Malloy vs. Pelto

The gubernatorial nomination on the Republican side is heavily, if politely, contested. In a few days, Republican nominating delegates will gather at Mohegan Sun Casino to sort out their ticket. On the Democratic side, the gubernatorial slot is a Malloy gimme – almost.

State employee union gadfly Jonathan Pelto continues to sting Governor Dannel Malloy.

Mr. Malloy’s temperament, like that of President Barack Obama, is sting averse. The Malloyalists who surround him sting back when stung. Both they and their chief have thin skins. And Mr. Malloy, when caught in a compromising position, has been known to throw a few elbows at his critics.

In the past, whenever Mr. Pelto had harpooned Mr. Malloy on his blog “Wait, What?” gubernatorial factotum Roy Occhiogrosso, who has parleyed his Malloy connection into a Vice Presidential slot with Global Strategy, leapt forward to answer Mr. Pelto with a box on the ear.

“No one cares what Pelto thinks,” said Mr. Occhiogrosso after Mr. Pelto had pelted Mr. Malloy for having joined the forces of darkness by attempting to purge Connecticut’s educational system of underperforming teachers who, Mr. Malloy felt, had only to “show up for four years” to achieve tenure, after which dismissal for rank incompetence becomes decidedly less frequent.

Even so, Mr. Malloy last January issued a letter underwritten by Lt. Gov. Nancy Wyman, House Speaker Brendan Sharkey and Senate President Donald E. Williams that delayed, according to one report “an important component of the new evaluation system: linking a teacher's performance rating with students' standardized test scores. Malloy also said he would create a working group to make changes in the implementation of the new Common Core State Standards. The administration will also scrap a $1 million marketing campaign for the Common Core.”

The decoupling of teacher performance and test scores, as well as the canning of a million dollar marketing campaign for Common Core, strenuously resisted by both teacher unions and many conservative groups, certainly did not bode ill for Mr. Pelto.

Conservatives and teacher unions oppose the Common Core effort for quite different reasons. Teacher unions are rather touchy on standards of any kind linked to student performance that might be used to weed out non-performing teachers; conservatives, comfortable with the principle of subsidiarity, do not want the federal government to do to education what it has done to, say, the private insurance market.

We have here a case of political ends touching and producing unmanageable political sparks. Without abjectly retreating from his school reform efforts – not in the cards -- Mr. Malloy has bent himself into a pretzel shape so as to remain in the good graces of the powerful unions whose votes he needs to whip in a general election the Republican Party’s gubernatorial nominee. Once the election is in the bag, Mr. Pelto will have been politically neutered, and Mr. Malloy’s education reforms, momentarily put on the back burner, may be resurrected from the “working group” to which the reforms have been entrusted for safe keeping. To parody Mr. Obama in his pre-presidential election meeting with Dimitri Medvedev, Mr. Malloy will have considerably “more flexibility,” following his victorious election, to repair burnt bridges with unions and to deep six the annoying Mr. Pelto.

There are three reasons why candidates for office enter campaigns: They’re in it to win; they’re in it to make an exotic political point; or they’re in it to affect the correlation of forces, so that the candidate’s views will be upheld by the likely candidate in a general election.

At this point, only Mr. Pelto and his conscience knows which of the three reasons cited above has moved him to suggest, very coyly in an appearance on Eyewitness News’ “Face The State” with Dennis House that a) Mr. Malloy can’t win the race for governor, and b) he might primary Mr. Malloy, if the delegates to the Democratic nominating convention are not enlightened enough to choose him on the first ballot as their gubernatorial standard bearer.

WFSB 3 Connecticut

Connecticut’s Media-Progressive Complex: Or -- It’s The Spending, Not The Taxes, Stupid

CTMirror asks in a recent story “Is it time to overhaul Connecticut’s tax system?”

The progressive wing of the Democratic Party, now in the ascendency in Connecticut, has been trying to “reform” the tax system ever since it was last reformed in 1991 by then Governor Lowell Weicker, the father of Connecticut’s income tax.

In the course of its story, CTMirror quotes William Cibes, identified as “state budget director under Weicker and also co-chairman of the finance committee in 1989-90,” on property taxes. Mr. Cibes recently testified before the General Assembly’s Finance, Revenue and Bonding Committee, which in the next few weeks will endorse a measure “that could launch a top-to-bottom analysis of how Connecticut taps taxpayers’ wallets.” Mr. Cibes testified that “high property taxes are a major reason why Connecticut’s tax system is broken. So property tax relief would lessen the economic burden on businesses, municipalities and individuals… Property taxes are relatively stable. But when a state relies excessively on property taxes to fund important services like education, infrastructure and public safety, businesses and individuals are punished.

Mr. Cibes’ statement was remarkably similar to an earlier Op-Ed piece printed in CTMirror written by John A. Elsesser, the town manager of Coventry: “The good thing about property taxes is that they are relatively stable. As part of an overall revenue structure, which is relatively balanced among taxes on property, sales and income, they make sense. But when a state relies excessively on local property taxes to fund governmental services, as does Connecticut, it’s reasonable to begin working to fix what House Speaker Brendan Sharkey has termed a ‘broken’ tax system.”

Mr. Cibes and Mr. Weicker were both prime movers in the effort to adopt an income tax. While campaigning for governor, former Republican U.S. Senator Weicker, running within a party of his own making, had eschewed an income tax as a means of liquidating a Democratic generated billion dollar deficit. Adopting an income tax, gubernatorial campaigner Weicker said, would be “like pouring gasoline on a fire.” Mr. Cibes had run for governor on an income tax platform, but he and his platform were decisively rejected at the time by 65% of Democrats.

While Connecticut’s income tax was muscled through the General Assembly by Governor Weicker, the income tax idea and its implementation originated with Mr. Cibes, whom Mr. Weicker tapped to head the state’s Office of Policy Management. Declining to run for a second term as governor, a grateful Weicker, before leaving office, created a plush featherbed for Mr. Cibes, appointing him the first Chancellor of Connecticut’s new Connecticut State University System. Like old soldiers, old political operatives never die, but neither do they fade away. They become associated with lobbying firms or pad their retirements with pensions drawn from tax dollars.

It should surprise no one, least of all the editors of CTMirror, that Mr. Cibes continues to insist that Connecticut is undertaxed. Mr. Cibes certainly is within easy reach of the reporters and editors of CTMirror. Mr. Weicker’s former OPM chief was one of the co-founders of CTMirror and serves on its board of directors, as does Stanley Twardy, former Chief of Staff for Mr. Weicker. According to a report in Raising Hale, CTMirror is published by Connecticut News Project. A review of political contributions by board members of CTMirror shows that eight of the ten board members have made donations to political candidates totaling more than $125,000, seventy five percent of which enriched Democrats.

The Weicker-Cibes income tax of 1991 dropped the sales tax rate from 8% to 6% and the corporate tax rate from 13.8% to 11.5%. A Rainy Day tax fund, since depleted by spendthrifts in the General Assembly, was also introduced, along with a largely irrelevant constitutional expenditure cap. Through inadvertence or design, the Democrat dominated General Assembly never quite got around to implementing the constitutional cap and, following the passage of the Weicker-Cibes income tax, spending in the state tripled within the space of three governors, two of whom were Republicans.

Mr. Cibes’ pitch on the necessity of tax increases sounds wearily familiar, especially coming on the heels of Governor Dannel Malloy’s massive tax increase, the largest in state history, which out-revenued even the Weicker-Cibes income tax.

Commending a plan put forward by “Better Choices For Connecticut”, progressive tax grabbers, Mr. Cibes argued a few years ago in his pitch for higher taxes that Connecticut could not possibly offset its deficit through spending reductions alone, and he called for a “fair share’ sacrifice on the part of taxpayers and tax gobblers, a motif candidate for governor Dannel Malloy deployed effectively in his campaign.

The revenue proposals promoted by “Better Choices For Connecticut” and embraced by Mr. Cibes included an increase in the income tax for “those who can best afford it,” likely anyone making more than $250,000 per year, an increase in corporate taxes and an increase in the sales tax. The corrective measures promoted by Mr. Cibes insert progressive features into the Weicker-Cibes income tax, considered by some when it was passed as insufficiently progressive. At the time of passage, Mr. Cibes had told the New York Times that the architecture of the tax made it more progressive than it seemed. But progressives believe you can never have enough of a good thing.

Once the new revenue proposals are imposed on the Weicker-Cibes income tax, Connecticut will have adopted the same tax scheme Mr. Cibes promoted when he ran for governor way back in 1991. Property tax relief is little more than a convenient cover that will allow progressive Democrats to boost taxes when, after the upcoming elections, the state once again finds itself confronting a $2 billion deficit brought on by exorbitant spending. And the reporters and editors at CTMirror are too bright not to have noticed the obvious sham. One can only conclude that in failing to report sufficiently on one of its board of directors, CTMirror did not wish to place before its readers such inconvenient truths as might disturb Mr. Cibes and others who financially support the Connecticut News Project.

Malloy’s Non-Campaign, The Dog Lobby And The Coming Auto-De-Fé

At a press conference on Access Health CT (Obamacare), Governor Dannel Malloy was asked for the hundredth time whether he intends to run for governor.

Weary of having to handle the question gingerly, Mr. Malloy told the gaggle of reporters assembled for the event something like this:  If I answer “Yes” to your question, the campaign will begin at that moment. And once a campaign begins in earnest, I will lose control of the sub campaign, which is the event you are attending right now. On this occasion, I can say what I like without having to wend my way through a briar patch of questions you and the Republicans might consider more important than the possibility of a soda tax -- which, by the way, I do not favor.

“On a proposed 2 percent tax on sugary beverages, put forward by New Haven Mayor Toni Harp,” the Register reported, “Malloy said: ‘I wouldn’t hold my breath. I am not proposing a sugar tax, I can assure you of that... At some point, there is a degree of personal choice to be made.’”

In the post-Obamacare epoch now upon us, people will be less able to make their own decisions concerning the kinds of coverage they need, those crucial decisions already having been made by  Obamacare technicians in Washington D.C. Perfectly healthy young people, quite able to make their own personal choices,  who used to be able to defer purchasing health insurance they did not need, will no longer be able to do so, thanks to a Supreme Court decision packed with linguistic fudge that permits the chief executive of the United States to impose a tax -- but not a fee -- on non-compliant college students whose futures are even now mortgaged to unreasonably high student loans.

The court’s green light opened a new era in governing: For the first time in U.S. history, a government will be able to prescind product choices and force people, on pain of punishing fees – oops, sorry there; the court says they are taxes, not fees – to purchase a product shaped in large part by Beltway technicians. Issues such as these tend to flop into the background in the absence of a political campaign that Mr. Malloy wishes to put off as long as possible.

There is no need to guess why Mr. Malloy wishes to put off his campaign announcement; he told the Register why at his faux campaign event:

“’I want to get as late into the year without having made a decision and being able to avoid talking about politics,’ Malloy said of daily questions he gets on the gubernatorial race where as many as five Republicans could be heading toward a primary fight.

“’Those folks (Republican opponents), they have a job to do. They got to beat each other up. At some point, they are going to do that. I have a job to do, I got to be governor and I want to do that job as long as I can,’ Malloy said.

“Tongue in cheek, he added: ‘If I suddenly was to decide today about being a candidate, I’m fearful you wouldn’t show up at these things.’” 

At some point the press availability drifted towards the plastic bag crisis:

“Malloy said they will look at a bill state Sen. Edward Meyer, D-Guilford, proposed on banning plastic bags. The governor said part of the calculation is understanding what is burnable as far as plants that convert trash to energy.”

The press/campaign availability over, everyone went about his business. The gaggle of reporters was given to understand that the governor, who will run for re-election (wink, wink), did not wish to be bothered by questions that might well be put to him had he announced he was running for governor. Reporters likely returned to their desks to find on their computer terminals the next announcement of Mr. Malloy’s next campaign event.

It really is a pity no paper in Connecticut could hire Mort Sahl, now pushing 90, as a news editor.

Editor Sahl to Reporter:  “Now, listen here, at Mr. Malloy’s next non-campaign campaign event, I want you to hone in on a question. The proposal to eliminate plastic bags will be strenuously resisted by dog owners in Connecticut; that is – responsible dog owners who pick up after their dogs with plastic bags they bring home from grocery shopping. Find out how many dog owners there are in Connecticut. Ask them whether they plan to use paper grocery bags for the same purpose. They can’t, you know. Get usable quotes. Don’t shake your head at me, boy. Have you ever tried to pick up dog poop with a paper grocery bag?  I can see your life has not been a raw one. I can tell from your silken hands. Now then, I want to ask the governor: If plastic grocery bags are rendered illegal by the General Assembly, will the governor ask Brendan Sharkey or Don Williams to be on call when one of their constituents’ dogs feels the pull of nature? What we need in this state is an auto-de-fé for idiot law makers. Get going now, and don’t let’em take a detour around the question.”

The Democrats’ 10 Percent Solution With Malloy as Firewall

The split between Connecticut’s two major parties is most dramatic on the question of spending.

Governor Dannel Malloy took a pledge early in his administration, after he had imposed upon the state the largest tax increase in its history, reminiscent of a pledge made by former President H.W. Bush: No new tax increases. Internal pressures were such during the Bush administration that the president reneged on his pledge.

The pressures are always there, especially in tax prone Connecticut. It was the fashion during the administration of Republican Maverick turned Independent Lowell Weicker to regard deficits as revenue rather than spending problems; and, of course, the solution to a revenue problem is to boost revenue.

This misperception – always encouraged by politicians uncomfortable with spending cuts – had tripled the bottom line of Connecticut’s budgets within the space of three governors. Focused on revenue boosts, Mr. Weicker and succeeding Republican Governors John Rowland and Jodi Rell rarely were put in the uncomfortable position of having to disappoint powerful union interests. Spending inched inexorably up.

When Mr. Malloy was installed as governor, it was generally supposed that the spending tap would be turned wide open. The so called“firewalls,” Republican governors who had offered a mild resistance to spending increases, were gone: Laissez les bons temps rouler, as they say during Marti Gras in New Orleans that precedes an abstemious Lent .

Democratic leaders in the General Assembly, impatient with the snail’s pace progress of a self-proclaimed progressive governor, have now proposed changes in the Malloy budget that increase spending by 10 percent. There is every reason to believe that Democrats stuck on stupid are still in a “let the good times roll” frame of mind.

And why not? Moderate Republican office holders in Connecticut have been washed away by the onrushing progressive high tide. Consider the number of Republican moderates who have fallen in recent years under the boots of the progressive hordes in Connecticut. Within Connecticut’s all Democratic U.S. Congressional delegation alone, three moderate Republicans– Nancy Johnson, Rob Simmons and Chris Shays, the last moderate Republican in New England before he surrendered his seat to current Democratic U.S. Representative Jim Himes -- had been replaced by ambitious progressives. Mr. Malloy and his Lieutenant Governor Nancy Wyman proudly march cheek by jowl with striking union workers, and no one winces. The largest tax increase in Connecticut history was accompanied with a union deal that assured salary and benefit increases to state workers of 3 percent nine years out, an arrangement at first rejected by union representatives, which rejection was characterized by Edith Prague, a longtime supporter of Connecticut unions, as a form of unthinking madness.

Despite a stalled economy, the progressive parade in Connecticut marches merrily and heedlessly on. Occasional disputes with leaders in the opposition party are imperiously brushed aside by Democrats who outnumber Republicans in the state by a commanding two to one majority. The difference in sheer numbers relieves Democrats of the necessity of quibbling over crucial economic points imperfectly grasped by an easily distractible media in the grip of an economic vise that has considerably reduced its own numbers.

What all this really means is that Mr. Malloy has now become Connecticut’s spending “firewall.”And the governor is surrounded by progressive Democrats quite certain that more spending will hasten the arrival of better times, a philosophy of governance to which Mr. Malloy also subscribes. On matters upon which there are some discernible differences between Mr. Malloy and the Democrat dominated General Assembly –say, education reform – Mr. Malloy’s programs have been refined by progressive leaders in the legislature. Both President Pro Tem of the Senate Don Williams and Speaker of the House Brendan Sharkey have had a good deal of practice in curbing the modest ambitions of past Republican governors, and there is no reason to suppose they will not employ their talents to frustrate a governor who proves to be insufficiently progressive on matters they consider ideologically important – like, to fetch for one example, ramping up the progressive income tax on Connecticut Gold Coast millionaires.

While Mr. Malloy has said he is averse to tax increases, he has moved steadily in the direction of increasing state revenue through a series of measures – borrowing money to pay off budget expenses, reneging on a gentleman’s agreement with “bad” energy producers to liquidate a “temporary” tax on the production of electricity, boosting the notorious gross receipt tax on gasoline, and short-sheeting hospitals, to cite but four examples – that most charitably may be described as revenue enhancers.

All eyes in the General Assembly are fastened on the governor. Given an inch, progressive legislators have now demanded a yard – a ten percent increase in spending. It is precisely incremental increasing in spending of this kind that has tripled the bottom line of Connecticut budgets since the imposition of the state income tax in 1991, a short two decades ago. Progressives in the General Assembly are betting that while the governor’s no tax increase spirit is willing, his progressive Democratic flesh is weak. Because taxing and spending are inextricably connected, the easiest way to drive up taxes by 10 percent is to increase spending by 10 percent. And the red ink, in progressive strategy, is little more than an inducement to impose a steeper progressive tax on greedy hedge fund managers living the life in Fairfield County.

The Devil In Blumenthal’s Details

The expression “the devil is in the details,” first appearing in print in 1975, is a variation of an earlier expression, “The good God is in the detail,”sometimes attributed to Gustave Flaubert. Both expressions point to the importance of detail, what we moderns call verifiable data or facts.

Politicians, to no one’s surprise, sometimes traffic in facts, sometimes not.

In a recent copyrighted story in the Hartford Courant, U.S. Senator Dick Blumenthal is shown expressing his disdain for the devilish details surrounding the Sandy Hook massacre: “Blumenthal dismissed the statistics and legal intricacies and focused on Begg and Heslin sitting at the witness table. He said, ‘Some or all of those 20 beautiful children and six great educators would be alive today if assault weapons had been banned along with high capacity magazines.’"

Mr. Blumenthal was speaking to reporters on the record following testimony before the U.S. Senate Judiciary Committee of one of the parents of the children, 20 in number, who were slain in Sandy Hook Elementary School.

As expected, the testimony was heart rending. Only a heart of stone could fail to be moved by the personal testimony of Neil Heslin, whose 6-year-old-son, Jesse Lewis, was murdered in the savage attack.

Also present during the testimony was the sister of Victoria Soto, one of the heroic figures in the Sandy Hook mass murderer.

Ms. Soto was the First Grade teacher at Sandy Hook Elementary School who managed to save children’s lives by hiding several of them in a closet. When Adam Lanza entered her classroom after having killed fifteen students and two teachers, she told him, with great presence of mind, that the children were in the auditorium. Some students ran from their hiding place and Mr. Lanza shot them, also shooting Ms. Soto who, in an attempt to save their lives, threw herself in death’s path.

“We don’t want our sister to die for no reason,”Jillian Soto told the host of MSNBC’s “The Rachel Maddow Show.” Courage runs deep in the Soto family.

“We lost our sister, tragically,” said Jillian, “and we are now honoring her by fighting for her name and for change–in her name, and all the other victims of Sandy Hook Elementary School and all the other school shootings. We don’t just want her to be a statistic. We want her to be known for who she is and the amazing teacher that she was -- the amazing sister she was -- and ask for something, demand that something be done so that nobody else has to go through this.”

“So that nobody else has to go through this…” These words should not be taken as a pointless rhetorical incantation. We should not allow the devil to ease a pathway for us around the details; for, if we do, we cannot arrive at a legislative destination that will assure family members of the innocent children slaughtered in Sandy Hook that other parents will not, like them, weep tears of blood when their innocent children are accosted by gunmen in what used to be considered here in Connecticut a sanctuary of peace and joy -- and this means that legislators must master the details, or the faults in their legislation will ride them like devils.

The architect of the federal bill preferred by Mr. Blumenthal is U.S. Senator Dianne Feinstein of California. The Feinstein bill bans future sales of assault weapons, already illegal under Connecticut law, while permitting current owners to retain their weapons and, as such, would not have prevented Adam Lanza from acquiring the weapon he used to slaughter children in Sandy Hook. A confiscation of such weapons legally owned by their purchasers might have prevented Mr. Lanza’s use of the AR15, a semi-automatic long rifle, but then Mr. Lanza arrived at the school armed with two equally lethal handguns, the weapon of choice in urban areas where the preponderance of murders occur. Only a little less than three percent of homicides in 2011 were committed with long rifles. The Feinstein bill also limits easily replaceable magazines to ten bullets. According to a story the details of which have not been verified by the official criminal report, not due until the summer, Mr. Lanza replaced his thirty round magazines after having fired 15 rounds. The shotgun he left in the car and the two hand guns he carried with him into the school would have been as devastating.

When Mr. Blumenthal said, focusing dramatically on Mr. Heslin and dismissing as “unimportant”statistics and legal intricacies, “Some or all of those 20 beautiful children and six great educators would be alive today if assault weapons had been banned along with high capacity magazines," he was telling what Mark Twain used to call a stretcher, not that he will ever be reproved for it by the right people. Mr. Blumenthal, formerly an attorney general, did, after all, include the slither word “some” in his stretcher.

Back home, Democratic leaders in the General Assembly were spooking their brother legislators. The president pro tem of the Senate Don Williams and Majority Leader Martin Looney wrote a letter to their colleagues demanding that a legislative committee complete its work on time; and the bill presented to the General Assembly, they said, would be“emergency certified.”

An "emergency certified bill" is one that short circuits the legislative process because an “emergency”requiring short circuiting is at hand. The short circuiting, fortunately for legislators who do not wish to leave unsightly fingerprints on the resulting bill, renders hearings on proposed bills unnecessary. There is no emergency, only a legislative stampede made in Washington. Convenient emergencies of this kind are the enemy of the good and a shameless dereliction of legislative responsibility. If legislators don't want to create effective bills, they should find another means of employment.

The one notable Democratic legislator who appears to be committed to a tried and sure legislative process designed to produce efficacious legislation is Democratic Speaker of the House Brendan Sharkey. Mr.Sharkey is reluctant to sign on to emergency legislation the provisions of which have not been approved by the General Assembly appointed bipartisan task force. Apparently, Mr. Sharkey prefers a more comprehensive bill written by Connecticut legislators for citizens of Connecticut. Hearings on proposed legislation allow legislators to shape bills with a view to particular circumstances. The notion that the General Assembly should be stampeded in its deliberations simply to meet a schedule imposed from Washington DC is more than preposterous; it is dangerous because it subverts a republican constitutional order and will likely produce a product useful only to politicians concerned with campaign sound bites.

Property Tax Regressive?

“Regressive,” as any practicing progressive knows, is the opposite of “progressive.” Theoretically, a progressive income tax is levied on those who, in the words most often used to defend the tax, can well afford to“pay their fair share,” the fairness of their share to be determined, naturally, by progressives. The sole purpose of the progressive income tax is to shift the burden of tax payments from the poor to the rich.

During the war years, Franklin Roosevelt, spurred on by progressives, signed into law the “Revenue Act of 1935,” a “wealth tax” that raised the federal income tax to 75 percent on incomes over 5 million. The 5 million, as it turned out, was but a foot in the door. Under the administrations of President Barrack Obama and Governor Dannel Malloy, millionaires have come down in the world, and anyone who makes a quarter of a million per year is considered, for progressive tax purposes, a millionaire.

By today’s standards, Mr. Roosevelt’s “fair share” would be considered unfair by anyone but socialist President of France François Hollandeand perhaps American economist Paul Krugman, one of Mr. Obama’s economic cheerleaders. Author and talk show host Chris Mathews, the guy with tingly leg, also is eupeptic on all things Obama, but he is not an economist.

In the Obama economy, some things have changed, partly because of inflation; the dollar just ain’t what it used to be. And though it takes far fewer bucks to make a millionaire, Mr. Obama’s income tax rate increase is far less than that of Mr. Hollande and Mr. Roosevelt.

When Governor of Louisiana Bobby Jindal proposed replacing his state’s income tax with an augmented sales tax, he was whipped by Mr. Krugman as an anti-progressive. “Such a move,” Mr. Krugman wrote in his blog at the NewYork Times, “would shift taxes from the rich to the poor, who are disproportionately hit by the sales tax.”

A progressive tax theoretically is a deprivation on the rich, while a regressive tax – a sales tax, say – is a deprivation on the poor. In reality, the very rich escape many taxes. When Republicans several years ago proposed a flat income tax that would fall equally on the stupendously rich Warren Buffet, the prince of Berkshire Hathaway, and his tax beleaguered secretary, while eliminating at the same time special exemptions enjoyed by crony capitalists, they were hooted out of the halls of Congress by progressive san culottes.

A property tax is progressive rather than regressive because it cannot be levied upon those whose economic circumstances to do not permit the ownership of property. The poor, as a general rule, don’t own property. Therefore, the property tax, the primary revenue generator for towns, is not unusually regressive. The sales tax, falling like the gentle rain on both the poor and the rich, is a regressive – i.e. non-progressive -- tax. It is also a broader based more dependable tax, which is probably why Mr. Jindal prefers it to the less dependable more narrow based progressive income tax.

In the halls of Connecticut’s General Assembly, it is being whispered that yet another tax increase may be necessary to balance the state’s chronically out of balance budget. The new Speaker of the House, Brendan Sharkey, has stepped forward to explain that a sluggish national economy and higher governmental costs have punched yet another billion dollar hole in the state’s revenue bucket.

And therefore the state may be forced to reduce municipal aid, Mr. Sharkey told more than a 100 state and municipal leaders and social service advocates at a state budget forum at the Capitol, which will prompt municipal leaders to raise property taxes or cut services. During his first tax bump, Mr. Malloy and dominant Democrats in the General Assembly held the towns in the state harmless. But “the days of being able to hold cities and towns completely harmless while dealing with the state's fiscal woes likely,” according to one report, “are over.”

“The property tax,” Mr. Sharkey told the property tax reliant mayors and town administrators, “will be the crisis once again.” According to the report, which summarizes the Speaker’s chat with the frozen faced municipal leaders, the Speaker went on to say, that“Besides harming low-income households the most, the regressive levy also places a heavy burden on small businesses and discourages economic development here.”

While it certainly is refreshing to hear any Democratic leader in the General Assembly frankly admit that taxes may be harmful – which is why Mr. Malloy in his first budget arranged his tax increases in such a way as to hold the towns “harmless” – the property tax certainly is not more regressive than the cornucopia of new taxes Mr. Malloy instituted, according to Mr. Krugman, the economic guru to progressives.

It is the state and federal government that has put the towns in crisis by imposing upon them costly state mandates. Town leaders do not have the political power to force the state to remove these yokes from their necks. And expensive state and federal mandates, along with poorly funded pensions and equally expensive benefit and salary increases enjoyed by teachers and municipal workers, have driven up so called “regressive” property taxes.

The chief reason why Mr. Malloy and dominant Democrats in the General Assembly are now considering voiding their often repeated pledge during campaigns to “hold towns harmless” from punishing tax increases is that the state needs the money to cover budget deficits caused by decades of improvident spending, and Democrats are loathed to punish those who consistently vote them into office by cutting increases in salaries and benefits.

Property taxes are not especially regressive. If Republicans were to propose a dollar for dollar reduction in costly state mandates for every dollar in revenue “saved”by the state in reduced municipal assistance, they just might have a useful campaign issue on their hands, for Democrats in the General Assembly fear a loss in municipal votes almost as much as they fear a temporary loss in state revenue from general and effective cuts in marginal tax rates and business taxes. Mr. Sharkey has proposed that “some of the big ticket items we impose" on communities -- funding for special education, for instance -- should be shifted to the state, but such a transfer of payments would not result in significant relief to taxpayers because municipal tax payers are also state tax payers.

Sharkey in the Water

In closing a $2 billion hole in Connecticut’s next budget, Governor Dannel Malloy does not have many cards left in his hand. In his first budget, Mr. Malloy was careful to steer a path around state cuts to municipalities. He chose instead to execute a broad based tax increase, the largest in state history. That hefty tax increase permitted the governor to “hold the towns blameless,” in the words of recently installed Speaker of the State House Brendan Sharkey.

That was then. And now?

Said Mr. Sharkey after his installation, “It’s inevitable that there are going to be some cuts. I hate to say that. I’ve been a longtime advocate for protecting cities and towns and boards of education from cuts in funding from the state. I don’t think it’s news to any cities and towns and boards of education out there. They are very appreciative of the fact that we’ve done as much as we have to hold them blameless for the last two years.”

It may be important to notice that the cuts in state aid to towns will not of itself reduce state spending. Cuts in state aid to towns will spur either municipal spending cuts, property tax increases or both. A cut in state aid necessarily would result in a loss of revenue, leaving municipalities with a political Hobson ’s choice.

Tax increases are anathema to both town and state officials– because those who pay town and state bills, municipal and state taxpayers, are having a great deal of trouble making ends meet. Taxpayers in the state are maxed out on taxes, thanks in large part to improvident state legislators who have consistently raised taxes and as consistently increased spending.

Legislators tend to operate under the illusion that federal, state and municipal tax payers are discrete categories, conveniently forgetting that the federal tax payer is the state taxpayer is the municipal property tax payer. Connecticut residents Mr. and Mrs. Smith, if they earn more than $250,000, will get socked with very hefty federal tax increases as the Obama administration unfurls. Those tax increases, in the absence of cuts to entitlement programs, will leave state taxpayers with less money in their budgets to absorb future state and municipal tax increases. When Mr. Malloy imposed upon Connecticut citizens the largest tax increase in state history, he made it less possible for municipalities to increase property taxes. Federal, state and municipal taxes are all drawn from the same pockets.

Tax increases are particularly onerous right now for a host of reasons, not the least of which is this: As the poor and lower middle class are more often sheltered from paying taxes, the tax load designed by progressives is shifted increasingly to a smaller number of people, so that the incentive to spend increases in proportion to a decrease in the number of people who finance the spending. To put it plainly, tax consumers are increasing and tax payers are decreasing. And of course Mr. and Mrs. Smith pay federal, state and municipal taxes, so that an increase any one of the categories affects their ability to pay in the remaining two categories.

A measure of relief will come to Mr. and Mrs. Smith only if the town or the state or the federal government cuts spending, at which point Mr. and Mrs. Smith will be able to afford a higher payment to the remaining two taxing authorities. None of this is rocket science. Just as you cannot squeeze water from a stone, so you cannot squeeze tax receipts from people or businesses in a declining economy. The money just isn’t there.

And the enticing notion that “millionaires,” defined by tax gobbling politicians as households earning more than $250,000 a year, will be able to pick up the tab left by the rest of us is little more than a campaign slogan successfully used by Democrats this election season to retain the White House and the U.S. Senate. But reality, like God, does not play dice with the universe. If you are spending more than you are taking in to pay expenses, reality, sooner or later, will have a word with you.

Municipalities face the same problem as the state, which is why mayors and town administrators should insist that every dollar reduced by the state to towns and cities should be off-set by reductions in costly regulations and state mandates, a chorus of common sense Republicans should be happy to join.

Connecticut, one hopes, is fast approaching a “bolt out of the blue’ realization that the tax cupboard is bare, at which point, one hopes, Mr. Sharkey and other free spenders within Democratic Party ranks will realize– it’s time to cut spending, reduce business taxes to re-ignite Connecticut’s flagging economy and pare back job slaying regulations.

Does “No” Mean Yes?

Governor Malloy has told the Appropriations and Finance, Revenue & Bonding committees through his Office of Policy and Management Secretary Ben Barnes that he will not resort to tax increases to backfill what Mr. Malloy calls a $365 million “shortfall” in his budget.

Mr. Malloy has been less assertive concerning “a deficit of as much as $1.2 billion projected for the coming fiscal year -- a shortfall of 6 percent-- saying only that he has ‘no intention of raising taxes,’" according to a story in CTMirror.

During his first budget, Mr. Malloy settled a budget deficit through massive broad based tax increases and anticipated “spending cuts” that fell short of the “shared sacrifice” from state workers that had been a hallmark of his gubernatorial campaign, which hoisted into the gubernatorial office the first Democratic governor since William O’Neill turned over the reins of government to Lowell Weicker, who settled his inherited deficit through the imposition of a state income tax, the second largest tax increase in state history. The Malloy tax increase is larger.

And here we are again – in deficit low dive.

The notion that Connecticut does not have a spending problem but rather a revenue problem that may always be solved through the expedient of tax increases seems now somehow quaint. That notion was, during the past four decades, much on the lips of politicians who did not wish unnecessarily to disturb their tax consuming constituencies, as well as lazy and thoughtless political commentators across the state who thought the good times of budget surpluses would never end, at least not here in Connecticut, in pre-income tax days thought to be one of the richest and most fiscally sound states in the union.

No more.

On a best (1) to worst (54) scale issued by Moody’s Analytics, Connecticut is near bottom (45) in economic growth. Connecticut’s economy has been flat ever since Mr. Weicker sought to solve the state’s revenue problem through a new income tax. The consequent revenue increases during the following decades opened a Pandora’s Box of spending.

It has now become settled opinion that Connecticut has a spending problem aggravated by an unwillingness on the part of successive governors and the Democratic dominated General Assembly to recognize the primary reason for the state’s woes –profligate spending -- even after all the red flags have gone up: Connecticut is number one in taxes and number one in pension obligations; the state has lost population from outmigration part of which has been caused by workers seeking employment opportunities in more business friendly states; young people armed with very expensive college educations paid by state taxpayers are taking their diplomas to greener economic pastures. And all this is simply the tip of a spending spree that has frozen the state’s forward movement.

It is against this depressing backdrop that Mr. Malloy has declared he “has no intention” of addressing the state’s current $365 million “shortfall” by increasing taxes, and it would be a refreshing sign of a return to fiscal sanity to suppose that one governor out of the last three has finally got the message.

State law permits the governor to address a shortfall in the budget by exercising his constitutionally limited rescission authority. Mr. Malloy already has announced that he will use his authority to cut between $150 and $160 million from the $365 million “shortfall,” leaving the remaining approximate $215 million balance to be addressed by the Democratic controlled General Assembly. The governor cannot rescission his way out of the deficit. Assuming Mr. Malloy is able to reduce the deficit as he wishes, the projected deficit the General Assembly must address for the coming fiscal year is approximately $1.2 billion plus $215 million – and growing.

The role that will be played by the General Assembly in liquidating the growing deficit introduces an uncertainty principle into Mr. Malloy’s repeated avowal that HE has no intention of increasing taxes. The Democratic dominated General Assembly may be of a different mind. Outgoing Speaker of the House Chris Donovan has in the past supported legislation that would increase state revenues by squeezing Gold Coast financial managers, and his successor, Brendan Sharkey, has not sworn off increasing tax rates progressively on the state’s entrepreneurial growth engines.

One supposes neither Mr. Malloy nor Mr. Barnes would be anxious to answer the question: Will the governor, who has pledged not to increase taxes, veto tax increase measures passed by his fellow Democrats in the legislature.

Time will tell. And time for the state’s recovery is running out.

Donovan, Still Kicking

It may be a little early to bury the corpse, though moments after the finance director for state House Speaker Chris Donovan’s congressional campaign, Robert Braddock Jr., was arrested and charged with hiding contributions of about $20,000, Governor Dannel Malloy, a former prosecutor with a soft spot in his heart for multiple murderers, threw a spade full of dirt over the quivering body.

Said Mr. Malloy in a press release:

“I want to commend the US Attorney’s Office and the FBI for their diligence in the investigation and the speed in which they’ve taken action. Law enforcement is in many ways the first and last line of defense for our taxpayers, and when an announcement like this happens, we should all be grateful for their work.

“These allegations are despicable. While I am encouraged that the Speaker is cooperating with the investigation, his position requires that he give our residents a full explanation of what he knows.

“Allegations like this not only damage a campaign or a candidate, they also undermine citizen’s belief in their government’s ability to carry out its responsibilities.”

According to an affidavit written and sworn to by the FBI agent who facilitated the arrest of Mr. Braddock, the finance director ran afoul of a campaign financing statute that makes it illegal for a campaign to conceal the source of campaign funds. It is a violation of federal campaign finance law for any person to knowingly accept a contribution made by one person in another’s name. Mr. Braddock is alleged to have accepted roughly $20,000 from an investor in the tobacco industry, thereafter laundering the money as multiple campaign checks given to the Donovan for Congress campaign by dummy donors. The investor was an FBI plant who, for purposes of this column, we shall call Mr. Sting. The names in the affidavit, thinly disguised, have been changed to protect the case against Mr. Donovan’s finance director.

Were it not for the state’s insatiable thirst for more tax money to plug a hole in Connecticut’s budget, consistently in arrears, Mr. Donovan’s path to the U.S. House need not have been cluttered by unseemly charges in FBI affidavits.

To goose more tax dollars from tobacco connected businesses, the Democratic dominated legislature passed a bill months ago levying a tax on roll-your-own tobacco shops, the well having run dry after Mr. Malloy and the Democrats passed the largest tax increase in state history. On behalf of state Revenue Services Commissioner Kevin Sullivan, Attorney General George Jepsen sought an injunction against Tracey’s Smoke Shop and Tobacco LLC for the illegal manufacture of cigarettes at its stores in Norwalk and Orange.

In February, a Superior Court ruled that the shops were not tobacco manufacturers and therefore not taxable entities under the relevant law. This judgment was little more than an inconvenience to Democratic legislators, and state tax officials promptly sought to overcome the judicial impediment though the creation of yet another bill that would allow them accesses to the tobacco shops’ piggy banks. The new bill opened the door to aggressive lobbying. But, alas, the bill died at the end of the last session.

Increasingly in politics, bills that ought never to have been passed are used as instruments to generate campaign funds for politicians who, through excessive taxation and burdensome regulations, are able to obtain from government rent seekers transfers of campaign cash into their own coffers in return for political favors. In this game of thrones, everyone wins but taxpayers.

In the short time since Mr. Braddock was arrested, two newspapers have called upon Mr. Donovan to make himself available for questions. Good luck with that. One paper has urged Mr. Donovan to quit the General Assembly, and most Democratic legislators connected in any way with the now toxic bill that would pile additional taxes on roll-your-own tobacco shops have assumed defensive crouches. Mr. Donovan has announced he has turned over to Brendan Sharkey, a House member in line for the Speaker’s post, his responsibilities as Speaker, at the same time announcing he does not intend to withdraw his candidacy for the U.S. House.

Mr. Malloy has pronounced the “allegations” in the affidavit used to secure Mr. Braddock arrest “despicable.” It is, of course, not the allegations that are despicable, but rather the tax and regulatory environment that opens a hundred doors to political corruption. The crony capitalist is the natural ally of the corruptible money grubbing politician. Politicians and their staffs rush into temptations of this kind much in the way a young boy with two stomachs rushes into the candy store. Hell itself will freeze over before despicable money seeking politicians condemn equally despicable quasi-socialist, faux capitalist rent seekers.

Cowards All

Connecticut’s House of Representatives voted on April 11 to abolish the death penalty prospectively, which is another way of saying that the General Assembly will not apply its morals and its legal prescriptions to the Connecticut 11, inmates presently awaiting punishment on Death Row.

The abolition bill having passed both houses of the General Assembly, will be made operative upon Governor Dannel Malloy’s signature.

In order to make abolition palatable for wavering politicians, the leaders of the Senate responsible for passing the bill, President Pro-tem Don Williams and Senate Majority Leader Martin Looney, inserted into the legislation a provision that will retain Death Row for prisoners who in the future commit heinous crimes. Death has been abolished, but Death Row lives on. In time, prisoners who have been spared death, courtesy of the moral epigones in the General Assembly, will mingle in the same general space with others sentenced to death whose crimes will be no less heinous.

The prospective abolition bill is the single most cowardly piece of legislation passed in the last half century, and it gives the lie to every argument made in the General Assembly in favor of abolition.

Here is House Majority Leader J. Brendan Sharkey fulminating, just prior to passage, that the death penalty has not eradicated evil:

"Despite having the death penalty in our society here in Connecticut for several hundred years ... it certainly hasn't eradicated evil from our society. If we as human beings created laws that reciprocate the evil that's perpetrated on society, are they really protecting us? ... Our laws more project our better selves."

But in the case of the 11 inmates awaiting execution, the bill approved by Mr. Sharkey visits upon them a reciprocal evil. And we would be no less safe, the pro-repeal forces in the General Assembly have repeatedly assured us, if the sentences of the Connecticut 11 had been commuted to life in prison retrospectively. Mr. Sharkey has yet to share with us the moral precept that justifies a penalty of death for 11 Death Row inmates who are to be executed AFTER the law authorizing execution has been abolished.

Following abolition, national president of the NAACP Benjamin Jealous said, “This vote tonight ... allows Connecticut to break with a centuries-old tradition of executing people and rejoin the rest of the Western world, which has long since cut bait with the death penalty. It also moves our nation forward." But as long as the Connecticut 11are subject to the death penalty, it cannot be said that Connecticut has “moved forward.”

Meeting in Paris in February 2007, the forward looking 3rdWorld Congress Against The Death Penalty pointedly noted that abolition was not nearly enough to satisfy the demands of justice: “We recognize that the process of abolition must be accompanied by a better consideration of the needs of victims and by an in-depth reflection on penal policy and prison systems, in the framework of an equitable and restorative justice… We demand with one voice the end throughout the world of justice that kills. No authority has the right to strike out a person’s life. We recall that the death penalty is a cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment, that it is contrary to human rights, that it has no utility in the fight against crime, and that it always represents a failure of justice.”

A death penalty abolition that leaves 11 Death Row inmates subject to execution by no means satisfies the prescriptions of the Paris conference.

Every argument made in the General Assembly in support of prospective death penalty abolition, sufficient or not, applies as well to retrospective abolition. And every argument made by partisan Democrats in Connecticut in support of abolition would apply equally to the FederalDeath Penalty Abolition Act of 2011, a bill co-sponsored by 15 Democratic Representatives. Democratic contenders for congress – most especially Speaker of the House Chris Donovan, who organized support for Connecticut’s death penalty abolition bill -- should be asked in the course of their debates whether they will support the Federal Death Penalty Abolition Act.