When Gov. M. Jodi Rell was still lieutenant governor, one of her chores was to stand around on street corners in Fairfield County, attempting to sell Hartford Whalers hockey tickets. The Greenwich investment bankers would respond, “Hartford? Hartford? Where is that? Like, that’s in Canada, right?”
When I moved to Hartford many years ago, my parents urged me to visit some old family friends who happened to live in Westport. This well-educated, professional couple told me all about New York, especially New York City. Connecticut? They sort-of-knew that Connecticut’s governor at the time was named “Meskill,” but they mispronounced it. They had never actually heard it spoken out loud.
A few months ago, a help-wanted ad in the New England Journal of Medicine was soliciting doctors for a Connecticut hospital in the “NYC Metro Area.” The best thing about the job, besides the “phenomenal benefits,” was that you could “live in Fairfield or Westchester communities within 1.5 hours of NYC.” Nothing here about Connecticut being the Garden of Eden. Connecticut? Who cares?
The strange wilderness that is Fairfield County comes to mind, as the reviews begin to come in on the state’s patched-together, one-time-revenues of a bonded joke of a state budget. The boy and girls up there at the state Capitol can go home and pretend that what they did might actually work, but the thing will unravel in a year or so, and the chant will be heard again throughout the land: “Tax the millionaires.”
Few states have as tempting a target as the rich guys in Fairfield County who pay a disproportionate share of the state income tax. They live in a colony all their own, they demand little of the state, beyond plowing I-95 and prodding MetroNorth to occasionally run the trains on time. Politically, they aren’t perceived to have much clout, because they don’t really care much about some silly patch of New England that through an accident of geography happens to be home.
The past legislative session, it was the job of Gov. Rell and all three Republican legislators to explain that rich people from Fairfield County are “working families,” even if they don’t perspire and don’t bang metal in factories.
The wealthy Fairfield County crowd isn’t stupid. The folks know they are cash cows, living in a tri-state tax-and-spend environment that depends on them to pay and pay and pay. Beyond the stereotypical Manhattan commuters, there are many phantom corporations based in Fairfield County, managing national and international enterprises that would never be silly enough to actually manufacture or warehouse anything in Connecticut, but will plop the chief executive in a snobby suburb near Manhattan.
The evidence is mixed on what level of tax abuse is, or would be, sufficient, to drive the Connecticut rich folks away. In truth, there are lawyers and accountants who specialize in assisting these folks to become legal Florida residents, which gives them a better suntan and no state income tax or estate tax.
Conservative economists Arthur Laffer and Stephen Moore said, “It is not a random occurrence that people are moving from Connecticut to Florida or from California to Nevada,” in their book, “Rich States, Poor States.” That being said, many fiscal analysts (and, thank God, the bond rating agencies) are reasonably comfortable with the notion that Connecticut can continue to fleece many of the rich folks, at least in the short term. Go ahead. Except for the newspaper columnists. Please …
Laurence D. Cohen is a freelance writer.
