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Reconfirmation of a Permanent Tax
By Tim Siggia
March 08, 2003
The budget battle in Connecticut is over, and it bears the hallmark of any true compromise: nobody is happy over it. It also brings to each household table a bitter pill to swallow: like it or not, the odious legacy of Liberal Lowell is here to stay.
Liberal Lowell is, of course, Lowell Weicker, former Connecticut governor and U.S. Senator who was so far to the left he made his buddy Ted Kennedy look like Jesse Helms, and who, to the consternation of all true Republicans, was a Republican himself until 1991 when he became governor under the auspices of "A Connecticut Party" (translation: "I Am My Own Party"). This was the man who became governor in no small part due to his bombastic statement that the imposition of a state income tax would be, "like pouring gasoline on the fire of recession." Liberal Lowell was elected, and the gasoline was poured.
Connecticut voters should have known better. After having had this clown as U. S. Senator for eighteen years, after which they finally replaced him with Sleepy Joe Lieberman, could they honestly have believed he could resist any opportunity to further tax an already overtaxed state? As predictably as the sunrise in the east, Liberal Lowell -- all 300 pounds of him -- made a run-and-dive for a state income tax as soon as he took office, and railroaded it through the legislature over the heated objections of the vast majority of Connecticut residents. Then, four years later, under no illusion that the voters would forgive this treachery, he declined to run for a second term, leaving his hapless lieutenant governor, Eunice Groark, to ride the sinking ship of A Connecticut Party to the bottom. His final coup-de-grace was to flee Connecticut for Virginia, thus escaping the very tax he himself had put in place.
Upon instituting The Tax, Liberal Lowell assured Connecticut that the tax would be in place for only three years. Three years later, The Tax was still in place, and Connecticut, unable to vent its frustration on Weicker himself, voted heavily against Eunice Groark, electing John G. Rowland governor in 1994. One of Rowland's campaign pledges was to phase out The Tax, and completely eliminate it in five years' time. Five years came and went, and The Tax remained. By 2002, tempers had cooled, resignation had set in, and Rowland, with the advantage of having an opponent so far left as to be considered extreme even by liberal Connecticut standards, was reelected to a third term.
In the meantime, Connecticut had regressed from having a record surplus to a record deficit, despite revenues collected not only from The Tax, but from a state lottery with all its ramifications, and from two Indian casinos regularly handing over a whopping 25 percent of their voluminous intake. Democrats licked their chops over the opportunity to hike the taxes, and Republicans decried the size and scope of state government. After many months of bickering, the compromise was finally reached: the taxes would be hiked, the spending would be cut, and nobody would be happy, but the state would be solvent -- for now, at least.
What Connecticut residents should realize by now is no such thing as a temporary tax. Once in place, a tax stays forever. The Rockies will crumble, Gibraltar will tumble, and the faces on Mount Rushmore will erode to nothingness before those taxes ever go away. For example, one federal tax was raised for the sole purpose of financing the Spanish-American War. That tax is still with us today, and we may rest assured that if Armageddon has not happened in the meantime our grandchildren's grandchildren will be paying that tax.
So it is, that now, in 2003, The Tax that was supposed to go away in 1994 is with us still, and will soon be higher and stronger than ever before. Thank you, Liberal Lowell, and all those state legislators who voted with you. As businesses and residents continue to exit this tax-greedy state, I hope you are all duly proud of what you have done.
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