I don't think they have the power to pass new taxes?

it was bizarre...

Kinda funny, but he likes state and local stuff and I have no patience with them. I'm much better at vocalizing on national stuff...

This article seems to say the opposite:

as well as one from today from the CT Mirror.

I have not paid too much attention. I know he put together a bipartisan committee before he took office that asked for suggestions on what to do about the long-term budget problems in the state

(To summarize - the state employee and teacher's pension funds got 0 funding from the state from 1938 till the 1970s, and then never more than 50% until the mid 1990s. so, they've been perpetually underfunded and the liability has been growing at a greater and greater rate and is now huge and will keep growing for the next 10-12 years... so, to offset this increasing expense, the state has nickel and dimed everybody to death with tax increases every year, so now a state that was an alternative to NYC and Massachusetts for business location because it was a little cheaper to live here now has businesses fleeing to NYC and Boston because the taxes here are now on par with NYC and Mass and we don't have the hip and trendy big city like Manhattan and Boston)

that means they are taxes that hurt the poor more than the well off. A just society does not have those taxes. I don't want to live in a society that is not just.

where I have lived now for 33 years. VA represented a lot of what I hated and I was happy to move to CT. I am so happy in CT now!

I'm sure it is different now. I worked in D.C. and had a carpool commute, which was an interesting experience. Do people still do those carpool commutes where they pick up people to fill their commute lane eligibility?

Unless you have 2 or more people in your car, It can cost as much as $50 to ride into DC on RT 66 during the morning rush.

us thru the commute.

I shudder to think of that. Nobody would do that today...if they had a brain...but then it didn't seem like such a bad idea

When I was a kid, there were nothing but dirt roads to our house, and it was kind of a wilderness. My parents hit up every relative they could find to loan them the money to build our house (1955), which was on a small lake that had been somehow dammed into existence around 1913. When my mom passed away (2002), the place had transformed into suburbia. We had to sell the house because we couldn't afford the inheritance taxes we would have had to pay to keep it, but by then, though, the immediate area was still a little woodsy, most of the surrounding woods farther out had been cleared away for malls and condo monoliths. I haven't been back to look at the house we grew up in since (can't bear to see it not ours), but my brother still lives and works in northern VA, and we still have friends and relatives all over the MD/DC/VA area.

Cash is apparently out of favor these days, and since my brother just pays for groceries with plastic doodads, I have no idea if there is sales tax on groceries or not, but I don't recall seeing an extra line for them anywhere.