Chris Powell: Smoke screen for other sales-tax increases; another police-pay scam

Sometimes trial balloons are meant to be shot down, which seems to be the case with the report that Connecticut Gov. Ned Lamont is considering repeal of the state sales-tax exemptions for groceries and medicine, necessities of life.

No tax policy could be more retrograde. But when this balloon is popped, as it surely will be, people may be less resentful about what follows from the governor on the sales tax -- a call to consider repealing some of its many other exemptions, which may cost nearly $3 billion every year.

Good arguments can be made for some exemptions, particularly when repealing an exemption may drive so much business out of state that tax receipts will fall instead of rise. But the decisive argument for some exemptions has been only that an influential special interest wanted it.

A comprehensive study of sales tax exemptions, often urged by former state Sen. Tony Guglielmo, R-Stafford, who just retired, should have been undertaken by the General Assembly long ago. It shouldn't have to wait another three weeks for the governor's budget. Legislators should get started on it now, while they're wasting their time on trivial legislative proposals.

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While it is impoverished and heavily dependent on state financial aid, Bridgeport managed the other day to pay its police chief, Armando Perez, $172,000 in vacation, personal, sick, holiday, and compensatory time accrued in his 28 years with the city's police department, money for which he no longer would qualify upon leaving the police union to become chief.

This accrual of time-off benefits is common in police departments and other government agencies in Connecticut and can amount to a second pension for people who already have pretty good first pensions from the government. It's a racket, and since municipal finance and state government finance are now so intertwined and so desperate, the practice should be ended by state law prohibiting accrual of more than a few months' worth of time-off benefits.

Police work is said to be stressful, but when an officer can go 28 years without fully using his ordinary time off and without becoming a physical and mental wreck, thereby amassing more savings just with accrued time off than ordinary taxpayers can amass from their full incomes in a lifetime, police work itself is a racket.

Where is the governor or state legislator with the courage to confront the police unions about this, thereby establishing that government in Connecticut isn't always a racket too?

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Two Republican state legislators, Reps. Fred Camillo of Greenwich and Brenda Kupchick of Fairfield, have joined Secretary of the State Denise Merrill, a Democrat, in proposing legislation to deny public access to voter registration information. The idea is to protect personal privacy.

But privacy can be achieved here only at the expense of making it impossible for people outside the government itself to detect election fraud, even as state government invites such fraud by issuing driver's licenses to illegal immigrants and New Haven city government invites it by issuing city identification cards to illegals. If the voter rolls weren't public, Connecticut last year might not have discovered that the Republican nominee for governor, political neophyte Bob Stefanowski, had never voted in the state he suddenly had presumed to run.

Voting requires assumption of a public office established by the state Constitution -- the office of elector. This much public identification is simply civic duty and should be sustained.

Chris Powell is a columnist for the Journal Inquirer, in Manchester, Conn.