Fay praises Trump for bolstering economy for all income groups

By Scott Benjamin

WEST HARTFORD – The Republican convention-endorsed candidate in the congressional district that is home to ESPN, the Insurance City and Francis Pratt & Amos Whitney’s defense contracting says she is disappointed about the negotiations over the next phase of stimulus to rejuvenate an economy mired in the worst crisis since the Great Depression.

Mary Fay - a Town Council member in West Hartford and longtime senior insurance executive – said the payroll tax suspension, which went off the table days earlier, “would have been the best way” since it would have benefitted both employers and employees as the country recovers from a pandemic that has sent the unemployment rate to above 14 percent. Nationally it was at 11 percent in June, still the highest rate since October 1982.

Fay, who faces Jim Griffin of Bristol in the August 11 primary in the First Congressional District, said she agrees with a recent Wall Street Journal editorial that criticized Republicans for not addressing the faults in the $2.2 trillion Cares Act that was approved March 27 or identifying what money is still in reserve from that appropriation.

“As Washington debates how many more trillions of dollars to borrow and spend, we are in a familiar political spot,” the newspaper wrote. “Democrats want to spend as much as they can on everything, while Republicans have no idea what they want. Guess how this is likely to turn out?”

The U.S. House Democrats on a largely party-line vote on May 15 approved the $3 trillion Heroes Act. National Economic Council Director Larry Kudlow of Redding said shortly thereafter that Republican President Donald Trump would wait at least until early June to evaluate the impact of the Cares Act.

The U.S. Senate Republicans countered on July 27 with a $1 trillion package just days before the extended unemployment benefits were set to expire.

Fay - who has held senior executive positions at The Hartford and Sun Life Financial, GE Capital and ING - said that she prefers reducing the amount for the unemployment payments to provide more of an incentive for people to return to work.

She said she supports another round of $1,200 stimulus checks to those earning less than $75,000 a year.

“That’s money that probably will go back into the economy,” she explained.

“We’ve got to get unemployment down,” she said in an interview in West Hartford’s Blue Back Square, which is considered one of Connecticut’s more vibrant central business districts this side of Greenwich Avenue and downtown Stamford.

Fay said she is concerned about small businesses failures.

“It’s the little guys that are really hurting,” she said, indicating that some of the Cares Act stimulus through the Paycheck Protection Program was misdirected.

“You worry about small businesses, because they don’t have the equity to draw upon,” Fay exclaimed. “There are a lot of vacancies.”

She said some of the big box stores have gone out of business and potentially some shopping malls could turn into apartments or affordable housing.

It seems like an eternity. In February a CBS News poll indicated that 65 percent of the voters surveyed expected that Trump would garner a second term.

Recent polls indicate that former Vice President Joe Biden, the apparent Democratic nominee, has a double digit lead.

To put it in perspective, Fox News media analyst Howard Kurtz recently wrote, “It was only a matter of time before the mainstream media, increasingly confident that Donald Trump will lose the election, started handicapping who will be in the Biden administration”

Fay praised Trump for “doing what he said he was going to do” on the economy and trade.

“Everybody benefitted,” she said of the 2017 tax reform. “People were feeling good about their households.”

However, George Will, a graduate of Trinity College in Hartford, stated in a July 29 Washington Post column that even before the pandemic the budget deficit was projected to soar beyond $1 trillion a year.

Fay said the surging growth in gross domestic product would eventually bring that figure down.

Fay said Biden’s proposal to increase the corporate tax rate to 28 percent after Trump lowered it from 35 percent to 21 percent, is “going to completely destroy the growing economy.” She also objected to his plan to raise the top individual rate to 39.6 percent, where it stood in the 1990s under former Democratic President Bill Clinton.

Wall Street Journal columnist Gerald Seib has stated that Biden has said that “big government investments” are needed to revive the economy

Fay also credited the president for not getting American “into any wars or skirmishes.”

Hartford’s skyline is dotted with insurance skyscrapers. Reportedly 18 major insurers have a presence in the metro area.

“I think so,” Fay said when asked if it will continue to be the insurance capital.

“However, somehow we need to alleviate the burden” of high state taxes, she added.

Over the last year United Technologies merged and the defense contractor is now known as Raytheon Technologies. About 100 corporate positions at the Farmington headquarters, just outside the First District, were transferred to the Boston area.

Fay said that at least “for now” she believes the manufacturing of military jet engines at Pratt & Whitney in East Hartford, where she grew up, will continue apace.

“However, I never thought that United Technologies would merge with a company and give it their name,” she added.

U.S. Rep. John Larson (D-1) of East Hartford is not only the longest serving congressman in the history of the district, but is the fourth-longest serving U.S. House member in Connecticut history.

It is almost forgotten that 26 years ago he was the Democratic convention-endorsed candidate for governor before he lost in a primary to then-state Controller Bill Curry, a Hartford native who lives in Farmington. Larson also was one of Fay’s social studies teachers at the now-defunct George J. Penney High School in East Hartford.

Remarked Fay, “He’s been there 22 years. He was in the state Senate for 12 years. That is a long time.”

Larson has annexed at least 60 percent of the vote in each election since 2000.

The Republicans haven’t held the district since Edwin May was elected in 1956 and served for just one term.

For generations, the congressmen from the First District have served on the powerful House Ways & Means Committee, which has a hand in about 40 percent of the legislation that comes before Congress.

Fay said if she is elected on November 3 she would seek a seat on that panel since it considers legislation impacting the insurance industry and it plays to “my strengths” from her career in that field.