Tax returns matter with tax policy at stake
A person who has the drive and the stamina to want to govern a state for four years must first have the intestinal fortitude and honesty to show his or her hand. If not, people will ask: What is it they don’t want voters to know?
A candidate who expects to win the public’s trust must earn it. Stalling or refusing to reveal federal and state income tax returns is one way to warn voters that openness and accountability are not part of the platform.
In this year’s race for governor of Connecticut, there is another powerful reason to show voters the money. Pressure is building for tax reform as a longterm correction to the state’s endemic revenue and spending imbalance, and voters need to know how the candidates’ own interests shape up before deciding who will look out for theirs. Officeholders are apt to protect their own interests and those of the donors who got them elected. That’s the American and the Connecticut way, however much campaign finance laws tried to balance it out.
The Day urges the major gubernatorial candidates, Democrats Ned Lamont and Republican Bob Stefanowski, to release their most recent returns early in the campaign. Their respective running mates, Susan Bysiewicz and Joe Markley, should do the same — not only federal but state returns, so voters can compare their own tax support of the state budget to that of the people who want to be entrusted with it.
On Friday the campaign manager for Oz Griebel and Monte Frank, an independent ticket for governor and lieutenant governor, told us they would gather up and release the tax information upon request. We’ve made the request.
Seeing the tax returns is especially critical in a campaign like this one, between major party candidates of way-above-average wealth who have been paying for substantial amounts of their own races. In Connecticut, the governor and lieutenant governor are elected as a unit. This year, neither party’s ticket is being publicly funded under the state’s Citizens’ Election Program option.
Lamont has released his tax information before. In his 2006 senatorial campaign against incumbent Joe Lieberman, he made the information public after Lieberman challenged him in a televised debate to do so. He spent $17 million of his own money before losing the election in a three-way race with Lieberman running as an independent.
Four years ago this week, as he campaigned for re-election, Gov. Dan Malloy released the top two pages apiece of four annual tax returns. Republican challenger Tom Foley, who spent $11 million of his own money to finance his 2010 run against Malloy, but used public funding in their 2014 rematch, released his as well, even though he must have anticipated the outcry over a multimillionaire paying $673 in federal income tax. Once the cat is out of the cash bag, financial privacy is over. The price of running for office is not only monetary.
Stefanowski, who took a nontraditional route to the Republican nomination, avoiding a convention fight and winning in a five-way primary, spent $2.3 million of his own money to do it. He is now raising money while campaigning on a promise to do away with the state income tax over a couple of terms in office, with the strategy that lower taxes will free more cash for commerce and development. He proposes a Trumpian model which, if applied across all income levels, frees up the most money for those making the most to begin with. So far, on a national basis, there has been scant trickledown as corporations use their newfound cash for other than wage increases. Steelworkers, for example, are expecting to strike because they are not seeing appreciable pay raises from the money the Trump tariffs are making for their employers.
Earlier this year the bipartisan Connecticut Commission on Fiscal Stability and Economic Growth, created by the legislature, released its report on the state’s fiscal instability and lagging growth, including concrete suggestions for reforming taxation. Like Stefanowski, they would modify the income tax, and like him they would make sizable spending cuts. Like Lamont, they would collect highway tolls. New taxes and raised taxes, such as the sales tax, would be inevitable. Property taxes and the manageability of small town budgets are a giant question mark.
Neither the Lamont nor the Stefanowski campaigns responded to The Day’s query of whether the candidates plan to release their tax returns. Perhaps that means they were hoping no one would ask, so they could skip that step.
That would give a bad signal to voters. A person who has the drive and the stamina to want to govern a state for four years must first have the intestinal fortitude and honesty to show his or her hand. If not, people will ask: What is it they don’t want voters to know?