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Some underrepresented conservatives and libertarians in Connecticut were buoyed, momentarily, by the neo-progressive resistance to President Donald Trump’s tariff initiative.
A tariff is a tax, a political charge on incoming goods, said the anti-Trump chorus, and taxes raise the price of goods for middle class Americans and the American poor. This refreshing honesty burst several neo-progressive bubbles.
There is no essential difference between a tariff and a corporate tax. As a political Gertrude Stein mighty put it: “A tax, is a tax, is a tax,” and what can be said of tariffs may also justly be said of corporate taxes, or indeed any other taxes.
Corporations are not tax payers; they are tax collectors. A “fair” corporate tax is charged upon a company by a government; the company then collects the tax in the form of a higher price for its goods or services, shuttles the tax to the government’s receivables, and then uses the price difference to defray its tax costs. The customer pays the tax, the corporation acts as a tax collector, and the customer is largely a middle class tax payer. Everyone knows this, except for “suckers born every minute” who fall for absurd political lines with hooks attached issued by neo-progressive politicians, most of whom are recent graduates of Karl Marx University.
So then, hearing this sunburst from neo-progressives in Connecticut – tariff taxes are bad because they fall most heavily upon the middle class – right of center conservatives and Milton Friedman libertarians welcomed the adjustment in thinking. Finally, they got it right. But, of course, they were disappointed upon hearing prominent neo-progressive legislators agitate for higher taxes on Connecticut’s redundantly rich billionaires who, neo-progressives tell us, are failing to pay their “fair share” of taxes.
We are to understand that Connecticut’s two neo-progressive Achilles – President Pro-Tem of the state Senate Martin Looney and Majority Leader Bob Duff – would retire to their tents if only adjustments were made in the state’s pension guidelines or spending caps so as to allow state employee union captured neo-progressives to increase spending. The tax haul, it has been intimated, will be paid by the state’s (17) billionaires, most of whom are living in splendor in Greenwich or Connecticut’s “Gold Coast. Some Connecticut billionaires, objecting to the fleecing and seeing no attempts reduce long-term spending, already have moved to other less predatory states.
Socialist U.S. Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont now refuses to chastise redundantly wealthy “millionaires” because he has become a millionaire, but he and U.S. Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (AOC ) of New York, in the midst of an anti-oligarchy tour, are still tanning the fannies of billionaires. Envy, religionists tell us, is one of the seven deadly sins, and tax greed on the part of politicians is another.
Here is neo-progressive Democrat President Pro Tem of Connecticut’s Senate Martin Looney, the Bernie Sanders of Connecticut, declaiming against the nation’s billionaires: “Under the last Trump administration, Connecticut’s top 1% saved $1.2 billion in federal taxes, while working families saw crumbs. If Washington insists on handing billionaires another tax break, we will ensure some of that windfall comes back to the people of Connecticut to help deal with the massive federal cuts we anticipate.”
Looney has not told us that the most effective way to assure that burdensome middle class taxes should be reduced is to cut spending and taxes. That is the whole point of spending caps.
Here is some eye-popping data provided by a Hartford Courant reporter: “Recent statistics from Lamont’s budget office show that the top 2.5% of tax filers paid 41% of the state income tax in 2022. At the other end, the bottom 49% of filers — representing essentially half of filers statewide — paid only 2.9% of the income tax… Less than 3% of the state income tax is paid by 830,000 filers who are earning less than $50,000 per year in adjusted gross income — for both singles and couples filing jointly. Filers earning more than $100,000 per year pay 85% of the income tax, while those under $100,000, representing 72% of filers, pay the remaining 15%, according to the statistics.”
It would be difficult to overestimate the progressive nature of Connecticut’s tax structure. The statistics are telling, but they are wasted on Looney. The state’s rich already pay 85% of the income tax, while the poor pay less than 3%, according to Lamont’s budget office. What percent of total income taxes paid by the rich will Looney consider “a fair share?”
Neo-progressives like Looney are well aware that there are two ways to discharge the state’s gigantic $88.3 billion accumulated debt: either by raising taxes or by cutting spending. For neo-progressives, both options are forbidding. If you raise taxes, you lose the middle-class tax paying vote. If, on the other hand, you cut spending, you will lose the votes of tax consumers who pay relatively little in taxes. That is why in Connecticut, under the stewardship of neo-progressive state Democrats, “spending” is so little mentioned in our media. The word “spending” has become the political sin that dare not speak its name.
