By CHRIS POWELL
Connecticut’s environmental extremists aren’t just extreme. They’re deceitful too, and as the new session of the General Assembly begins they are coming back with legislation that is more extremism and deception.
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They want state government to put another tax on conventional energy — oil and natural gas — in the name of reducing “climate change,” which used to be called “global warming,” as if Earth’s climate hasn’t been changing, oscillating between warming and cooling cycles for millennia, long before the rise of mankind and the internal combustion engine, the invention being blamed for “climate change.”
The deceitfulness of the environmental extremists’ proposal is that they want to levy the new tax on the producers of oil and natural gas rather than on the consumers — that is, the people of Connecticut — as if the producers are the bad guys and force people to use their fuels instead of the far more expensive and far less effective fuels the environmental extremists prefer. The new tax would be an indirect tax on a necessity of life and drive up energy costs as producers and wholesalers recovered the tax from ordinary users.
But to the environmental extremists and deceivers, the nice thing about the proposal is that the public would blame the big energy companies for the resulting price increases, not the true perpetrators, their own state legislators and the governor.
By contrast, a tax on retail fuel purchasers — a sales tax — would be clearly visible to all and honestly fix political responsibility for higher costs.
The environmental extremists and deceivers are following the model set by the dishonest tax Connecticut already applies to fuel — what is called the gross earnings tax, which is applied to the first sale of petroleum products brought into the state. This is a tax on wholesalers and adds about 26 cents to the retail price of each gallon of gasoline in the state. The wholesale tax is built into the sales price. People can’t see it or understand it. It fools them very well, which is why the environmental extremists and deceivers love it and are eager to expand on it.
Chris Herb, president of the Connecticut Energy Marketers Association, gets to the point that the environmental extremists and deceivers avoid. “Anyone supporting this proposal,” Herb says, “is supporting higher electric bills, higher heating costs, and higher prices at the gas pump.”
Such higher prices won’t be popular. But bashing corporations usually plays well politically.
Since Connecticut is so highly taxed and expensive, many state legislators now are prattling about the need for “affordability” in public policy. With bitter cold, deep snow, and high wind having just caused state residents to spend more than ever to keep their homes warm, the campaign for “affordability” should easily defeat more hidden taxes on energy — if the campaign is sincere.
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It seems that advocates of Connecticut’s new housing legislation, including Governor Lamont, don’t really think it will accomplish much. For they are supporting legislation that would give municipal fair-rent commissions authority to prevent landlords who acquire existing rental properties from raising rents by more than 5%.
Meanwhile Connecticut is full of apartments and tenements that need maintenance and renovation costing more than their current rents can support. Indeed, Connecticut lately seems to have more rent control than housing construction.
Connecticut is in urgent need of at least 100,000 more housing units, and the housing shortage is a big part of the state’s “affordability” problem. The shortage can be solved only by housing construction or swift deportation of the state’s illegal immigrant population, which isn’t going to happen as long as state government remains controlled by the people who have made Connecticut a “sanctuary state.”
No one is likely to try to build housing if his chances of making money are substantially impaired by rent control.
Enacting rent control amid a desperate shortage of housing may be popular but it’s hypocritical and will only make things worse.
Chris Powell has written about Connecticut government and politics for many years. (CPowell@cox.net)
Chris Powell column 