NYT: Connecticut Restores Estate Tax in Move to Balance Budget

[RamboLiberal]

http://www.nytimes.com/2005/06/08/nyregion/08budget.html?pagewanted=print

The State Senate gave final approval on Tuesday to a two-year, $31-billion budget that increases funds for health care, education and other social services in part by restoring an estate tax, a move that frustrated Republican lawmakers and runs counter to political pressures in Washington.

Gov. M. Jodi Rell, a Republican, agreed to the estate tax during negotiations early on Saturday, a concession to the Democratic-controlled legislature, which virtually assured swift passage of her first budget since she took office last July.

While Republicans criticized the new tax and voted almost uniformly against the budget, aides to Mrs. Rell defended the measure as a palatable alternative to the Democrats' proposed "millionaires' tax," which would have increased income taxes for wealthy residents. They also said Connecticut was acting in keeping with other states struggling to offset revenue lost because of changes in federal tax policy.

"Our thought was that this was the way states were going," Robert L. Genuario, the secretary of the Office of Policy and Management and the governor's chief budget writer, said on Saturday after a long night of negotiations.

[UpInArms]

1. good for Connecticut!

It's about freakin' time someone ran with this - just because idiotson doesn't understand the simplest math test (2 + 2 = 4), doesn't mean that the entire country should dive into the bowels of the toilet.

[Old and In the Way]

2. Good for them.

When a rich relative passed away 10 years back, our family paid huge estate taxes. Didn't bother any of us because:

(1) We didn't earn it.
(2) We understood the value of taxes to support a progressive society.

It's the greedy "I got mine, screw everyone else" thinking of Bush-Republicanism that will kill this country. And once the Golden Goose dies, there won't be any more eggs being laid.

[Redstone]

3. But they didn't pass the "millionaire tax,"

because the Rupublican asshholes ACTUALLY CLAIMED that if the State taxes for people who makes over a million bucks a year NOT, mind you, someone with a million bux of net worth--let me repeat it, makes over a million dollars a year would move out of Connecticut in droves if their State taxes went up by two thousand dollars a year!

I shit you not. They really claimed that. I can't offer any further comment, because just thinking about it makes me nauseous.

Redstone

[mbperrin]

5. I can believe it! In the 50s here in west Texas,

every time someone wanted to raise taxes on oil companies to buy like school libraries or air conditioning or musical instruments, their representative would scream about them just picking up their oil wells and leaving!

It worked; we had some of the worst-equipped schools anywhere...I was in elementary school then and wondered, HOW will they move those wells?

Course now that most of the oil is gone, the taxpayers are left to clean up their huge messes, never mind those "mysterious" sinkholes that are now appearing all over west Texas..

Ah well, like my grandma said, "Poor people have poor ways, rich ones have mean ones."

[gtar100]

6. It's all in how the message is presented to the public

Your post brings out that this article doesn't give all the necessary facts. I learn so much more from reading all the various viewpoints on these blogs than if I just read the initial article. How much space would it have taken to say what you just said - that the proposed increase in taxes, that the republicans opposed, would have have increased taxes by $2,000 on incomes over a million dollars. If that's factual, that gives a whole new perspective on the issue that unfortunately most people just won't know - instead they're stuck with the spin. This happens in just about every article or news segment in the MSM and little by little it has completely distorted perceptions in the masses.

Thanks for letting us know. Keep on rolling...this is a minor victory for social equity. More will follow.

[DeepModem Mom]

4. They're not calling it the "death tax"? Alert Rove and Frank Luntz. nt

[gtar100]

8. I'm sure they're on it.

x(

[Hobarticus]

7. State's rights, baby...the fed can sod off

After all, Repugs are all about state's rights.