Connecticut shouldn’t cut taxes 

On Feb. 5, Connecticut governor Ned Lamont delivered his biennial budget address for the coming two years. The speech was filled with positive rhetoric about how amazing the proposed tax cuts are going to be for Connecticut residents and how the new budget allocation is going to help so many people. As a dual-degree student staring down the barrel of finding classes without College Scheduler, something seems to be missing. While appealing at face value, these tax cuts don’t actually help working families as promised, but rather stretch state funds thin and result in a reduction of services that people need. 

Of course, there are fundamental problems with the way taxes are handled in Connecticut which need to be addressed. When talking about taxes people often talk about tax burdens (the percent of a person’s total income spent on taxes), but this is insufficient at painting the whole picture. For example, a flat tax rate may seem fair because everyone shares the same burden, until you consider that a 10% tax on someone who makes $35,000 a year hurts far more than it does someone making $666,827.18 a year.  

For this reason, Connecticut uses a graduated tax rate, where your tax rates increase with your income. In Connecticut rates start at 3% for the first $10,000 of taxable income and then increase up to nearly 7% for incomes greater than $800,000. Despite this apparent system, Connecticut ranked sixth in the nation for the highest tax burden in 2024, with the lowest 10% of incomes spending nearly half their budget in taxes. 

So, what should we do about these high taxes? Well, the obvious thing which Lamont has chosen is to simply lower them, but there are obvious problems with that. It was rather telling during his speech when he arrived at the topic of higher education and suddenly got very vague with the numbers, attempting to hide a 305-million-dollar budget cut to public and state funded universities.  

Additionally, he chose to offset transit costs by increasing ridership fees, ignoring the fact that over 50% of public transit users earn under $50,000 a year—a tax primarily levied on our state’s most economically vulnerable. He would even add a $10 fee to the UPASS program, which currently allows university students to ride public transit for free. Once you actually take a look at it, this new fiscal budget with its tax cuts is nothing more than an exacerbation of Connecticut’s already highly regressive tax policies. 

Under the new administration we are entering a time of extreme economic uncertainty. Now, more than ever, we need a financial plan that will ensure the funding of healthcare and public education, and we need to make sure that the burden of paying it is not placed on those who can least afford it.  

So, what are some options Connecticut could do if it wanted to improve its overall taxation crisis?  

First, instead of tax cuts that will need to be offset elsewhere, we should look at implementing tax reforms which redistribute how taxes are paid. Sales taxes should be removed and the deficit made up by a dramatic increase in the taxes of wealthier residents, perhaps as high as 73% on top earners. It sounds like a lot at first, but someone making $666,827 would still be able to take home quite a comfortable living, and we could ease the burden on the many people in the state making minimum wage. We need a truly progressive tax policy if we aim to keep our programs funded and relieve people’s financial burden. Finally, if we must decrease spending, we should not look at public services, but at overfunded agencies like the police. We should ask ourselves: is UConn too expensive to run, or perhaps is it possible that $666,827 is a bit high of a salary for UConn’s president?