Guardrails For Surpluses

Sen. Gordon

State Senator Jeffrey Gordon’s Senate Bill SB128 should generate some interest in Connecticut among state politicians who have said repeatedly they are interested in positioning Connecticut as a business generator in New England.

Among politicians interested in repositioning Connecticut so that in the post-COVID era the state will be friendlier to businesses, as well as taxpayers whose own household budgets have been depleted and stressed by a raging recession, is Governor Ned Lamont.

Following the recently concluded off-presidential-year elections, Lamont pledged to reduce taxes and maintain what he calls “guardrails” erected with the help of GOP leaders a few years back when the State House was nearly evenly divided between Democrats and Republicans. A bipartisan House had put caps on the state budget that in the future now upon us would prevent a spendthrift legislature from using state surpluses to increase long term spending.

The guardrails were a welcomed acknowledgement that increases in spending always lead, when surpluses are spent down, to higher debt and higher taxes. Part of Connecticut’s obscene surplus, about $4 billion, is due to transfers from a tax bloated federal government whose spending in the last two years has been highly inflationary.  

As always, Massachusetts is several steps ahead of Connecticut.

Section 3 of the General Laws of Massachusetts, which sets parameters for state surpluses, reads: “Limitation on growth of allowable state tax revenues. Except as otherwise specifically provided herein, the governor and the general court in exercising their respective constitutional and statutory duties shall endeavor in each fiscal year to establish and approve a budget for the Commonwealth and set rates of taxation for the citizens of the Commonwealth such that net state tax revenues for said fiscal year shall not exceed allowable state tax revenues for said fiscal year (emphasis mine).”

The law respecting taxpayer refunds, Chapter 62F, enacted by voters in 1986, sends to the citizens of Massachusetts and businesses, both in and out of the state, the following clarion message: The state of Massachusetts recognizes the elementary connection between getting and spending. The more tax money the state receives, the more tax money money the state has at its disposal to spend, and spending without borders creates, in the long run and by a circuitous route, a prosperity deficit in the general community.

The state of Massachusetts also recognizes that state surpluses represent a total amount of unnecessary taxation, and Boston is, after all, the town that tossed tea in a harbor because Sam Adams realized that the tax on tea was an unnecessary and punitive act by a royal authority that had deprived Americans across the pond of their God given rights as British subjects to pursue “happiness,” understood by Adams and others in the 18th century as the right to hold, own and dispose of personal property.

The phrase “pursuit of happiness” in the Declaration of Independence probably came to Jefferson by way of John Locke who in 1690 wrote in one of his essays, "The necessity of pursuing happiness is the foundation of liberty."

Jefferson drew upon the Virginia Declaration of Rights when he penned the Declaration of Independence: The Virginia Declaration reads: “That all men are by nature equally free and independent and have certain inherent rights, of which, when they enter into a state of society, they cannot, by any compact, deprive or divest their posterity; namely, the enjoyment of life and liberty, with the means of acquiring and possessing property, and pursuing and obtaining happiness and safety.”

Taxation, when it is unnecessary, is a theft of property. Inflation is a hidden tax, all the more insidious for being hidden. The chief purpose of government is to secure the safety, liberty and general well-being of the citizenry – not the convenience of politicians who are sworn to secure property rights.

Gordon’s Senate Bill SB128 is a necessary guardrail that will, if passed, trim the unsettling appetite for reckless spending in Connecticut, secure for the citizenry their imprescriptible rights to enjoy and dispose of their own property as best suits them, make Connecticut once again a safe space for business opportunity, and give the state an advantage over other Northeastern states that have thwarted the benefits of a free market unencumbered by unnecessary taxes and job killing regulations.