Connecticut Commentary: Red Notes from a Blue State

Energy, as we all know, is the stuff that makes thing go: light bulbs, even the squiggly, earth friendly, energy saving kind that, some say, may cause cancer; cars and buses, preferred by “smart growth” utopianists who drive their non-motorized, non-gas guzzling bikes to work; and computerized presses that produce newspapers of a kind for which Senator John Fonfara of the 1st District and Vickie Nardello of the 89th Assembly District write op-ed pieces . Mr. Fonfara and Ms. Nardello are co-chairs of the General Assembly’s Energy and Technology Committee, and together they are promoting a bill that at least one non-utopian academic, Richard D. Pomp, the Alva P. Loiselle Professor of Law at the University of Connecticut Law School, considers highly mischievous. Political watchers may have noticed that there are every so often within the Democratic Party sudden flare ups, quickly suppressed, of economic good sense. Mr. Fonfara and Ms. Nardello have escaped this human frailty. The two...

Attorney General Richard Blumenthal’s quick fix solution to soaring energy prices – impose a “windfall” profits tax on the greedy captains of the energy industry – will not fix the problem. His pseudo-solution to high energy prices in Connecticut -- caused by an insufficient energy transmission system and the absence of competition in the energy market – is likely to worsen the problem in the long run. The powerful Speaker of the House of Representative, Jim Amann, so far has resisted the tune piped by Blumenthal. He may have been fully awake in his high school Economics 101 class when the teacher explained that companies do not pay taxes – not even taxes labeled, for the edification of the general public, “windfall profit taxes.” Companies are tax collectors not tax payers. If you demand they pay a windfall profits tax, they will collect the tax from consumers in the form of higher prices charged for their product. All business taxes result in higher prices or – when they are state or...