CT takes $7000 per person in taxes-- and wants more

From the editorialists of the WSJ...

Connecticut grabs $7,007 in state and local taxes per man, woman and child resident, according to the Tax Foundation, more per capita than every state but New York and New Jersey. That's hardly the company any state would want to keep these days, but the politicians in Hartford seem intent on following Trenton and Albany off the tax-and-spend cliff.

This week Republican Governor Jodi Rell proposed a $1-billion-plus income tax hike, raising the top tax rate to 6.5% from 5% on individuals with incomes above $500,000 and couples with earnings above $1 million to close an expected two-year $8.5 billion budget deficit. The tax hike would be retroactive to January 1...

Given the size of its deficit, it's hard to believe that for 200 years Connecticut balanced its budget without any income tax and became the richest state in the bargain. That changed in 1991 when then-Governor Lowell Weicker pushed the state's first-ever personal income tax with a promise that the rate would remain flat at 4.5%. But the next time the state couldn't pay its bills, in 2001, the legislature raised Mr. Weicker's tax to 5%...

But why? Since the income tax became law, Connecticut has experienced a long, slow exodus of jobs and people. The Yankee Institute notes the astounding fact that since 1992, the year the income tax went into effect, businesses in Connecticut have hired a grand total of zero net new workers. This is while the nation added 22 million jobs and despite the Wall Street boom. As the tax burden has surged, the state lost population to other states (a net 113,000) in every year but one over the last decade.

What the income tax did stimulate was a spending binge and big pay raises for the state's unionized government workers. The year before the income tax was enacted, Connecticut's government expenditures per capita ranked right in the middle of all states; now it ranks in the top 10....

To revive growth and boost family incomes in Connecticut, Ms. Rell should be working to repeal the income tax, not expand it. It's a failed experiment that has mostly benefited the likes of Florida and Texas. Connecticut's saving economic grace in recent years has been that its political class is slightly less destructive than its Northeast neighbors, and that's not an advantage it can afford to give up...