In Tolls We Trust

Leading Democrats in the General Assembly think we need a new revenue source – tolls. Why do they think so? Because they have run out of money.

And why have they run out of money? The answer to that question will depend upon the political affiliation of the person to whom the question is put. Democrats have offered a cornucopia of reasons. Number one on their list is -- the gas tax just ain’t what it used to be.

There are really two gas taxes: one at the port, and one at the refill tank. Connecticut proudly boasts that it imposes on nutmeggers among the highest gas taxes in the nation. And this is good for the environment, because it keeps people in their holes and prevents them from despoiling nature. When they pop out of their holes of a morning, we Democrats would like them to take public transportation to work. That is why we are investing tax dollars in rail lines and fast track buses. Ditch the car, save a flower, cut auto transport on our busy highways. Better still, move to our soon to be flourishing cities. As an added bonus, we will reduce highway commuter traffic and eventually – though these happy days lie far in the future – reduce gas taxes even more through attrition, a rainbow for hard pressed taxpayers arcing over two pots of gold. It would be best, as this process of recovery rolls along and the earth heals itself, to speed progress by raising gas taxes even higher. Then – finally and at long last – we will be able to reallocate our diminishing fossil fuel tax dollars to our crumbling highways and byways.

But, hang on a minute there. Somehow, we're all under the misapprehension that gas taxes were to be used to make Connecticut into a glowing transportation hub between New York and Boston. Evidently, to judge from the state’s crumbling infrastructure, that did not happen. So then, what disaster befell Dorothy on the way to a progressive Oz..

Now the answer to this question has about as many turns in it as a crooked politician on a stump casting his nets for votes. But there really is only one answer to the question: The transportation lock-box "investments' were diverted circuitously into the pockets of special interests, largely people who work, day and night, to assure their own comfort and the reelection of the diverters, This is not at all a question of robbing Peter to pay Paul. In Connecticut especially, it is a question of robbing marginal workers to pay the salaries and extravagant benefits of state employees who, it turns out, are much richer in salaries and benefits than workers in the sadly diminishing private marketplace who perform similar services.

The politicians, pleading urgency, who are now beseeching middle class taxpayers to lift upon their sagging shoulders yet another new tax burden, tolls, are the very same political Babbitts that have raided both the transportation fund, leaving behind themselves a load of dangerous bridges and cracked roads AND state worker pension funds. “Connecticut’s total state and local unfunded pension and other post-employment benefits (OPEB) liability,” says the reliable Yankee Institute “is a whopping $124.9 billion.”

Governor Ned Lamont and majority Democrats in the General Assembly – who, of course, have “inherited” this mess from previous administrations, rather as if the gigantic hole in Connecticut's debt and obligation bucket were a bequest rather than the result of political chicanery – now proposes to reduce a small portion of this crushing debt through 1) tolling and 2) passing on the debt to their grandchildren and great grandchildren. But – really and truly this time, really, really, really – there will be no lock-box picking, no diversion of toll funding into the state’s largest slush fund, the General Fund, no political feints, no propaganda delivered daily to the doorsteps of the state’s increasingly credulous media, no attempt to stifle reasonable opposition by flooding public hearings with pro-toll propaganda, no more pulling the wool over the eyes of beaten taxpayers.

No, no, there will be none of this because, from now on, all our energies will be devoted to permanent, long-term cuts in spending, rather than tax-increase bandages put on suppurating wounds. 

This last vow must appear to marginal workers suffering from Lamont’s most recent tax grab a revolutionary prescription for eventual recovery. And so it would be – if legislators were to commit themselves to repairing the hole in the bucket, through cost savings, before pouring more tax water into it.  But they have not, and they will not – because they CANNOT.

Doing so would toss on the ash heap of history a political strategy that in the past has assured victory at the polls for political Elmer Gantries who have sold the birthright of Connecticut citizens for a mess of political pottage. State politicians who have persistently raised taxes to cover ever-increasing debts are the primary victims of their own past successes. The forgotten taxpayer now exiting the state is a less important tertiary victim.