After months of insisting that Connecticut’s budget gap be closed with cuts to basic services and regressive taxes, Gov. Jodi Rell announced yesterday a new willingness to consider a progressive income tax increase on the wealthy – a major goal of the Connecticut Working Families Party.
From the Courant:
In a sharp reversal from her stances since February, Rell would raise the state income tax to 6.5 percent on couples earning more than $1 million per year and individuals earning more than $500,000 per year. The current maximum rate is 5 percent.
It’s progress – but as Connecticut WFP’s Executive Director Jon Green points out, her budget proposal would still eliminate the state’s inherentance taxes on the wealthy and cut programs working families rely on:
“The public clearly supports making our taxes more progressive, and at long last Governor Rell is starting to move in that direction,” said Jon Green, the party’s director. “But it still is not defensible to demand deep service cuts in healthcare and education while safeguarding the inheritance of trust funders.”
In an op-ed in the Hartford Courant this Tuesday, Connecticut WFP’s Communications Director Joe Dinkin laid out the case for raising taxes on the rich:
When Wall Street was in trouble, taxpayers ponied up billions in bailout money to keep the financial sector from collapsing. Today, financial firms are giving out record bonuses to top executives. Andrew J. Hall, head of a Citigroup subsidiary located in Westport, is slated to get a bonus check for $100 million. Citigroup is currently 34 percent owned by U.S. taxpayers.
The new revenue generated for the state from this one bonus check — under the progressive income tax proposal passed by the legislature — would be about $2.5 million.
For Hall, a prolific art collector, that $2.5 million in new taxes might mean one less piece in his sculpture garden. But for Connecticut, it could mean much more.
In recent weeks, the Connecticut WFP has dogged the Republican Governor, dispatching “Billionaires for Budget Cuts” to satirically praise Gov. Rell for protecting the state’s wealthy at the expense of its working people. More here and catch the TV coverage below:
