Stefanowski: We’ll Never Tax Our Way To Prosperity

Connecticut is in dire financial straits thanks to bad policy and worse leadership. Voters in Connecticut have a real opportunity to elect a governor who will reverse course and steer our state back from the brink.

Polls currently show our traditionally blue state is a legitimate pickup opportunity for Republicans because of the failed tenure of America’s least popular governor, Democrat Dan Malloy. He has decimated our state’s economy and inspired an exodus of jobs and people from Connecticut. Startlingly, my opponent, Ned Lamont, has pledged to continue his failed policies.

Since the start of this race, I’ve kept a laser focus on Connecticut’s suffocating income tax. In fact, my economic plan would completely eliminate the state’s income tax over eight years. Lamont falsely claims that this would mean higher sales taxes, higher property taxes, less school funding, and/or other devastating hits to the state’s budget. He would rather balance the state’s budget by siphoning the money from individual citizens’ already tight budgets.

But Ned must have missed the econ class at Yale, where they taught that you cannot simply tax an economy into prosperity. To me, growing Connecticut’s economy is the key to creating prosperity and getting our state back on the right track.

States without income taxes — even excluding the two sparsely populated oil-producing states of Alaska and North Dakota — are in far better shape fiscally than ours. Connecticut cannot balance its budget on the backs of the unemployed, or those who are forced to pack up and leave our state.

Malloy has demonstrated for us that higher taxes result in slower growth, more poverty, business exodus and fiscal crisis. Connecticut has followed these policies since its income tax was adopted in 1991. It’s time to play the film backward.

It’s time to stop playing political games and look to the data for answers. When you compare the seven states with no tax on earned income versus Connecticut over the past 10 years, the results are astounding. Whether it be growth, net migration of taxpayers, employment growth, personal income growth, or gross state product growth — Connecticut has vastly underperformed these states in every single category. Will politicians ever realize what those of us in the private sector already know? If you tax something more, you will get less of it.

The lesson here really isn’t that difficult to understand. People don’t work to pay taxes; they work to earn an after-tax wage. Businesses don’t locate their plant facilities as a matter of social conscience, but to make an after-tax return for their shareholders. Connecticut’s sky-high taxes really do matter, no matter what Lamont says.

And instead of dealing with the problem, Lamont wants to double down on Malloy’s failed strategy and raise taxes yet again on the hardworking people of our state. Never mind the fact that we are now doing worse in every measure of a state’s economic performance than Texas, Florida, Nevada, Tennessee, South Dakota, Washington state and New Hampshire — each of which has no income tax.

Maybe there’s a lesson here. As Jack Kemp used to say, “You can’t love jobs and hate job creators.” Voters in Connecticut are fed up with bad leadership and worse math. I am running to bring our economy back from the dead, and to restore Connecticut to prosperity. We have a real opportunity to do just that in November.

Bob Stefanowski is the Republican nominee for governor of Connecticut. He wrote this for the Washington Examiner, where it first appeared.