Mosquitos suck blood, Dems hike taxes

As the Democratic caucus of the state House of Representatives finally proposed a state budget with tax increases last week, the majority leader, state Rep. Matthew Ritter, D-Hartford, said apologetically, “Raising revenue is always a last resort.”

Mosquitos suck blood as a “last resort” too. That is, they do it only when they are hungry. It’s just as much consolation as Ritter offered.

But maybe Connecticut should be grateful that the tax increases proposed by the House Democrats are not as large as the record-breakers they enacted with Gov. Dannel P. Malloy in 2011 and 2015.

The House Democrats would raise the sales tax by half a point, from 6.35 to 6.85 percent, drawing nearer to the 8 percent level that was in force when the state income tax was enacted in 1991 on the premise that it would push the sales tax way down forever.

The House Democrats would authorize municipalities to impose their own 1-percent sales tax on restaurant meals and hotel stays.

The House Democrats would divert more school aid from normal towns to the poverty factories of Connecticut’s cities, if not as much as the governor has threatened to divert.

And while they pose as the party of progressive taxation, the House Democrats also propose to exempt Social Security income from the state income tax as of 2020. But low incomes are already exempt from the state income tax, so this proposal is just a cynical and empty bid for the votes of higher-income old folks, leaving plenty of time for it to be canceled if the state keeps declining, as it probably will.

As the House Democrats unveiled their budget, the governor was planning to reallocate municipal aid according to the solvency of municipalities. Cities and towns with good financial reserves would be punished with aid reductions, while those that are broke because they have been incompetent or corrupt would get more money.

Adjusting municipal aid this way would, in effect, force competent towns to reimburse Hartford for spending $80 million on a minor league baseball stadium even as the city was approaching bankruptcy and failing to maintain its schools. One word from the governor — a threat to deduct from state aid to the city whatever it spent on the stadium — could have averted that abomination. But Hartford produces big Democratic pluralities in state elections, so the governor wants to make the suburbs pay for the stadium instead. Maybe they’ll grow to like minor-league baseball.

House Speaker Joe Aresimowicz says the objective of the tax increases proposed by the House Democrats is to maintain state aid to local schools and thus their quality. Apparently it will be just a coincidence if the tax increases protect members of teacher unions against having to make concessions in wages and benefits as cities and towns run short of money, just as members of the state employee unions recently were guaranteed their jobs and compensation for four years as state government ran short of money, just as it is apparently a coincidence that the two groups form the base of the Democratic Party.

Malloy says he is against raising the sales tax as the House Democrats propose. Instead he wants to charge cities and towns $400 million each year to make them underwrite a third of the state teacher pension fund. Such a charge would cause municipalities to lay off teachers, reduce their compensation, or — the most likely option — raise property taxes.

So it seems that one way or another, as long as the Democrats are in power, taxes in Connecticut will keep going up — if always as a “last resort.”