Dannel Malloy Taxed the Rich and The "Rich" Are Leaving Connecticut - Granite Grok

Dannel Malloy Taxed the Rich and The “Rich” Are Leaving Connecticut

Connecticut-tax-ratesThe government can do nothing without first taking property from someone else. How much government should do cannot be separated from the problem of how much government must take. Who gets to decide what and “how much” is at the very heart of the divide between the left and the right.

Progressives always want the government to do more. There is, in fact, no end to what it should do, in their mind. Ask them where it ends. How much is enough? They have no answer. But government can do nothing without first taking property from someone else, and the rich make for a big target. A target that moves. Just ask Democrat Governor Dannel Malloy.

(LI) Connecticut Governor Dannel Malloy (D) is facing a situation that may make him reconsider his position on taxing the wealthy.  Aetna insurance company, based in Hartford since 1853, is looking for a new state to call home, a state that is more business-friendly in terms of taxation.

Having lost GE to Boston last year due to the massive tax load piled on businesses, Malloy is desperate to keep Aetna in Connecticut, but it may be too little, too late.

Malloy is doing a song and dance, promising to protect Aetna from his moral authority to rob the citizens to pay for his political agenda. He is offering special privileges, none of which are permanent and Aetna knows that. The state government isn’t getting smaller. It’s payroll, benefit, and pension obligations to union political allies aren’t going away.

Anyone who stays will have to pay.

In all fairness to dopey Dannel, the people of Connecticut got what they asked for with Malloy and a progressive majority that has been driving the state into a fiscal toilet for years. Even the Republicans in CT are Democrats. So, I have no sympathy for them, or New York, or California, which–without a sympathetic ear in the Executive Branch–will drown in its ocean of debt long before it is “swallowed by the rising seas” or “baked” by the warming planet.

I also have no sympathy for the rubes in New Hampshire who continue to kneel before the same progressive gods promising more government will make their lives better. But it can’t.  If you follow the path of Jerry Brown, Dannel Malloy, or the New Hampshire Democrat party, the end is the same. There is no other result. A Government run by progressives will choose to feed itself before all else.

Venezuela is a proper example of this taken to the extreme. California is probably the closest nearest domestic equivalent.  Connecticut, a neighbor, is headed in the same direction.

From WSJ c/o LI,

Last month the state Office of Fiscal Analysis reduced its two-year revenue forecast by $1.46 billion. Since January the agency has downgraded income-tax revenue for 2017 and 2018 by $1.1 billion (6%). Sales- and corporate-tax revenue are projected to fall by $385 million (9%) and $67 million (7%), respectively, this year. Pension contributions, which have doubled since 2010, will increase by a third over the next two years. The result: a $5.1 billion deficit and three recent credit downgrades.

According to the fiscal analyst, income-tax collections declined this year for the first time since the recession due to lower earnings at the top. Many wealthy residents decamped for lower-tax states after Mr. Malloy and his Republican predecessor Jodi Rell raised the top individual rate on more than $500,000 of income to 6.99% from 5%. In the past five years 27,400 Connecticut residents, including Ms. Rell, have moved to no-income-tax Florida, and seven of the state’s eight counties have lost population since 2010. Population flight has depressed economic growth—Connecticut’s real GDP has shrunk by 0.1% since 2010—as well as home values and sales-tax revenues.

At present progressives on both sides are having daily tantrums because the people understood whose property they will be taking to pay for the government progressives wanted. Obama nearly doubled the national debt in just eight years and never once did we see a Democrat candidate running ads with a freight train bearing down on our children.

Now, every effort to stop that train means the ruin of women, children, the elderly, education, roads and bridges, a thousand different things, none of which improved after the government stole trillions more in the name of fixing all those things.

A Government run by progressives will choose to feed itself before all else.

Anyone who dares question it shall be shouted at, called names, intimidated, threatened, boycotted, and pilloried. Death is not, to borrow from Gen. John Stark, the worst of evils.

Lucky for us, Aetna, and America, when the progressives get too comfortable with taking our property, we move. And we will.

New Hampshire would do well to take notice. It only takes a few years of uncontrolled, progressive policy to put your state in the toilet. That’s the only destination liberal policy knows.

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