Terry Cowgill lives in Lakeville, blogs at ctdevilsadvocate.com and is news editor of The Berkshire Record in Great Barrington, Mass. Follow him on Twitter @terrycowgill.
It would be funny if it weren’t such a travesty. In order to appease taxpayers, lawmakers reluctantly agree to limits on revenue or spending. Then they while away the ensuing years trying to avoid the very limits they supported.
Such is the case with Connecticut’s constitutional spending cap. Enacted by both the General Assembly in 1991 and ratified by voters in a constitutional amendment the following year, the cap was clearly designed to mollify taxpayers who were incensed at then-Gov. Lowell Weicker’s advocacy for the state’s first-ever income tax. Indeed, some 30,000 protesters came to Hartford. Some of them hanged Weicker in effigy and spat upon him.
If they were to keep the income tax, Weicker and his allies realized they needed to do something to appease the masses who were angry at Weicker for breaking his campaign promise not to enact an income tax (Weicker said it “would be like pouring gasoline on a fire”). The idea was to limit spending increases to personal income growth over the last five years or the inflation rate for the preceding 12 months, whichever is greatest.
See the complete story at CT News Junkie.
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