Connecticut Commentary: Red Notes from a Blue State

According to a recent news report , the anti-capitalist Occupy Wall Street (OWS) movement has moved its operations from Wall Street, chock full of greedy financers, to Main Street, chock full of greedy merchants. This is encouraging and depressing; encouraging because the protestors have recognized a vital connection between Wall Street and Main Street, and depressing because the connection is misconstrued. The OWS movement has refocused its ire on publically traded retailers, according to a Stop Black Friday website: "The idea is simple, hit the corporations that corrupt and control American politics where it hurts, their profits.” Among the companies to be boycotted are: “Abercrombie & Fitch [ANF 44.88 -0.79 (-1.73%)] - Amazon.com (yes, we have to stay away from Amazon, too!) [AMZN 188.99 -3.35 (-1.74%) - AT&T Wireless [ATT 27.21 0.17 (+0.63%) - Burlington Coat Factory - Dick's Sporting Goods (I was surprised, too!) [DSG-FF 27.745 -0.76 (-2.67%) - Dollar Tree [...

Governor Dannel Malloy has rented a trading floor for five years at $20 million, according to a brief piece in the Wall Street Journal : “In his latest attempt to save jobs and keep businesses in Connecticut, Gov. Dannel Malloy on Tuesday announced $20 million of incentives to keep UBS AG's flagship trading floor and other operations in this city.”

Governor Malloy’s “shared sacrifice” was never evenly – some might say “fairly” -- distributed. Progressive Democrats, in fact, do not believe in shared sacrifice. Their credo includes, on the tax side, a progressive income tax in which the “rich,” defined as anyone making more than $200,000 per year, pay the lion’s share of governmental “investments.” SEBAC negotiator Dan Livingston is typical of the genus. In a progressive regime, the majority of people “invest” relatively little in their government and prudently vote for Democrats, who collect little from them in tax payments (AKA “investments”) while showering them with benefits. Whatever name one chooses to put to this lopsided getting and spending process, it is not “shared sacrifice.” Nationally, the wealthiest 1 percent of the population earns 19 percent of all income and pays 37 percent of the federal income tax , a figure that excludes payroll taxes for Social Security and Medicare. The top ten percent pay 68 percent of ...

The Wall Street Journal thinks Ned Lamont is responsible for the Democrats difficulty in passing ObamaCare: “If, after all this fuss, the Senate manages not to enact ObamaCare, one man we will have to thank for it is Ned Lamont. He's the liberal-left cable-TV executive who successfully challenged Joe Lieberman, Connecticut's junior senator, in the 2006 Democratic primary. Lieberman, taking advantage of the Nutmeg State's nutty election laws, ran as an independent in the general election and trounced Lamont. “The Republicans didn't put up a serious candidate for the seat, so that if Lamont had not run, Lieberman would have coasted to re-election as a Democrat--and as a Democrat, he would have felt much greater pressure to back ObamaCare in its original version out of party loyalty. Instead he has emerged as a holdout against some of its worst provisions, and we can credit him with making the Senate bill unacceptable to the likes of Howard Dean (though we shall see ...

In Stoneridge v. Scientific-Atlanta, the Supreme Court Ruled in 2008 that companies cannot be sued just for doing business with another firm that had committed fraud. In tandem with another precedent in Central Bank of Denver v. First Interstate Bank of Denver, the ruling put a check on what the Wall Street Journal has termed “’scheme liability’, in which trial lawyers seek to rope in parties acting legally for having done business with parties that don't.” U.S. Sen. Chris Dodd, accused by some of his opponents of playing patty cake with corporate campaign contributors, is on an anti-business head trip just now. In the dust and dirt of battle, it has been forgotten that Dodd, at one point in his sterling career, set his face against lawyers who unjustifiably drove up the cost of doing business through excessive litigation. One of the reasons doctors send their patients to so many specialists, driving up insurance coverage and medical costs, is because by so doing they are bu...

The Wall Street Journal, the day after a Republican sweep, acknowledged that President Barack Obama was dealt a tough hand, a deep recession and a financial crisis. “But in New Jersey especially,” the paper notes, “former Goldman Sachs chief Jon Corzine became governor in the belief his financial industry skills would bring the state's high taxes and high spending under control. He didn't and he lost. If Washington's Democrats keep pushing taxes and spending in the same direction, they may be joining Jon Corzine on the retirement beaches soon.” Here in Connecticut, Democrats ought to heed the same warning. The depth of the disenchantment with Democrats in Connecticut, as reflected in some astonishing spreads – Torrington: DEM 1796; GOP 6571 – should be worrisome to Democratic leaders who interpreted Obama’s win as a signal that his progressive programs would lift all the Democratic boats. There is room for second thoughts. And some progressives are beginning to bit...

The Wall Street Journal is reporting: “The discovery that Countrywide Financial Corp. recorded phone conversations with borrowers in a controversial mortgage program that included public officials -- and that those recordings have been destroyed -- has prompted new congressional calls for more information about the program.” Just wait till Dodd’s Republican assassins hear about this.

Both the Wall Street Journal and the Huffington Post have published pictures that prompted President Barrack Obama to say he was disturbed by the violence in Iran. The photo below shows a crowd of young Iranians bearing the bullet ridden body of a protestor. When Iranian police elsewhere fired upon a crowd of protestors, the crowd began to chant in unison, “Don’t be scared. We’re all together.” The president had been criticized as being tardy in his response to the Iranian election (read-- fraud). On Sunday, according to a report in Politico , Vice President Joe Biden expressed “doubts” about the election, and on Monday, press secretary Robert Gibbs was battered by a reporter: "... State Department spokesman Ian Kelly said the U.S. is 'deeply troubled' by events in Iran but stopped short of condemning them. “'I haven’t used that word, condemn,"' he [Gibbs] told the State Department press corps. 'We need to see how things unfold.' “'You need to se...

It looks like the golden goose has already fled the Northeast, according to a study done by the Manhatten Institute. The Wall Street Journal reports: “Finally, there is the issue of whether high-income people move away from states that have high income-tax rates. Examining IRS tax return data by state, E.J. McMahon, a fiscal expert at the Manhattan Institute, measured the impact of large income-tax rate increases on the rich ($200,000 income or more) in Connecticut, which raised its tax rate in 2003 to 5% from 4.5%; in New Jersey, which raised its rate in 2004 to 8.97% from 6.35%; and in New York, which raised its tax rate in 2003 to 7.7% from 6.85%. Over the period 2002-2005, in each of these states the "soak the rich" tax hike was followed by a significant reduction in the number of rich people paying taxes in these states relative to the national average. Amazingly, these three states ranked 46th, 49th and 50th among all states in the percentage increase in wealthy tax fi...