Marginalizing Wealth in Connecticut

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Rising electric bills that have angered Connecticut voters are a very small tip of a very large iceberg.

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In a Hartford Courant story – “Anger over massive CT electric bills will drive voter choices on Election Day, GOP says ” – party honchoes assessed the anger.

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Senate Republican leader Stephen Harding of Brookfield said. “Every day that I door-knock, every time I go to an event, I can’t speak to three or four constituents without the electric rates being brought up. People have had enough … Most voters want to see some effort to do something. We had an ability in a special session to stop the bleeding. On top of that, we can provide some immediate relief. At least it’s something. We should not dismiss it the way the Democrats have dismissed it.”

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Hartford Democrat House Speaker Matt Ritter off-handedly dismissed Harding’s concerns and at the same time gave the neo-progressive game away when, shrugging his shoulders, he confessed that any attempt to provide a small relief to Connecticut householders would be too expensive for big spending legislators who had over the years compiled a massive debt.

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“Overall debt across all areas tops $88 billion,” CTMirror tells us. “Connecticut remains one of the most indebted states, per capita, in the nation, and required annual payments are expected to put extra pressure on state finances well into the 2030s or later.”

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The state has so many business and residential electric customers, Ritter said, that it would be highly expensive even to provide a small amount of relief, according to the Courant story.

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Note the import of the word “expensive” here. Tax relief would be “expensive” for whom?

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“It would take hundreds of millions of dollars to save the average person $5 on their bill, and it would appear as a credit,” Ritter told The Courant in an interview. “If you need an election issue because you’re trying to turn attention away from the national stuff, you can certainly mention this, but it would literally save people five dollars. I don’t think it’s a smart play.”

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The cat Ritter let out of the bag will be squealing soon.

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Ritter’s is an argument in favor of abandoning all tax cuts and all savings realized through spending reductions, the reason being -- such measures would be too costly for the governing authority. What Ritter means to say is that tax reductions, regulation reductions and spending reductions are inadvisable because they would be inconvenient for Ritter and his Democrat Party associates in the state’s General Assembly and the governor’s office.

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Regulations and taxes in Connecticut, once they go up, must never come down. In fact, this has been for decades the unofficial and overriding doctrine of Connecticut’s Democrat Party, which is why the state is staggering under an unsupportable $88 billion dollar debt, passed on through the decades to future generations. The future has now become too close for comfort.

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Now then, like God, the immutable laws of economics will not be mocked, nor should they be overridden by political greed, and at some point Connecticut must bite the debt bullet. It started to do so when Republicans, for a brief moment at parity with Democrats in one House of the General Assembly, convinced leading Democrats, Ritter among them, to erect some spending guardrails. But those guardrails will not survive an attack upon them by neo-progressive Democrats in the General Assembly devoted to the above proposition -- that spending and taxation should under no circumstances be reduced.

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Such reductions enriching the middle class would be inconvenient for a political body addicted to harvesting votes by lavishing upon supportive political groups tax credits and regulatory relief. If you have no surplus money in your budget to parcel out to favored groups, you cannot buy their votes with tax money you do not have.

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And here is the bigger problem, the larger iceberg that will sink the state by making beggars of a once self-sustaining middle class in Connecticut. Very slowly and craftily, a self-sufficient middle class in Connecticut is being pushed toward marginal dependence by neo-progressives standing on deck and, as always, willing to lend a hand to those fleeing the ship approaching the iceberg.

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What our leaders should be doing is moving the ship in a different direction – towards passenger self-sufficiency. The very first political matter in order of importance is not “What should be done?” but rather “Who should decide what should be done?”

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Bill Buckley provided us with an answer to that decisive question when he confesses that he would much rather place his God-given liberties in the hands of the first hundred people chosen at random from the phone book than the Harvard Law faculty.