"No man's life, liberty or property is safe while the Legislature is in session” -- Gideon John Tucker
All neo-progressive Democrats in Connecticut understand
perfectly the progressivity principle. The principle was most clearly stated by
Karl Marx in the Critique of the Gotha
Program — “From each according to his ability to each according to his
needs.”
An old wise woman once expressed perfectly the spirit of neo-progressivism
politicians when she told her teenage son, this intended as a criticism, “So,
what you mean is: What’s yours is mine, and what’s mine is mine too.”
Neo-progressivism is the political means by which
socialistic retributive economic justice is achieved. This principle was very
much front and center in a recent discussion among Democrat Party leaders.
If taxes are to be redistributed from millionaires to those
less economically endowed, then it is obvious that the redistributors should
take care NOT to apply tax cuts or credits to millionaires, for that would
defeat the purpose of the progressive principle – which is to move money from
the haves to the have-nots.
It seems such a short time ago that socialist legislators
were castigating millionaires. U.S. Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders was the
loudest defender of the Marxist principle, and then a wondrous thing happened:
Bernie became a millionaire, and the object of his vituperation shifted to
billionaires. Extreme socialist rhetoric, it would appear, is also a casualty
of inflation.
We all know we are in the midst of an “affordability
crisis.” The price of gas is inching upwards after having dropped precipitously
from President Joe Biden’s year in office. A concerned Governor Ned Lamont and
a Democrat dominated General Assembly are tossing around ways to alleviate the
pain of high gas prices.
“Multiple ideas,” Connecticut’s media tells us “are on the
table.” Lamont has called for a $200 per person temporary “tax rebate.” Progressives
prefer rebates to tax cuts because a rebate – unlike a tax cut, which leaves
assets in the hands of taxpayers – does not disturb their Marxian equity
principle. In a rebate arrangement, tax money still flows from taxpayers to
state government and is disbursed to the needy, minus administrative costs.
Government, we know, is an extremely costly enterprise. Then too, a portion of
the assigned funds is dedicated to supporting politicians and their friends. We
call this drain off “fraud,” and there is plenty of it to go around. Tammany
Hall used to call this boodle of tax money shuttled to the politically
privileged “walking around money” or campaign payments.
President Pro Tem of Connecticut’s Senate Martin Looney is
the most quotable of the state’s charitable neo-progressives.
Middle class taxpayers in Connecticut and across the nation,
Looney advises, “are in the aggregate Charlie Browns. President [Donald] Trump
is Lucy and the football.” The Charles Schultz cartoon character Lucy is much
in the habit of removing the football just as Charlie Brown is about to kick
it, resulting in a nasty fall. Poor Charlie never leans from recent history and
seems forever doomed to fall prey to Lucy’s torments.
“What the next crisis will be,” Looney said, “is hard to
predict at this point. … We’re living in a really volatile time, and we don’t
know from week to week what federal policy is going to become a crisis for us
at the state level.”
Generally it is politicians who decide what a crisis is. American
lawyer and politician Gideon Tucker put it aphoristically in a judicial
decision way back in 1866: “No one’s life, liberty or property is safe when the
legislature is in session.”
The Hartford Courant tells us, “Lamont’s plan for rebates of
$200 per person would go to individuals earning up to $200,000 annually and
$400 for couples earning up to $400,000 annually.
Speaker of Connecticut’s House of Representatives Matt
Ritter, never lagging too far ideologically behind Looney, has serious
misgiving concerning Lamont’s temporary tax rebate. “Truck drivers in
Massachusetts and Rhode Island, he told the Courant, “would be getting the same
tax savings per gallon as those in Connecticut.
The richest person in the state is getting the same benefit as the
poorest person,” a violation of the Marxian principle stated above.
“I would rather,” Ritter said, “look at a rebate from the
$500 million fund directly to families for property tax stabilization or, as
the governor talked about, an energy tax rebate. If you put gas tax on the
board, yeah, it would pass. But I don’t know that is as targeted to Connecticut
residents, and then on a progressivity
level the way some policy makers would want [emphasis mine].” Ritter
doubtless had Looney in mind when he referred to “some progressive policy
makers.”
The Marxian principle of the just and necessary inequitablity
of taxation must never be violated. Of course the principle could be honored under a unitary,
non-progressive tax code if the distribution of tax benefits were to be weighted
in favor of the have-nots at the distribution end though a negative Income Tax
(NIT) proposed by libertarian economist Milton Friedman.
Friedman’s NIT would provide through the tax code a
guaranteed adjustable minimum income to individuals and families, insuring that
no one is destitute. The NIT would work by providing a percentage of the
difference between an individual's income and a specified income cutoff, the
goal being to incentivize work and reduce poverty. The NIT also would rid the
nation of an overworked, overpaid administrative bureaucracy and, as an
additional bonus, a sizable chorus of self-serving neo-progressive rhetoricians
and politicians.
It goes without saying that greedy, tax-hungry politicians
would oppose such a measure because, if enacted, it would deny them access to
the life, liberty and property – taxes, like all assets, fall under property
laws – of their subjects.
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