford Business Journal, but not yet to Connecticut’s progressive, Democrat dominated General Assembly – to “sunset” a progressive corporate business tax surcharge and institute a middle class income tax cut for people earning up to $150,000. Lamont also told the Hartford Business Journal “he’d like the legislature to continue the fiscal guardrails — including a volatility cap that limits spending — that were established in 2017.” Those guardrails were installed at the behest of Republicans who, in 2017, had archived parity with Democrats in one chamber of the General Assembly. The Republican advances were washed away in a succeeding election period. Dominant progressives presently enjoy a near veto-proof legislative majority.  

As responsible journalists sometimes point out, “Governors propose, but legislatures dispose” of the governor’s proposals. And Connecticut’s Democrat dominated General Assembly, mostly for ideological and campaign reasons, is not likely to leave Lamont’s proposals cited above unmolested.

Lamont’s proposals likely will be favored by Connecticut Republicans, vastly outnumbered by progressive Democrats in the state’s legislature. But, when push comes to shove, the legislative sausage maker likely will turn Lamont’s succulent sausage into a bite sized political hors d'oeuvre, for progressives have never been willing to surrender to a conservative economic enemy camp the notion that politicians are far more creative and responsible than free marketers, an absurd proposition.

Before President Joe Biden took office, the United States had grown used to running on cheap energy, inflation was manageable, joblessness had been greatly reduced, and America, thanks to fracking, was a net exporter of oil and natural gas. Biden severely restricted oil production. In response to Putin’s war on Ukraine, the Biden Administration and much of Europe suffered energy shortages, forcing Biden to go a-begging to Saudi Arabia for oil less clean than that produced in the United States. And here in Connecticut, the Lamont administration has invested tax dollars in windmill production.  As might be expected, the costs of a New London pier that will serve as a shipping point for the non-biodegradable windmill blades were wildly understated.

It would have been much wiser and more profitable had the Biden or Lamont administrations “invested” in nuclear energy, a clean and reliable  energy source. Scientists and researchers at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory last week announced that they had “for the first time produced more energy in a fusion reaction than was used to ignite it – a major breakthrough in the decades long quest to harness a process that powers the sun,” according to an Associated Press account little remarked upon by politicians searching for sound and clean energy production. “Unlike other nuclear reaction, fusion does not create radioactive waste (emphasis mine).”

The fusion energy solution could never have been proposed by political mechanics. Technological solutions to problems created by politicians -- the energy crisis, for example – are always more efficacious and creative than synthetic and expensive solutions proposed by the authors of  media releases.