President Obama chose just one state leader to sit alongside First Lady Michelle Obama, touting him as the model of liberal leadership during last night’s State of the Union address. In ice-cold irony, the business community promptly reminded the president and the American people the very next day that Connecticut Gov. Dan Malloy is a dismal failure.
General Electric, one of the largest private employers in the State of Connecticut, announced Wednesday it will relocate to Boston, Massachusetts. Obama chose to highlight Malloy at the State of the Union for his social tinkering in Connecticut, pushing dangerous and untested criminal justice reforms, including early release from prison — even for violent offenders — and Second Chance, a program of prohibitions for employers against considering criminal history in hiring decisions.
In Malloy’s Connecticut — and Obama’s America — social experimentation is all the rage, as the middle-class and working Americans lose out. While Malloy has eagerly taken to making Connecticut the petri dish of liberal utopian nonsense for the president, the state’s economy and budget have fallen into a deep hole.
GE, the eighth largest company on the Forbes 500, notches a staggering $150 billion in annual revenue. The massive tax take from the company will now move away from the grasp of Malloy and land in the lap of Republican Gov. Charlie Baker in Massachusetts.
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After weathering the largest tax increase, $2.5 billion, in the history of the State of Connecticut under Malloy in 2011, General Electric finally had enough when the unpopular governor pushed yet another round of damaging new taxes in 2015 to close a gaping budget deficit. Credit agency Moody’s downgraded Connecticut’s credit rating in 2012 following Malloy’s first massive tax frenzy. The budgetary craziness has suppressed wages and caused an exodus of jobs and workers from the state.
The state has lost 27,000 manufacturing jobs over the last seven years, including over 2,000 in 2014 alone according to the Bureau of Economic Analysis, and it has badly lagged surrounding states like New York and Massachusetts in GDP growth.
More than 200,000 people had already fled Connecticut and four other high-taxed states as of 2013, according to a 2015 study from Americans for Tax Reform.
The tinkerer-in-chief shares Malloy’s passion for social “reform.” Last winter, President Obama issued an executive action, held up for now by the courts as unconstitutional, granting illegal immigrants amnesty. The President is also expected to push executive orders in 2016 following Malloy’s lead on radical criminal justice reform.
“A move by GE would be a serious rebuke to the fiscal policies of Malloy, a Democrat who oversees a Democrat-controlled legislature that has consistently turned to higher taxes instead of cuts to balance the state’s budget,” Forbes Finance Reporter Daniel Fisher wrote in June 2015.
October polling from Quinnipiac University found Governor Malloy to be the least popular governor in the nation, with a whopping 58 percent of citizens finding the job he was doing inadequate. The departure of at least 800 good paying jobs from the state in the coming months is not likely to help those numbers.
A 2015 report from MoneyRates put Connecticut among the ten worst states to make a living and small business owners gave the state an “F” rating in a September survey from Thumbtack.
“GE aspires to be the most competitive company in the world,” said Chairman and CEO of GE Jeff Immelt in a statement on the corporation’s site Wednesday, “We want to be at the center of an ecosystem that shares our aspirations.”
The statement indicated GE employees at the headquarters in Connecticut would begin moving to temporary facilities in Boston this summer, with a target for the complete move into a permanent location being set for 2018.
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