Connecticut Commentary: Red Notes from a Blue State

Governor Ned Lamont’s slippage in the polls is not surprising. Former Governor Dan Malloy, now gainfully employed reforming education in Maine, casts a long shadow, and Lamont’s policy prescriptions – including his budget, now on its way to approval by the Democrat dominated General Assembly – do not differ much from Malloy’s in matters of getting and spending. Some may notice that a new expression, “modernize” and its variants, has made its way into Democrat oratory. Lamont said of his massive sales tax increases, “Look, we’re gonna try and modernize our sales tax structure… In fact, wanna know why sales tax revenues are already up compared to what we had expected” That’s cause of sales tax applying to e-commerce.” Lamont is a graduate of high-priced colleges. So what’s all this business about “gonna” and “wanna”? Do Harvard and Yale lack speech teachers? The use of the word “modernize” is gonna become an Orwellian catch phrase for “increasing and broadening sales taxes....

Managing Editor of the Journal Inquirer Chris Powell notes in a recent column that Connecticut’s constitutional cap on spending has over the years been easily surmounted by governors and legislators determined to spend money. And indeed, spending has spiraled in the state. Governor William O’Neill's last pre-income tax budget was about $7.5 billion. Connecticut’s current biennial budget is hovering around $40 billion, and the Democratic dominated General Assembly has not yet finished tinkering with it. By broadening the sales tax while reducing the sales tax rate and removing from under the spending cap pension payments for state workers, progressive magicians in the General Assembly are now in the process of transmuting a multi- million dollar deficit into a multi-million dollar surplus. Spending in Connecticut has tripled within the space of four governors, one of whom was independent Governor Lowell Weicker, the father of Connecticut’s income tax.

  In 1991, then Governor Lowell Weicker was facing a stubborn billion dollar deficit that had been left on his doorstep by retiring Democratic Governor William O’Neill, an opponent of a state income tax that had first been publically proposed by Bill Cibes in a Democratic Party primary. Running for the Democratic Party nod against Bruce Morrison, Mr. Cibes argued that the deficit and Connecticut’s parlous economic climate made it impossible for the state to raise the sales tax, then among the highest in the nation, or business taxes. An income tax was inevitable. ''The public,” Mr. Morrison retorted, “should beware of people who want to increase their taxes and call it reform.”