John Olsen still bristles when he recalls the budget battles of twenty years ago, when the state got an income tax for the first time and the wealthy no longer had to pay a 14% tax on what the government called "unearned income".
Now, with Gov. Dannel Malloy threatening state employee unions with layoffs if they don't make $1 billion a year in contract concessions, Olsen, president of the AFL-CIO, wants somebody else squeezed.
"The top five percent, those making $412,000 and above, who received an extension of a tax cut, that was never paid for, that they were never really entitled to, that alone translated into $3.2 billion," he said Thursday.
Olsen hopes the legislature will protect unions as the budget process begins. The Speaker of the House, Rep. Chris Donovan, once a union organizer himself, is publicly non-commital.
"The governor has been given a tough challenge," said Donovan. "All of us, as the governor said, shared sacrifice. We agree, and we want to make sure that share is fair."
Not all the unions are unhappy. The Connecticut Education Association, a teachers' union, hails Malloy's proposed money for local schools, $570 million, to make up for money they're losing from Washington.
