Connecticut may be one of America’s wealthiest states, but its economy is actually limping along, with weak growth on the horizon. The state ranks near the bottom by many economic-outlook and business-climate metrics. Governor Dannel Malloy and the Democratic-controlled legislature have a predictable solution: $1.1 billion in new taxes, including as much as $700 million in new levies on businesses. Lawmakers rammed through a nearly $40 billion two-year budget on a mostly party-line vote only minutes before midnight Wednesday.
But it wasn’t for lack of effort by saner members of the state — including one conservative with a particularly prominent platform, MSNBC’s Joe Scarborough.
State governance issues don’t usually get much attention, but over the last week, Scarborough, who lives in Fairfield County, in the southwest-corner of the state, has repeatedly brought up the tax increases on Morning Joe, offering a dose of red-state economic common sense to hundreds of thousands of cable viewers.
https://youtube.com/watch?v=Dadxy8JigzA
He does have at least a few friends in state politics — state Senator Joe Markley, a Republican from Southington, agrees that Connecticut has a serious, worsening problem. Twenty-five years of tax increases and inexorable government growth have destroyed “one of the country’s great manufacturing bases,” he says. Governor Malloy and the Democrats “philosophically don’t understand” what is causing the statewide economic malaise, Markley tells National Review. The governor’s idea of a pro-growth strategy is to “bribe business to stay.”
In contrast, Scarborough notes, states such as South Carolina are “obsessed” with attracting new businesses with low taxes and a reasonable regulatory environment. The most recent ALEC-Laffer State Economic Competitiveness Index ranks Connecticut 45th in economic performance and 47th in economic outlook — before Governor Malloy reneged on his reelection pledge that “there won’t be a tax increase” or a budget deficit.
Connecticut’s problems and nearby states’ successes call to mind Milton Friedman’s test case between the performance of free-market West Germany and socialist East Germany.
Connecticut’s problems and nearby states’ successes call to mind Milton Friedman’s test case between the performance of free-market West Germany and socialist East Germany, Scarborough says, although he notes the situation is far less dramatic here. In New England, low-tax New Hampshire has vastly outperformed high-tax Connecticut over recent years.
Markley puts it rather more bluntly: “The economy stinks and we spend too much.” The senator traces the state’s economic decline on the passage of a state income tax in 1991 — under Governor Lowell P. Weicker Jr., a liberal Republican who eventually left the party.
“We are the example of what you get with big government,” Markley says. And when tax and spend doesn’t work, the Left thinks the “answer is to try a bigger dose.”
Markley was straightforward about the path to saving the Constitution State: The “only way forward is to win elections,” he says.
Is Morning Joe’s Scarborough part of the answer? He says he’s not interested in a return to politics. “I have a national platform here, where I can speak on these issues,” Scarborough says.
The successful MSNBC host has, however, often alluded to an interest in returning to politics generally. If Connecticut is going to be rescued from the machinations of clueless Democrats such as Malloy, someone will need to step up.
— Mark Antonio Wright is an intern at National Review.