Author: jdd

No CT Income Tax

Posted on by jdd

Connecticut has a problem no one in Hartford seems willing to name plainly: we are taxing our residents and businesses into leaving.

The state income tax — introduced in 1991 over fierce public opposition — has grown steadily ever since. What was sold as a stabilizing measure became a permanent drag on every household and business in the state. The evidence isn’t abstract. People are voting with their feet. Between 2010 and 2020, Connecticut was one of the few states in the nation to lose population. The wealthy leave first, then the businesses that employed their neighbors, then the neighbors themselves.

The case against the income tax is both principled and compassionate. Money earned belongs to the person who earned it. When government takes less, individuals and families decide how to allocate their own resources — saving, investing, spending locally. All of those outcomes beat feeding a state bureaucracy whose track record of resource allocation is, to put it charitably, unimpressive. And lower taxes aren’t a gift to the wealthy — they’re a recognition that the working family in Bridgeport and the small business owner in Torrington deserve to keep more of what they earn just as much as anyone else.

The obvious question is how. Connecticut can’t eliminate the income tax overnight. But that’s precisely the right conversation to force — what does the state actually need to do, and what has it taken on that properly belongs to individuals, communities, and the private sector? Reduce rates, eliminate exemptions that favor the well-connected, and commit to a glide path toward elimination. Remove the obstacles that prevent people from contributing to the state’s economic health on their own terms.

Connecticut was once one of the most prosperous states in the nation. Prosperity won’t be taxed into existence. It has to be earned — and for that to happen, the people doing the earning need to be trusted with the fruits of their work.

We can still do this.

The Future of Not Working

Posted on by jdd

The debate over basic income has been running for decades, and it has a tendency to get stuck. Proponents paint a vision of liberated human potential — people freed from drudgery to create, care, and contribute on their own terms. Skeptics see a fiscal fantasy that rewards dependency and punishes work. Both sides spend so much time arguing about the theory that the evidence rarely gets a fair hearing.

GiveDirectly is interested in the evidence.

The nonprofit was founded on a simple and somewhat radical premise: that the most efficient way to help poor people is to give them money directly and trust them to know what they need. No bureaucratic overhead. No paternalistic conditions. No elaborate programs designed by well-meaning people far removed from the lives they’re trying to improve. Just cash, transferred directly to the people who need it most.

The results have been striking. Recipients of direct cash transfers don’t, as critics often assume, spend the money on alcohol or idle away their days. They invest in their children’s education, improve their homes, start small businesses, and build the kind of financial cushion that makes the difference between a setback and a catastrophe. They behave, in other words, like rational people making reasonable decisions with their own resources — because that is exactly what they are.

This matters beyond the immediate humanitarian case. GiveDirectly’s model is a direct challenge to the architecture of traditional charity and foreign aid, much of which is consumed by administrative costs, intermediaries, and programs that serve the preferences of donors rather than the needs of recipients. The question “what do poor people actually need?” turns out to have a simpler answer than the aid industry has historically been willing to admit.

The basic income debate will continue. The policy questions — how to fund it, at what level, with what conditions — are genuinely complex and worth serious argument. But GiveDirectly has already answered one part of the question that should have been settled long ago: when you give people who have very little the resources to make their own choices, they generally make good ones.

That’s not a utopian fantasy. It’s a finding.

We can still do this.