Dems must defend record
Last year marked the ninth consecutive year that Connecticut lost residents to other states as another 30,000 people became exNutmeggers. It was among the highest total for a single year over the last decade.
That should tell the politicians in charge at the Capitol, meaning Democrats, a lot about what they have been doing to this state. The oneparty majority they have enjoyed since 2010 has wreaked havoc on our state’s finances and the people who work for a living or now want to retire understand this.
We have endured neverending tax increases, in 2011, 2015 and 2019, jobkilling policies such as mandatory payroll taxes on all nonunion workers so someone else does not have to go to work, the Family and Medical Leave act, and minimum wage hikes as far as the eye can see.
Their budget that passed without a single Republican vote in June also included a hidden tax on most items bought in groceries. When this was pointed out by Republicans prior to the new tax taking effect Oct. 1, Democrats panicked and the Lamont administration came up with a flimsy bureaucratic definition that disabled the tax, at least temporarily.
But to hear them tell it, it is somehow incumbent upon Republicans to now join the majority party to promote policies that we don’t support. My colleague and good friend state Rep. Jason Rojas on these pages recently lamented that Republicans have declined to go along with the Democrat agenda. Over the last decade the majority party has dismissed our budgets and policy proposals and that only resulted in more deficits and then higher taxes.
We did come together in bipartisan fashion in 2017 when Democrats failed to come up with even one budget proposal and ultimately passed a notax hike plan, which also included an elimination of the income tax on pensions and social security. When the Democrats expanded their majority following the 2018 elections, they promptly went about undoing as much of that bipartisan agreement as they could and enacted more tax hikes.
The Democrats have not only failed the people of Connecticut with their policies, they are lousy at math. They now have comfortable margins in both the House and Senate and they occupy the governor’s residence. They have the ability to push through their agenda, and they have decided to do so without input from the Republicans.
But Democrats now find themselves at another critical juncture. Their governor has made the installation of tolls on Connecticut bridges and roadways the lynch pin of his overall transportation plan. Public opinion polls show most residents of Connecticut don’t support the concept of adding hundreds of millions more in annual taxes on motorists.
The original toll plan was rolled out in February and was a disaster for the Democrats and was scrapped because they could not muster the votes for it. Gov. Ned Lamont has promised a revised version.
House Republicans have made our opposition to tolls quite clear, have offered alternatives in the past and are poised to once again to address our infrastructure needs into the future.
We don’t need to hear more civics lectures from our elected leaders. We do need to examine the reasons why our neighbors and friends continue to head for the exits and translate that into public policies to make it easier for them to stay, and until the Democrats begin to listen to the plight of the working class, the exodus will continue.