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Many state legislators claim to be perplexed by the challenge of eliminating municipal property taxes on cars, which produce about a billion dollars per year for municipal governments. If property taxes on cars were eliminated, how would the money be replaced?
One advocate of eliminating car taxes, state Senate President Pro Tem Martin Looney, D-New Haven, is not perplexed. He would get rid of car taxes by raising the rest of the municipal property tax, which applies to real estate. State law restricts municipal property taxes on real estate to 70% of the assessment of a property’s market price, and Looney notes that 30% of real estate is tax-exempt. So to replace lost car tax revenue he would eliminate or get rid of most of the 30% exemption. Money saved by car owners would be recovered from real estate owners.
Looney’s idea will have little appeal, since typical Connecticut residents pay property taxes on both cars and their homes. Even people who rent their homes pay property taxes indirectly through their landlords.
But Looney figures that the poorest car owners might come out slightly ahead and government’s difficulty in collecting and keep track of car taxes would be eliminated, along with the resentful surprise many people feel when they receive their car property tax bills in the mail every six months.
Representing one of Connecticut’s permanently impoverished cities, Looney also always seems to figure that poverty is a virtue and that people who escape poverty and manage to support themselves are oppressors, a premise that the middle class may find tiresome, another reason his idea isn’t likely to get much support.
So how else might car taxes be eliminated and the foregone money recovered somewhere else?
Given state government’s fondness for deception, maybe car taxes could be reclassified as financing a “public benefit” and quietly stuffed with the other “public benefits” hidden by law in electricity bills, or added to wholesale sales taxes on fuel, tricks that cause the public to blame electricity and fuel companies for the resulting higher prices.
Or, as Looney might like best, state income tax rates could be increased and most of the additional revenue redirected to impoverished cities like Looney’s own New Haven, though urban poverty has not yet been alleviated by decades of such income transfers.
Or as a last resort car taxes might be eliminated through a little honesty in state government: by reducing spending at both the state and municipal levels.
Expensive state mandates on municipalities that cause them to spend much more than they need to spend to get the job done could be repealed, like binding arbitration of government employee union contracts, a practice that has subverted democracy and exempted municipal officials from responsibility.
Or state government could resolve to be less of a pension and benefit society for its own employees and divert the savings to municipal aid.
There’s no reason to be perplexed about getting rid of the car tax. It’s just a matter of political will, and it won’t happen until legislators and governors decide to pursue the public interest rather than the special interest — which in turn won’t happen until the public interest stands up for itself.
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Rather than defend itself against the thugs among its students and their friends who might join them this weekend amid the final games of the national basketball tournaments, in which its men’s and women’s teams are participating, the University of Connecticut has decided to accommodate thuggery.
Last year when UConn’s men’s basketball team won the tournament, there was a riot at the main campus in Storrs, with the thugs tearing down lampposts and damaging cars and buildings.
So this week the university removed the lampposts considered most vulnerable.
A university publicist attributed last year’s damage to a “small fraction” of the young people celebrating. But if troublemakers are really so few, couldn’t a similarly small number of police officers have been assigned to guard the lampposts this weekend? Removing the lampposts has normalized the thuggery.
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Chris Powell has written about Connecticut government and politics for many years. (CPowell@cox.net)