By CHRIS POWELL
According to state Sen. Jan Hochadel, D-Meriden, Connecticut shouldn’t be afraid of taxing the wealthy more.
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In a newspaper essay last week Hochadel cited a study done last year by something called A Better Connecticut Institute. The study, the senator wrote, contended that “income taxes play almost no role in where high-earning individuals choose to live,” and that “when states raise taxes on top earners, the number of wealthy residents who actually leave is statistically insignificant,” only around 2%.
“Wealthy people, like everyone else, care about more than their tax bill,” Hochadel wrote — they also care about schools, public services, public safety, economic opportunities, and such.
Well, of course. But no one says the wealthy care only about taxes and not about those other things. They care about many things, including taxes. It is a matter of judgment and degree.
Besides, who exactly should be considered wealthy for tax purposes?
The senator writes of “millionaires,” but when retirement savings are added, housing price inflation has made millionaires of tens of thousands of Connecticut residents who are not close to being plutocrats but still pay a lot in taxes. Millionaires are not as rich as they used to be.
Maybe certain billionaires don’t care about Connecticut’s income tax, but then why have so many state residents who are not billionaires been moving to Florida and other low-tax southern states as they near retirement and even before? Why are states that don’t tax their residents as much as Connecticut does growing economically and in population even as Connecticut’s economy is stagnant and its population might be decreasing if not for the illegal immigration state government encourages?
As Connecticut’s illegal immigration from Central America and the Caribbean suggests, migration is not entirely a matter of warmer winters. Those illegal immigrants see more money for themselves where there are colder winters. Contrary to Hochadel’s suggestion, money and people still tend to go where they are treated best.
Liberal Democratic state legislators like Hochadel have two reasons for framing their desire to increase state government spending as a matter of raising taxes only on the wealthy.
First is that these legislators can’t make a good case for spending more on the merits of the spending itself, a case that would persuade the less than wealthy. For decades these legislators have been bleating about poverty in Connecticut and appropriating more to alleviate it without reducing poverty at all. Some state government policies plainly perpetuate poverty. No state government seeking to reduce poverty would subsidize childbearing outside marriage and run schools by social promotion as Connecticut does. But ministering to poverty and making it generational provides much political patronage for Democrats.
Second is that while state government still neglects much human need, liberal Democratic legislators, being the tools of the government employee unions, don’t dare to examine the mismanagement, waste, fraud, and general excess in government, where much money could be saved. Reports in this regard by news organizations and the state auditors almost always pass without comment from liberal Democratic legislators. Most look away even from federal prosecutions of corruption in state government.
Now that Connecticut has become a one-party state, Democrats have become the party of government for its own sake — not the party of efficient and effective government. Hochadel’s essay revealed her as an embodiment of this problem.
The organization whose study the senator cited in her essay, A Better Connecticut Institute, consists mainly of government employee unions, and Hochadel herself is an officer of the Connecticut chapter of the American Federation of Teachers.
That is, the institute represents mostly state and municipal government employees, who just happen to be the recipients of most state and municipal government tax revenue.
Just as you shouldn’t ask the barber if you need a haircut, you shouldn’t seek advice from government employee unions about whether taxes should be raised so more money can be spent on their members. Bettering Connecticut requires much more than making government employees happy.
Chris Powell has written about Connecticut government and politics for many years. (CPowell@cox.net)
Chris Powell column 