Don Pesci: And now Conn. considers a wealth-repelling 'mansion tax'

The Branford House, in Groton, Conn., on the Avery Point campus of the University of Connecticut, which rents it out for events. Branford House was built in 1902 for Morton Freeman Plant, a local financier and philanthropist, as his summer home; he named it after his hometown of Branford, Conn. The house is on the National Register of Historic Places.

VERNON, Conn.

”There will be time, there will be time

To prepare a face to meet the faces that you meet.’’

– T.S. Eliot

Connecticut is running out of time to prepare a face to meet the faces it will meet. “The whole world is watching,’’ as kids in the Sixties used to say when, caught in the grip of an unwanted war, TV cameras showed them sticking flowers in the barrels of National Guard rifles warding them off .

Clever politicians may hide behind their own designer masks, but the face that Connecticut presents to the world and other states cannot be hidden. The question that politicians in Connecticut should be asking, and acting upon, is this one: What is the face that Connecticut has been presenting during the last few decades to revenue producers? Is it attracting or repelling the entrepreneurial capital that the state desperately needs to finance both its operations and its best prompting from the angels of its better nature?

Consider a recent story in a Hartford paper titled “Lamont tells Connecticut businesses he opposed ‘mansion tax.’” The mansion tax is the latest sunburst from Martin Looney, the most progressive president pro tem of the state Senate in Connecticut history.

The Looney state property tax would be levied on the assets of millionaires in Connecticut. The mansion tax, we are told in the story, will “funnel more money to municipal governments.… It will raise $73 million a year as part of a package to provide property-tax relief for cash-strapped communities like his hometown of New Haven.-

The quickest and most efficient way of shuttling money from state coffers to municipalities is to reduce any tax and allow people in municipalities to retain their own assets. Doing so would avoid the trip that a dollar makes from the municipality to the state and back again – minus administrative costs – to the municipality. But this method would short circuit the progressive afflatus and considerably reduce the political influence of progressive redistributors. One imagines Looney gagging on such a solution as being too simple, workable and efficient.

The new mansion tax drew an immediate response from millionaire Gov. Ned Lamont: “I don’t support it. I don’t think it’s going anywhere, and I don’t think we need it,” Lamont told “Chris DiPentima, president of the Connecticut Business & Industry Association” on a webcast conference call.

Lamont, we are told, issued his comment “a day after a public hearing among state legislators who called for a separate 5 percent surtax on capital gains, dividends and taxable interest.” In addition, the progressive legislators want to increase the personal-income-tax rate for earners making more than $500,000 a year and couples earning more than $1 million annually.

In addition, progressive lawmakers – nearly half the Democrat caucus in the General Assembly are progressives – “support reducing the Connecticut estate tax exemption of $2 million and [eliminating] the current cap on payments that would yield higher” revenue payments from millionaires in the state who foolishly decide to remain on the spot, there to be cudgeled and deprived of their assets by tax greedy progressives.

This concerted attack on wealth accumulation in Connecticut is designed, consciously or not, to drive creative revenue production out of the state the way St. Patrick once drove serpents out of Ireland and, in the long run, the effort will succeed. Millionaire snakes will slither out of Connecticut on their way to enrich competing states.

Seen from outside the state, what does the face of Connecticut look like?

Well, it is among the highest taxed states in the nation; business flight is rampant; out-of-state companies have gobbled up Connecticut home-grown companies, such as, United Technologies, now merged with Raytheon Technologies, based in Waltham, Mass.; Sikorsky, now owned by Lockheed Martin, headquartered in Bethesda, Md.; Aetna Insurance Company, now a subsidiary of CVS Health, which is based in Woonsocket, R.I.; Colt firearms, bought by the Ceska Zbrojovka Group, a Czech company; and it seems likely that The Hartford, a company that once insured Abe Lincoln’s home in Illinois, will in the near future be bought by Chubb, incorporated in Zürich, Switzerland. This is not a fetching portrait of Connecticut's face, but it is an accurate one.

This is not a fetching portrait of Connecticut's face, but it is an accurate one.

When the Coronavirus high tide recedes, very quickly now, it will leave on the shore the wreckage of Connecticut’s economy that had been apparent to everyone before the Wuhan, China, virus arrived in our state. Connecticut, if it is to remain competitive with other states, must address a legion of problems that cannot be settled by politicians more interested in saving their seats than their state. The state’s spending spree, unchecked since 1991, must be addressed. Taxes are too high, and politicians much too clever and committed, body and soul, to unchecked spending, neither of which advances the public good.

Don Pesci is a Vernon-based columnist.

The Thimbles

Looking toward the Thimble Islands from the mainland in Branford, Conn.

“….Situated in Long Island Sound,

Connecticut’s Smith Island is among that state’s famed Thimble

Islands, a cluster of landmasses named for the thimbleberry,

cousin to the black raspberry. During the Revolutionary War,

the Thimbles were deforested to rid the sound of hiding

places for British ships. …’’

— From “Hymn to Life,’’ by Timothy Donnelly

Information as edited from Wikipedia, a little bit of which may be outdated:

The inhabited Thimble Islands have a total of 81 houses: 14 islands have only one, one (Governor) has 14, (Money) has 32, and the rest have between two and six. The houses are built in a variety of styles, ranging from a 27-room  Tudor mansion, with tennis and basketball courts and a caretaker's residence on 7.75 acres, on Rogers Island, to small summer cottages built on stilts or small clusters of buildings connected by wooden footbridges. Some of the houses almost cover a small island, while Money Island, at 12 acres, has a village of 32 houses, a church and a post office building, concealed among tall trees. Some of the houses were once occupied year-long, but now are only used in the summer. Their exposure makes them dangerous places to be during hurricanes.

The exclusivity of the houses has made them expensive, thus dividing residents between local families who have owned their homes for generations, and more recent residents who tend to be rich.