Connecticut Commentary: Red Notes from a Blue State

Whatever you tax – and excessive regulation may also be viewed as a tax, since it forces companies to shell out money that might better be spent elsewhere – disappears, including, in the long run, revenues collected by the tax. This is what is happening in Connecticut. Taxpayers and taxed companies are disappearing. The current budget is about $16 billion, slouching towards $18 billion; that’s more than twice the bottom line figure of the last pre-income tax budget. Some of us are old enough to remember fondly the days of Democrat governors who were able, usually by threatening to burn down the houses of Democrat legislative leaders, to control the ravenous appetite for spending that always threatens to burst budget envelopes. They are long gone. High taxes have forced companies in Connecticut that cannot absorb the usual raid on profits to move elsewhere in search of lower labor costs, lower taxes and less entangling regulation. During the terms of the last three governors, two of the...

On one of his many campaign stops across the country, Senator John Kennedy, then running for president, found himself at the Alamo. It was very hot, very crowded, and Kennedy was anxious to be on time for his next campaign appearance. He was running late. So Kennedy corralled a guide and asked where the back door was. “There are no back doors to the Alamo, Senator Kennedy,” he was told. “Only heroes.” Speaker of the House James Amann beat a most unheroic retreat, one newspaper reported, “rather than have budget negotiations that included Republican leaders Rep. Lawrence Cafero and Sen. Louis DeLuca,” who has a bid of a problem involving his grand daughter’s husband and state prosecutors. DeLuca recently pleaded guilty to a charge of “threatening conspiracy,” a misdemeanor, that arose from a meeting he had with James Galante in which DeLuca was told by Galante that he would help the senator settle a family problem. The problem involved a granddaughter who, DeLuca thought, was being abu...

" Sometimes you take a good piece of legislation, and you tack on a rat. This is some huge rat." -- Robert Genuario, Governor Jodi Rell’s budget director. Actually, said State President Pro Tem Donald Williams in a disquisition worthy of a 12th century Dominican, or a modern lawyer, the rat that Mr. Genuario thought he smelled in Clean Contracting Bill was a mythical rodent. Mr. Williams was not quite certain whether Mr. Genuario's metaphor was purposeful or not – It may have been negligence -- but both he and State Senator Donald DeFronzo called a news conference to protest the “lack of truthfulness” on the part of Republicans and call upon Governor Jodi Rell to “stop the campaign of misinformation against the Clean Contracting Bill passed by the General Assembly” which, Mr. Williams did not note in his press conference, is controlled by majority Democrats. Mr. Williams was particularly disturbed that the possibly mendacious misinformation campaign waged by Republican...

During her budget address, Gov. Jodi Rell embarked on a spending spree with a smile, even as she announced that “We must not embark on a spending spree of new programs and policies.” The governor pledged $1.3 billion more for transportation improvements, $5.5 million for universal pre-school pilot programs, $57 million more for public education, $20 million for embryonic stem-cell research, and on and on… Rell surprised many of her Republican well-wishers by raising what used to be called “sin taxes’ and popping the lid on the state’s spending cap in an effort to gain revenue from the federal government by taxing nursing home property; this after the governor wisely pointed out that, from the point of view of costs to taxpayers, there is little difference between the three forms of government – municipal, state and federal – since the same citizen shells out money for all three tax collecting agencies. A Democratic leader came closer than he may have wished to the truth when he said th...