My wife and I moved to Connecticut thirty years ago. The economy was booming and businesses were hiring. We loved living in Fairfield. Our two daughters received excellent educations in the public schools. My friends, my neighbors, my wife and I looked forward to having our children settle in Connecticut as we became grandparents.
But it didn’t happen. Our children are gone. To visit our grandchildren, we sit in New York and Boston traffic. We wait at LaGuardia and Kennedy to catch flights to Florida, California and Colorado.
How did this happen? How did a state that led the country in GDP (Gross Domestic Product) growth from 1976 until 1991 end up with the third worse business climate in the country? How did we actually lose population in the past several years? Why did General Electric, Aetna and multiple small businesses leave for greener pastures? And why don’t our children want to live here?
The answer is that an incompetent political class has used the hard-working Connecticut taxpayer as a piggy bank for socialist schemes and fat pensions for bureaucrats while destroying the business climate. It began when Lowell Weicker became Governor by misleading the voters in the early 1990s and enacting a state income tax. And it culminated in the past eight years when Dan Malloy promised no tax increases on his way Governor’s mansion, and reneged on this promise not once; but twice.
There is still a chance to return Connecticut to its former glory; but we will need an outsider to do it. That man is Republican Bob Stefanowski. His main opponent is Democrat Ned Lamont, a Greenwich plutocrat who is the great grandson of J.P. Morgan’s right hand man. He blew over $26,000,000 of his personal wealth trying to become our Senator. He will probably blow more trying to become our Governor.
The Democrats gave Lamont a cakewalk to the nomination (he won the primary by over 80%) because he promised the public sector unions and education bureaucrats lavish pensions and health benefits. He promised to allow some of our municipal employees to continue to pad their pensions by working overtime in their final year. Many of these people will retire in their mid-forties with six-figure pensions and Cadillac health insurance. But what many voters don’t realize is that these pensions have annual cost-of-living increases. As many of these people will live into their eighties and nineties, their pensions will exceed $300,000 a year! Where will this money come from?
It will come from your paying massive tax increases and tolls. Your property taxes will skyrocket while your housing values continue to plummet. And do not believe Ned Lamont when he says he is only going to place tolls on trucks driving through the state. Once the toll apparatus is constructed, all Ned Lamont has to do is flip a switch to make the rest of us pay too. And furthermore, wait until these trucks start driving into your towns and destroying your local roads to avoid the tolls. You will be paying even more. Ned Lamont is a clone of Dan Malloy.
Stefanowski plans to repeal the estate tax and the corporate taxes that are driving our productive citizens and businesses out of the state. He will stand up to the public sector unions. Now I know some of you reading this want to vote against Stefanowski because you don’t like Donald Trump. Yet, the liberal states of Maryland, Massachusetts and Vermont (Yes. Bernie Sanders’ home state) are poised to elect Republican governors. Why can’t Connecticut? Moderate voters in those states realize that allowing the Democrats to pillage their state just to get back at Donald Trump is like cutting off your nose to spite you face.
So on Tuesday, November 6th, please vote for Bob Stefanowski. Trust me; it isn’t pleasant sitting in traffic for hours on the Mass Pike. And do you really want to live in Florida? Your clothes are drenched with sweat by 10 AM. Alligators gobble up your pets and attack you if your tee shot lands near a water hazard. Mosquitoes the size of vultures suck out your blood. Pythons join you in the swimming pool. And as one of my patients said, “Every doctor down there wants to become a millionaire in one year.”
I have lived all over the country – Pennsylvania, Rhode Island, New York City and Texas. And I can tell you that Connecticut is where it’s at. Do yourself and your family a favor. Do not allow Ned Lamont to put another nail in the coffin of our beautiful state.