Connecticut Commentary: Red Notes from a Blue State

  “Saying Gov. Ned Lamont’s plan is not enough, Senate Republicans are calling for $1.5 billion in tax and electricity relief in an election year,” the Hartford Courant tells us in its February 12 report, “ GOP unveils $1.5B   tax cut plan .”   Republicans are calling for tax cuts. Democrats are calling for tax relief . The two are entirely different. A tax cut is an uncollected tax that leaves dollars in the accounts of taxpayers who are, free market Republicans will insist, better able than tax-hungry bureaucrats to decide how dollars should be allocated. The difference between a tax cut and a tax rebate or credit , preferred by state Democrats, is the same as the difference between a price reduction and a temporary price discount. A rebate must be collected before it can be rebated. But a tax cut leaves dollars at the disposal of taxpayers. Rebates and credits can be easily redistributed by the tax collecting authority, but it is not possible to redistribute an un...

In Charles Dickens’ David Copperfield , Mr. Micawber finds himself headed to a debtor’s prison. Before it was abolished Dickens’ own father found himself in similar straights.   Micawber, chronically unable to take his own advice, tells Copperfield, “Annual income twenty pounds, annual expenditure nineteen, nineteen and six, result happiness.   Annual income twenty pounds, annual expenditure twenty pounds ought and six, result misery.” The difference between economic misery and happiness may turn on a penny. Debt – or rather inattention to debt – accumulates, and cumulative debt is always painful.   The state Office of Legislative Research (OLR) reported in 2024, “You [perhaps one of our tax-thirsty legislators] asked for a 50-state comparison of state debt as a percent of state gross domestic product (GDP) and how Connecticut’s debt burden based on these measures has changed in the past 10 years.   “Connecticut had the highest NTSD [Net Tax Supported ...

A recent CTMirror story by veteran journalist Mark Pazniokas, “ How Marty Looney shapes CT politics, Patience and persistence ,” is, a staple of Pazniokas’ writing, both amusing and informative.   We find that Looney, whose political life spans more than 45 years, is Irish Catholic, a union supporter like his father, independent-minded like his mother, and persevering. In sketching Looney’s character, Pazniokas might easily have quoted Mark Twain: “The miracle or the power that elevates the few is to be found in their industry, application and perseverance under the promptings of a brave, determined spirit.”   There are, of course, two kinds of perseverance. Both the Devil and St. Michael the Archangel are, many Catholics believe, persevering creatures.   The success of perseverance in politics depends upon a few variables. Looney may best be described as a leftist Democrat in a Connecticut Democrat political party apparatus properly characterized as “left of ...

My inner skeptic – we all have one --is a skeptic’s skeptic. The word “skeptic” is yet to be used as a political cudgel by incumbent politicians and those who look favorably upon them, unlike such battering rams as “Nazi” and “Fascist.” Connecticut US Senator Chris Murphy has notably deployed his moral brickbat against President Donald Trump, nearly universally reprehended in New England, New York and Connecticut, the “land of steady [bad] habits.   “We must not,’ my skeptic says, “expect to see on Connecticut editorial or Op-Ed pages commentary in praise of Trump. Victor Davis Hanson, an astute political historian and commentator, wrote a book a few years ago titled provocatively The Case for Trump. The book has since been updated. The Epoch Times recently ran an analytical piece titled, “ 30 Ways Trump Impacted the US, World in First Year .” There is no question, even among Trump’s most energetic opponents, that Trump stands at the head of a transformative presidency. ...

“Top DOJ officials,” we are told in a Fox News report, “say they are looking into whether the agitators who disrupted services at St. Paul's Cities Church on Sunday violated the FACE Act and the Ku Klux Klan Act.”   Cities Church in Saint Paul, Minnesota is Baptist, a strong proponent of marriage (“We believe that marriage joins one man and one woman in a single, exclusive, lifelong union and that God designed and directs sexual intimacy exclusively for one man and one woman married to each other), also regards sexual immorality as sinful and abhorrent (“Any form of sexual immorality, such as adultery, fornication, homosexuality, bisexual conduct, bestiality, incest, pornography, or any attempt to change or disagree with one’s biological sex is sinful and offensive to God.”) The church is also largely white. Among cultural anarchists in the amusingly irrelevant 21 st century, such quaint religious precepts are considered verboten.   “The FACE Act”, we are assured, “m...

Barely two days after Nicolas Maduro made his acquaintance with the interior of a Brooklyn courthouse, National Assembly President of Venezuela Jorge Rodríguez, a part of Maduro’s socialist oppression machinery, announced his country “will release an ‘important number’ of political prisoners, including both citizens and foreigners,” ABC News has announced. “’Consider this gesture by the Bolivarian government, which is broadly intended to seek peace,’ Rodríguez said in an announcement publicized over TV.”   The arrest of Maduro and his future prosecution already has had a rippling effect in Latin America and the Middle East, not to mention Democrat Party Central, USA.   The resistance to the Trump administration by the Presidents of Columbia and Cuba, both states reliant on income derived from the purchase of Venezuelan oil, have in the past been far more fierce than the denunciations of Trump as a larval Nazi dictator by progressive Democrats.   Cuban Presid...

On dictator Nicolás Maduro’s abrupt leave-taking from Venezuela, Daniel Johnson observes in The Telegraph , “The same raddled radicals who half a century ago cut their teeth worshipping at the shrines of Castro and Mao, who spent their youth marching for Chile and Nicaragua, who rallied behind Saddam’s Iraq and still champion Hamas in Gaza, are now recycling their anti-American agitprop on behalf of a tin pot tyrant who even by Latin American standards is entirely unlamented.”   One of the American rattled radicals who spent his youth worshiping at the shrine of the Ortega brothers in Nicaragua was present Vermont Socialist Bernie Sanders, who spent his honeymoon, such as it was, in the Soviet Union, a collection of formerly free and independent states hauled by force into the Soviet Union by Stalin – no democrat he. Stalin was, even as Nikita Khrushchev knew, a true believer in the politics of the terror, the bullet and the gulag. The same may be said – and has been said of M...

  Mamdani and The Warmth of Collectivism   Zohran Mamdani’s ambition, he tells us, is to “replace the frigidity of rugged individualism with the warmth of collectivism.” But collectivism is only warm for socialist politicians minding the boiling pots.   The Telegraph of London tells us, following Mamdani’s ascension to the mayoralty of New York City, “From this week, however, [New York City and London] will be aligned in a much more unfortunate manner: with the self-proclaimed democratic socialist Zohran Mamdani taking power in New York, both will be governed by the far-Left. New York may well be about to match London’s decline.   “Mamdani comes to power with a far more radical agenda than Sadiq Khan,” a British politician serving as the third and current mayor of London. He [Mamdani] is demanding higher taxes on the rich, although that has to be agreed by the state’s governor, tougher rent controls, transport subsidies, and even state-run grocery st...