No income tax? No thanks

When I moved to Connecticut in 1986, my new boss assured me that while I wouldn’t get rich on my salary, the state didn’t have a personal income tax, so that meant a little extra money in my pocket.

I thought I’d misheard her. I was moving from Kansas, where the state income tax was decades old. My state of origin instituted a personal income tax in the 1840s and reinstituted it during the the Civil War. Paying a personal income tax was all I’d ever known, and I wondered how Connecticut paid for, well, everything without those funds coming in.

As it turns out, Connecticut wasn’t paying for, well, everything, and just a few years later, the state — along with the rest of the country — was in crisis. Nationally, the early ’90s recession tanked the stock market and pushed the unemployment rate up over 7 percent. Hardest hit were white-collar workers in finance, insurance and the real estate industry. Though the recession was over in about eight months, the economic doldrums helped squash George H.W. Bush’s 1992 bid for re-election.

Enter Gov. Lowell P. Weicker Jr., who had been Connecticut’s Republican U.S. senator. After winning the gubernatorial election as the head of his own independent party, Weicker knew it was political suicide to suggest a state income tax, but he did so anyway. Opposition to a personal income tax was something the state’s major parties agreed on, so the outcry was full-throated and bipartisan.

For his efforts, Weicker was compared to Adolf Hitler and hung in effigy at the Capitol, a short walk from my Hartford office. It was the first time I’d ever been surprised at people’s politics. How did those tens of thousands of protesters in Hartford think their roads were paved?

That’s not to say our tax system is without flaws. It needs an overhaul. The rich don’t pay enough (and if you’re rich and want to argue, I have all the time in the world, and if you’re not rich and want to argue, let the rich folks argue for themselves).

In Connecticut, lower-income and middle-income families are carrying the water for their rich neighbors, according to a February study — the first of its kind since 2014 — from the state Department of Revenue Services. The study looked at 2019 numbers and found that lower-income groups “bear a greater relative tax burden” than do higher-income groups.

Nationally, it’s mind-boggling just how little some ultra-wealthy people pay in taxes, and while we work our way out of the pandemic economy, families who were struggling already are now officially in crisis mode.

“Tax” is so often accompanied by “burden” and “break” that we’ve come to think of it as a bad thing. “Tax” is the gubmint taking my rightfully earned money, rather than “tax” is the price you pay for a civilized society, and thank you Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes for that saying. “Tax” has become an entity unto itself, to be avoided at all costs. One recent example? I appreciate the state cutting 25 cents off the gas tax, but I’d prefer we talk about the record profits recently posted by oil companies (following losses earlier in the pandemic). But no. Cut taxes and the people will cheer.

Of course, we should always give a rigorous review of how our taxes are spent, but from where I sit in the padded chairs of the middle class, I believe paying taxes is my way of creating a world where people don’t die on the streets, where children are educated, where people who need it get help. When I hear a candidate promise to cut taxes, I don’t hear “Cool! More money for me!” I hear school lunches not being funded, farmers not being subsidized and small-business owners not getting loans because there just isn’t the money for that.

Charity can only take us so far. Of all our societal institutions, only the government is big enough to do the heavy lifting.

I know it’s not popular to be OK with paying taxes (especially not where I’m from), and my taxes have often gone for things I didn’t support (most wars), but even during the most corrupt of administrations (TFG comes to mind), I never thought to skip paying. That’s not part of the deal.

I also know the chattering class doesn’t like phrases such as “the collective,” but I was trained in a hard pew to think about the all of us, as a group. If you cut my taxes, and I get, say, $54 more in my weekly paycheck, guess what I’ll spend it on? Something from Amazon, most likely. But my $54 and your $54 add up to something worthwhile, because we pooled our money and shared. Managed properly, that will hire and retain the teacher who encourages your fifth-grader and the municipal worker who takes your trash. It will plant flowers in the town parks and fund the baseball programs there, too. It will make sure your elderly loved one has a dignified old age and your 3-yearold has a library in which to start a lifetime of learning.

And no, this isn’t me being virtuous. This is me being practical. I like paved roads and welleducated children. Don’t we all?

Susan Campbell is the author of “Frog Hollow: Stories from an American Neighborhood,” “Tempest-Tossed: The Spirit of Isabella Beecher Hooker” and “Dating Jesus: A Story of Fundamentalism, Feminism and the American Girl.” She is Distinguished Lecturer at the University of New Haven, where she teaches journalism.