Wednesday, June 3, 2009

CT's Broken Tax System: Republicans Are NOT Inclined To Fix This, Are Democrats?

My Left Nutmeg:: A more progressive income tax is the answer:

"The solution, as advocated by Connecticut Voices for Chidren, is a more progressive income tax. Adopting higher income tax rates for married couples who earn more than $250,000 (and individuals who earn more than $132,500), as proposed by the legislature's Finance Committee, would raise an estimated $1.226 billion in additional revenue to close the budget deficit, while affecting less than 7 percent of Connecticut taxpayers.

Even under this proposal, income tax rates on Connecticut's wealthiest residents would still be lower than the rates in most neighboring states. Of the 41 states with income taxes, only seven have a lower marginal rate for the wealthy than Connecticut.

And even with this rate increase, the share of income paid in state and local taxes by Connecticut's wealthiest 5 percent would still remain smaller than what is paid by the 'bottom' 95 percent of families. That is, this change would only begin to make the state and local tax system less regressive.

In the long term, a progressive income tax could help to reduce the state's over-reliance on regressive property taxes, creating additional revenues in more prosperous years that could be used to more fully fund education at the state level."

A Serious Look At Socialism And America

Connor Clarke has a nice short dicussion on the Atlantic blogs with links to longer discussions worhty of reading.

What Socialism Looks Like - Conor Clarke

How close? This is what socialism looks like:

socialism chart.png

And Then There Were 6: Lets make Iowa An Honorary New England State

UnionLeader.com - Same-sex marriage becomes law in NH -

"Concord – Gay marriage legislation became law in New Hampshire this afternoon.

Gov. John Lynch signed the bills just after 5:20 p.m. before dozens of enthusiastic supporters of same-sex marriage.

New Hampshire's law takes effect Jan. 1."

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