A Business Group for Lower Taxes? In Connecticut?

January 22, 2009

There’s not much capitalism left in Connecticut. The local-state-federal tax burden is the highest in the land, healthcare providers are being micromanaged into nonexistence, zoning regulations are excessive, NIMBY hysteria is epidemic, and whacked-out environmentalism has sent the cost of energy skyrocketing.

And the state’s “business” lobby is a major contributor to these problems.

It’s an assertion that must sound crazy to some, but look at the record. Chambers of commerce and the Connecticut Business & Industry Association consistently support politicians and policies that encourage jobs and investment to flee the state.

At the local level, chambers usually endorse “yes” votes on big-spending municipal budgets, as well as unaffordable government-school construction projects. Sucking up to area elected officials, no matter how often they embrace higher taxes and new expenditures, is standard procedure.

Regional chambers are even worse. A serial offender is the Middlesex County Chamber of Commerce. The organization’s president, retired educrat Larry McHugh, is a reliable toady for the state’s anti-free enterprise establishment. McHugh heaps effusive praise on lefty pols -- including Chris Dodd (“a great man, a great friend and a great leader … Middlesex County is proud to have [him] representing us each day in our nation’s capitol”), Joe Lieberman (“we should be celebrating [him]”), and Jodi Rell (“a person who is committed to every citizen in Connecticut”). In 2005, U.S. Rep. Rosa DeLauro, the New Haven Democrat who’s as committed as anyone in D.C. to making life miserable for businesses, was a “guest of honor” at a chamber breakfast.

If there’s a dunderheaded policy being proposed in southwestern Connecticut, the Business Council of Fairfield County is probably behind it. Unwise “investment” in government-run trains and buses is an idée fixe -- the council works with the eco-loon Connecticut Fund for the Environment to push expansions of “mass” transit.

As for revenue, Joseph McGee, a former “economic development” official under Lowell Weicker now serving as the council’s vice president for public policy and programs, has called the 1991 adoption of Connecticut’s income tax “on balance, a terrific thing.” (Hiking the tax’s rate is cool with McGee, too. The millionaire’s tax “is not a bad thing to do, we can increase the upper rate, it’s not a killer, as long as it’s done reasonably.”)

CBIA completes the set of Connecticut’s deeply delusional “business” organizations. “Affordable” housing? “Smart” growth? Preschool? CBIA champions those liberal causes, and more. The group was a major booster of the income tax in 1991, and defends it to this day. (In 2004, a CBIA nitwit claimed “people who were fiscally conservative” favored creation of the tax, that it made the state “more economically competitive” and was a necessary tool to “fix our budget problem.”)

With “friends” like these, what’s a Connecticut business owner to do?

That’s easy. Join the Nutmeg State’s chapter of the National Federation of Independent Business.

NFIB is one of the nation’s leading advocates for the free market. Its focus is on small business -- publicly traded corporations are not allowed to join -- and it doesn’t collaborate with power-mad pols and activists.

The Connecticut chapter’s legislative agenda is a dream come true for long-suffering entrepreneurs. NFIB wants to repeal the business-entity tax. It works to block expansion of socialized healthcare. It fights “captive audience” legislation, and seeks the passage of medical-malpractice reforms. Andrew Markowski, the group’s state director, is making a name for himself in Hartford by representing his members’ thirst for lower taxes and less government intrusion. In 2008, he was one of the few lobbyists brave enough to speak out against the latest job-killing hike of the state’s minimum wage.

“Small business is the economic engine that drives the state,” says Markowski, and the data back him up. Connecticut’s large companies are pruning jobs, while workplaces with fewer than 20 employees now make up a whopping 71.5 percent of all establishments in the state. Connecticut’s “nonemployers,” the term federal researchers use to describe sole proprietors with no staff, now top 250,000.

As The Wall Street Journal’s Stephen Moore observed in 2007, “thanks to an astonishing political transformation, many chambers of commerce on the state and local level … [are] becoming, in effect, lobbyists for big government.”

In Connecticut, that transformation began long ago. The glad-handing numskulls who run the state’s traditional “business” organizations have no understanding of the challenges faced by men and women who struggle to satisfy customers’ desires in an outrageously high-cost state.

Today, the only voice still willing to defend free enterprise is the state’s NFIB chapter. It deserves the support of every Connecticut entrepreneur.

D. Dowd Muska is a writer, commentator and lecturer. His website is www.dowdmuska.com.

# # # # #