Ingratitude of Conn.’s wealthy

The News-Times editorial (“Don’t do this to the rich”) for April 29 is the sorriest piece of cultural obscurant I’ve seen in a long life. It pleads for sparing the rich on the basis they pay so much already they might leave the state. “Many” of them did. Many, it seems, “being at least four.” Billionaires that is. It’s not actually clear how many.

Let’s question who these people were? The claim appears to be based on the tax years from 1992 to 2018 when the rate became 4.5 percent, then went up to 6.99 percent. The extra 2.49 percent seems to have done it. An increase for everybody and the rich just couldn’t take it? Really? So they pulled up their lives, disoriented their families, transported their well-to-do belongings, gyrating off to the no-tax-state of Florida with their $13 billion. Other places for $7 billion. How constrained their lives must have been here.

So though making their super abundant wealth while in Connecticut they could not live with paying back a small portion of their good fortune. Thus the ingratitude. At least the editorial didn’t pull out the old nugget of how they “earned” their wealth when undoubtedly they only aggregated it from the work of millions, some of whom actually made it possible by inventing the means.

Why risk losing any more of our millionaire/billionaires? It’s a good question brought on by too narrow a focus omitting the wider nation’s tax distortions. The solution requires substituting separate state tax contraptions by a federal levy rebated to the states according to their separate needs of poverty, health, education, resources and jobs. Grants that recognize the sucking sound and size of the steal and level the reality of the wealth displacement. What could be more reciprocal? e pluribus unum, reversed.

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