Are people no longer obliged to support their own children?

By CHRIS POWELL

Anyone following the news in Connecticut might wonder if people are still expected to support their own children, or if a great wave of impoverishment and exemption from responsibility is sweeping the state.

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If cows will get tax credits, all journalists should farm

Governor argues weakly against voter registration ID proposal

It is said that half the households with children in Connecticut can’t afford diapers, so state legislators want to appropriate $1 million for a program distributing free diapers to households with incomes of $62,000 or less.

New Haven Mayor Justin Elicker’s city budget proposal is being criticized for omitting an appropriation of $400,000 for groups distributing free food in the city. The city’s Coordinated Food Access Network says 37% of New Haven’s residents are getting free food from local food charities quite apart from the money they receive from the federal Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP).

The General Assembly is advancing legislation to extend free breakfast and lunch to all public school students. The other day WTIC-AM1080 talk radio host Reese Hopkins noted a claim being made in support of the legislation: that free meals in school are the only meals thousands of Connecticut children get. So, Hopkins asked: If children aren’t being fed at home, isn’t that child neglect or abuse? And where are the corresponding complaints to the state Department of Children and Families? 

Advocates of the free school meals bill don’t seem to have made any.

In January, celebrating Connecticut’s having indexed its minimum wage to inflation so it will rise automatically every year — it’s now at $16.94 per hour — state Labor Commissioner Dante Bartolomeo said thousands of single women in the state support their families on minimum-wage jobs. Of course they don’t do it on minimum wage alone; many also receive SNAP benefits, state medical insurance, and housing vouchers, as well as free diapers.

But where do people get the idea that, while contraception and abortion are also essentially free for those who can’t afford them, they should be having children they can’t support themselves, and having them without a father or other partner in their home? Such children are overwhelmingly the ones who, because of lack of sufficient parenting, develop learning disabilities and behavioral problems, require costly “special education,” and do poorly in school — and then in life.

Poor people aren’t necessarily stupid. Like everyone else, they respond to incentives and disincentives from government. Taking care of widows and orphans, victims of misfortune, is one thing. Lowering the general cost of living is another thing, an objective with which Connecticut fails terribly, particularly in regard to housing, electricity, and taxes. 

But subsidizing people to do what they shouldn’t — to overextend themselves, sink themselves in poverty, and impose profound costs on society — is national suicide.

Where do people get the idea that they are not obliged to support their own children? They get it from the government itself, which, with its perverse incentives, essentially manufactures poverty.

Since inflation has risen sharply in recent years, “affordability” has become a theme with politicians of both parties in Connecticut. But most of what they are doing in the name of “affordability” is not making the state more affordable at all. 

Real affordability would reduce costs, as by making government more efficient and effective, stripping out the inessential, and facilitating housing construction. But most policies being pursued in the name of “affordability” don’t reduce costs at all but just increase government subsidies.

Tax cuts, rebates, and refunds — much proposed at the state Capitol lately — in effect constitute mere borrowing against state government’s long-term pension obligations unless they are financed by spending cuts, few of which seem to have been proposed by either Democrats or Republicans. Any tax cuts, rebates, and refunds this year also are likely to be nullified by contractual or inflation-induced spending increases next year.   

No one in authority seems to be going through the budget to identify many things that could be foregone, not even the political patronage grants. Instead it seems to be assumed that any tax cuts, rebates, and refunds can be undone once November’s state elections are safely past.

Chris Powell has written about Connecticut government and politics for many years. (CPowell@cox.net)

UConn facilitates student riots; and sidewalks aren’t therapy

By CHRIS POWELL

Students at the University of Michigan’s main campus in Ann Arbor rioted Monday night, along with other city residents, after the university’s men’s basketball team, the Wolverines, defeated the University of Connecticut in the national college championship game. The rioters set 40 fires and vandalized streetlights and street signs. Police made a few arrests.

If cows will get tax credits, all journalists should farm

Governor argues weakly against voter registration ID proposal

Misconduct forgotten, a grifter sits in the governor’s chair

Administrators at UConn’s main campus in Storrs expected similar trouble if the Huskies won. Remembering the riots after the Huskies won national championships in 1999 and 2023, UConn administrators had streetlights, street signs, and trash cans removed in advance of the title game. After the 2023 game was won rioters did more than $100,000 in property damage on the UConn campus, and there were a few arrests and expulsions. Many rioters were not students but young people who figured that the university would not be prepared to maintain order.

UConn’s removal of streetlights and street signs this week wasn’t just a disgrace, an indication of the university’s low opinion of its students. It was also almost an invitation to misconduct and drunkenness. It signaled that UConn expected rioting and vandalism, considering them normal when college athletic championships are won.

Of course riots frequently follow championships in major-league sports as well. (College sports no longer can be distinguished from “professional” sports, since college sports themselves have gone pro.) But the participants in the riots in major-league cities have not been specially admitted to an institution of higher education, and local governments in major-league cities aren’t yet taking down streetlights and signs in anticipation of rioting.

Such riots keep happening because their participants have little fear of consequences. Criminal law enforcement is weak throughout the country and especially in Connecticut. State legislators and courts here strive less to see that justice is done than that criminals are kept out of prison. Such policy is far less expensive than justice but it robs justice of its crucial deterrence.

Removing streetlights and signs on campus in advance of championship games also confirms that UConn knows that there is little deterrence to student misbehavior. If UConn shows that it knows, potential rioters can take the hint.

So rather than removing streetlights and signs, the university should assign an armed police officer to each one and, if not enough officers are available, ask the governor to dispatch state police officers and even the National Guard to show as much force as necessary to restore ordinary deterrence. Of course the Tolland County Superior Court state’s attorney’s office would have to resolve to be stingy with plea bargains and probations, and news organizations would have to report convictions and punishments. But some respect for the university particularly and public institutions generally might be restored. After all, this year’s national tournaments won’t be the last one UConn teams play in.

* * *

The General Assembly’s Planning and Development Committee has confirmed that state government won’t do anything effective this year about the housing shortage, homelessness, and mental illness.

The committee this week approved legislation formally authorizing people to sleep or panhandle in parks, on sidewalks, or in other public places.

Supporters of the legislation saw it as a helpful response to homelessness. They noted that 20 homeless people died of exposure or other causes outdoors in Connecticut this winter. Of course that is a disgrace, but the legislation won’t get anyone indoors. It will diminish the value to the public of parks and sidewalks. Sleeping or panhandling vagrants will scare people away.

For many if not most homeless people are mentally ill or drug-addicted. Some prefer to stay outside no matter how cold it gets. They need overnight shelters, supportive housing — studio apartments with supervision and medical care on the premises so they can undertake recovery — and, for those incapable of caring for themselves, confinement in mental hospitals.

Those things cost money. Authorizing the homeless, addicted, and mentally ill to sleep and panhandle in parks and on sidewalks is just pretending to care about them. It’s really a rationalization for ignoring them. 

Chris Powell has written about Connecticut government and politics for many years. (CPowell@cox.net)

If cows will get tax credits, all journalists should farm

By CHRIS POWELL

Connecticut’s dairy farmers, long having suffered in a marginal business and having been reduced in numbers from about 800 in the 1970s to only 80 today, say they are on the brink of failure and require a subsidy from state government to survive.

Governor argues weakly against voter registration ID proposal

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Other states, including Massachusetts, provide what Connecticut’s dairy farmers want: a tax credit to offset low milk prices. So such legislation has been proposed in the General Assembly by state Sen. Stephen Harding, R-Brookfield, whose district is rural and has many farms.

The farmers estimate that collectively they are likely to lose $20 million this year, so the legislation’s tax credit would cover that loss.

Of course dairy farms aren’t the only businesses in trouble in Connecticut. The state is nearly the highest taxed in the country and might be losing population if not for illegal immigration. These days hardly a business enters or expands in the state without seeking some sort of financial incentive or tax abatement from state or municipal government. 

Struggling businesses that receive no such subsidy might look at the proposal to subsidize dairy farms and wonder: What’s so special about them? 

Cows may be cute and dairy farms quaint, but the legislature should ask that question and, if it approves the subsidy legislation, provide a clear answer to it. 

For could Connecticut really not survive without dairy farms? Would it be wrong to let Massachusetts and other states subsidize the milk consumed in Connecticut? 

Farming generally is also a marginal business in Connecticut, so if dairy farms get a state subsidy, why shouldn’t other farms get one too?

Legislators may have noticed — and enjoyed — the sharp decline of the news business in the state in recent years. Local news, the most expensive to produce, since its potential audience is smallest, has nearly vanished. The state’s newspapers are shadows of their former selves with less local news than ever. Few radio stations in the state have reporters anymore, and television news increasingly emphasizes weather as if its viewers live without windows. 

Last year there was some talk in the legislature about subsidizing the news business in the hope of reviving it. Nothing was done, but if cows can get tax credits, anything serving the public interest more than chocolate milk might have a fair claim as well. 

After all, if every dairy farm in Connecticut closed, the state still would get plenty of dairy products elsewhere. For the state’s dairy farms aren’t as crucial to dairy products in Connecticut as the trucking industry is. 

But if Connecticut’s news organizations disappear, no one in other states will step in to provide the missing news. Indeed, most news organizations in other states are in as much trouble as Connecticut’s are, and for the same reasons.

This doesn’t mean that government subsidies for news organizations are a good idea. Government money is inevitably compromising, and defining news organizations for tax purposes would be a challenge. For journalism is a constitutional right, not a profession — a right anyone can exercise at any time with no more capital than a pen, a pad, and an internet site or e-mail provider. 

Indeed, state policy might be of more help to news organizations not with subsidies but with schools that made their students more literate, more familiar with history and government, more civic-minded, and less full of self-esteem after 13 years of social promotion. 

The only people who read newspapers and follow news organizations anymore are people who care about their communities, want to know what is going on in them, and want the authorities to be held to account — and many if not most people today no longer care about that. More than half Connecticut’s eligible adult population didn’t vote in the last election for governor. In such an environment there is little future for journalism, civic-mindedness, and democracy itself.  

Government subsidies for failing industries are horrible precedents, inviting more special pleading and subsidies. But maybe every Connecticut journalist will have to rent a cow.

Chris Powell has written about Connecticut government and politics for many years. (CPowell@cox.net)

Governor argues weakly against voter registration ID proposal

By CHRIS POWELL

Democratic leaders in Connecticut are clamoring against what Republicans in Congress are calling the SAVE Act, which would require people registering to vote to produce proof of citizenship. Since the state’s congressional delegation is entirely Democratic and there is little chance that the state will elect any Republican to Congress this year, the Democrats may fear that the principle of the SAVE Act makes so much sense that Republicans could exploit it even in Connecticut. 

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Accountability terrifies public higher educators

National opinion polls show the public overwhelming favors requiring proof of citizenship for voter registration. 

So the other day Governor Lamont, Lt. Gov. Susan Bysiewicz, and Secretary of the State Stephanie Thomas held a press conference to publicize their opposition to requiring proof of citizenship. Their arguments were weak but they could have been confident that reporters would not question them critically.

“I don’t want to put up all these bureaucratic roadblocks to make it tougher” to vote, the governor said. He added: “I don’t think I need any lectures about election fraud from a president who famously called the secretary of state down in Georgia and told him to ‘find me 11,780 votes.'”

Yes, President Trump is often disgraceful. But that is not an argument for or against policy; it is a distraction, frequently used by Democrats these days to change the subject.

As for what the governor calls “all these bureaucratic roadblocks,” meeting the requirement of the SAVE Act — producing proof of citizenship — would not be onerous. Proof would be constituted by a birth certificate, a naturalization certificate, or a U.S. passport. While many citizens haven’t secured their birth certificate, replacing one is not difficult, and maintaining one may be considered part of basic responsibility to one’s family and society.

After all, producing identification is required in many aspects of daily life — like banking and obtaining government licenses, transportation tickets, and telephone and utility services. Nearly everyone in the country has often had to produce identification in pursuit of a normal life. 

Replacing a birth certificate may take a while, but a requirement for proof of citizenship in voter registration could give people plenty of time to get their documents in order. The next elections are seven months away. 

As for Trump’s corruption in pursuit of extra votes in Georgia, how much more corrupt was that than the last Democratic national administration’s opening the borders to millions of illegal immigrants? How much more corrupt was it than Connecticut’s issuance of driver’s licenses and New Haven’s issuance of city identification cards to illegal immigrants precisely to facilitate their living in the state illegally and thereby to increase the number of Democrat-dominated state and federal legislative election districts? 

At the press conference Secretary Thomas noted that under the SAVE Act driver’s licenses would not help people register to vote. Well, of course not. As shown by Connecticut’s own driver’s licenses issued to illegal immigrants, driver’s licenses aren’t proof of citizenship.  

Opposing requiring proof of citizenship in voter registration, Connecticut Democrats note that there isn’t much evidence of illegal immigrants voting. But it does happen sometimes, there long has been much evidence of election fraud in Bridgeport, and recently a member of Tolland’s Town Council — a Republican — was exposed as having changed his legal residence to Florida and having registered to vote there without resigning from the council. 

Indeed, some Democrats around the country already propose to let non-citizens vote in municipal elections.

In any case Connecticut has never done a serious audit of its voter rolls and the state allows anyone to register to vote simply by claiming to be a citizen, at the risk of being charged with making a false statement. But such claims are never checked, and people know it.   

The governor doesn’t want to be lectured about election security by Trump. Fair enough. So why should supporters of a citizenship requirement for voter registration want to be lectured about election security by a governor who is enthusiastically subverting enforcement of immigration law?      

Chris Powell has written about Connecticut government and politics for many years. (CPowell@cox.net)

Misconduct forgotten, a grifter sits in the governor’s chair

By CHRIS POWELL

Twenty years ago Ned Lamont accomplished what may have been the neatest trick in Connecticut political history. He won the primary for the Democratic nomination for U.S. senator, defeating the incumbent, Joe Lieberman, and lost the election on the same night.

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Accountability terrifies public higher educators

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How did it happen? 

While being a good liberal Democrat in most respects, Lieberman was in trouble with many Democrats for supporting the war in Iraq that was being waged by the administration of President George W. Bush, a Republican, in pursuit of imaginary “weapons of mass destruction.” Lamont mobilized anti-war Democrats and narrowly won the primary, 52-48%.

But as he claimed victory on live television, Lamont was standing next to his supporter from New York, Al Sharpton, who back then was known less for being a “civil rights leader” than a race hustler, a perpetrator of the Tawana Brawley rape hoax, an income tax evader, a violator of federal campaign finance law, a defaulter on a libel judgment arising from the hoax, and an all-around grifter. In a general election Sharpton was the kiss of political death and so, standing next to him that night, Lamont kissed the moderate vote goodbye. Running as an independent Lieberman easily defeated Lamont and a token Republican nominee, drawing both Democratic and Republican votes.

Now governor and seeking re-election to a third term, Lamont is somewhat in the position Lieberman was in 20 years ago: He is the moderate or somewhat less liberal candidate in what likely will be a Democratic primary with far-left Hamden state Rep. Josh Elliott. So the other day Lamont seemed to see political benefit in paling around with Sharpton in the governor’s office at the state Capitol. Sharpton and civil rights lawyer Ben Crump had just spoken at the funeral of a mentally ill Black man who had been fatally shot by police during a psychotic episode in Hartford. They were there to racialize the incident.

For as Lenin and other totalitarians are supposed to have said: If you label something well enough, you don’t have to argue with it. No matter how unsubstantiated, accusations of racism still put people on the defensive in Connecticut.

The governor may have been confident he wouldn’t have to worry about being tarnished by Sharpton’s misconduct, since most of it happened long ago and Connecticut’s politically correct journalists would never bring it up even if they knew about it.

Instead the journalists reported that the governor and Sharpton agreed that police need more training in handling mentally ill people who are threatening others. The journalists did not report that while Hartford two years ago created a special squad of social workers to respond to such troubled people, city government lately has much reduced the squad’s funding and has been relying more on intervention by the police to handle the dozens of psychotic episodes that occur in the city every week.

Sharpton didn’t bring that up either. Of course he probably didn’t know about it, nor about the $70 million deficit being run by Hartford’s school system, nor about the system’s incompetence in the face of the enduring poverty and neglect at home of its heavily minority student population.

But then why bother? Everyone was having such a good time in Lamont’s office, with Sharpton sitting in the governor’s chair and remarking, “He’s one of the best governors in the country.”

Polls suggest that Connecticut well may concur in November, since most people have concluded that nothing can be done about the poverty of the cities except to increase their residents’ dependence on welfare and keep raising city government salaries.

Indeed, poverty is big business for many people now, including Sharpton himself, whose non-profit “civil rights organization,” the National Action Network, pays him annual salaries of between $600,000 and $1 million, money drawn in part from donations made by corporations afraid of being targeted by boycotts staged by the group. Such extortion may be what the group means by its slogan: “No justice, no peace.”  

Chris Powell has written about Connecticut government and politics for many years. (CPowell@cox.net)

By firing cop in shooting, did Hartford mayor yield to politics?

By CHRIS POWELL

When he peremptorily fired the Hartford police officer who shot and killed a mentally ill man who was walking through his neighborhood with a long knife and was refusing police commands to drop it, Mayor Arunan Arulampalam last week worsened a bad situation and probably increased city government’s financial liability.

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Many people throughout Connecticut may have seen police body camera and bystander video of the incident. Three officers were escorting the man at a safe distance and trying to talk him out of his mission, which seems to have been to commit “suicide by cop,” especially since he had already cut himself with the knife. He also disregarded appeals of family and friends to drop it. Shots from a stun gun failed to bring him down. A fourth officer arrived, drew his gun, also told the man to drop the knife, and was approached by the man, who may have seen this as his best chance to get killed. Whereupon the officer obligingly shot him nine times in quick succession, mortally wounding him.

Hartford police deserve special sympathy, being assigned to keep order in a city that has become an open-air mental hospital, where every month brings more than a hundred similar “mental health crisis” calls — the euphemism for psychotic episodes — even as state government has no mental hospitals for the chronically but not yet criminally insane. But even police sympathizers may wonder why the man had to be shot so many times so fast, or why the officers couldn’t have kept escorting him downtown for coffee in the hope that he would tire of walking, come to his senses for a moment, and surrender.

The law still may be on the officer’s side. An officer may use deadly force if he reasonably fears for his life or the lives of others. The police would not have been summoned by the disturbed man’s family and officers would not have been escorting him if they all didn’t fear that he was putting lives in danger. More efforts to humor and isolate the disturbed man might have been nice but were probably not legally required. 

The state’s inspector general is investigating and will decide for purposes of prosecution.

Mayor Arulampalam is entitled to think, as many people do, that the police should have kept escorting and ducking away from the man as necessary for a while longer. But the mayor could have reached that conclusion long before he was interrupted by critics of the police during his “State of the City” address, and long before he attended the funeral of the disturbed man, who was Black, and heard civil rights leader Al Sharpton and civil rights lawyer Ben Crump make the incident a racial issue. Crump even charged demagogically that the man was shot because he was Black.

So now the fired officer and his union can plausibly argue that the mayor succumbed to political pressure instead of following due process and giving the officer a chance to defend himself.

It is easy to imagine an expensive result here. 

The inspector general will regret that more time wasn’t spent escorting the disturbed man but will acknowledge that the officer who shot him was within the law. 

The mayor will stick by the officer’s firing and it will go to state labor board arbitration, where firings of unionized government employees are seldom upheld. The officer’s penalty will be reduced to a few weeks of suspension and some retraining and he will be reinstated with a lot of back pay. 

The disturbed man’s estate will sue the city and win or settle for a few million dollars.

The city’s police will keep getting more than a hundred “mental health crisis” calls every month, times will get harder, mental illness will increase, the whole state will move closer to being an open-air mental hospital, and no one in authority will ask why or do anything relevant about it. 

But at least Mayor Arulampalam will have gained sufficient political cover with his constituents.

Chris Powell has written about Connecticut government and politics for many years. (CPowell@cox.net)

Accountability terrifies public higher educators

By CHRIS POWELL

Connecticut’s public higher educators, or at least those with the ear of the General Assembly, want to prohibit the public from finding out what they’re teaching students at tax expense. For the fourth straight year they have persuaded legislators to advance a bill that would exempt the outlines of their courses — “syllabuses” — from disclosure under the state’s freedom-of-information law.

At last Linda McMahon finds a school that will listen to her

Democrats’ legislation would turn Connecticut into a people’s republic

Another bailout won’t reveal why Hartford’s schools fail

Thus the courses being taught — their materials, assignments, grading policies, and teaching schedules — would become state secrets.

Why? Because the higher educators are terrified of criticism — terrified that the FOI law might be “weaponized” by anti-intellectual yahoos to try to hold them to account for their work.

But of course to serve as a weapon of accountability in government is the very point of FOI law. There can be no accountability if the governed can’t examine what the government is doing. 

In recent years higher education, like lower education, has been taken over by the political left and now is sometimes much engaged in propagandizing as much as teaching. Liberals and Democrats outnumber conservatives and Republicans in education jobs by dozens to one. Any institution so politically one-sided needs extra scrutiny to determine if it serves the public interest.

Indeed, the secrecy legislation sought by Connecticut’s public higher educators is proof that they can’t be trusted to serve the public interest.

The public higher educators are also again seeking legislation to prevent disclosure of records about their teaching or research on scholarly issues, again fearing that disclosure will facilitate criticism, which they deliberately misconstrue as harassment and intimidation. 

Yes, some government records will always be requested by people who dislike what the government is doing or what they suspect it is doing. Some requesters of records may even be malicious. But so what? 

For in a democracy people are entitled to dislike what the government is doing and even to hate it. They are simply entitled to know. The public higher educators may have forgotten it, but disliking what the government is doing was at the heart of the American Revolution. 

Besides, the state Freedom of Information Commission is already empowered to dismiss requests for public records that constitute mere harassment.

The problem is that Connecticut’s public higher educators, or at least those who purport to represent them, consider simple accountability itself to be hateful. So they should switch to teaching in private colleges and universities, or in government colleges and universities in places like Russia, China, North Korea, or Iran. Their “academic freedom” might be constrained in those places, but they’d never have to answer to the public for what the government paid them to do.

LIMIT PROPERTY TAX EXEMPTIONS: New Haven is celebrating Yale University’s decision to increase its voluntary annual payment to city government by 43% over the next seven years, from $23 million now to $33.6 million in 2033. This may be generous of the university in light of the huge new punitive tax the federal government has levied on Yale’s $40-billion-plus endowment and other big university endowments.

Despite the big increase in Yale’s annual gift, the city is likely to raise its property taxes by 4%, which, like the property taxes of all Connecticut’s cities, are already far too high. Welcome as it is, the university’s higher annual voluntary payment doesn’t really address the city’s big tax problem.

That problem is that most real estate in New Haven, about 56% of it, is tax-exempt under state law, and while the university is still the city’s second-largest property taxpayer, it owns 45% of the property in the city and most of it is tax-exempt — $4.5 billion worth.

This is a gross failure of state government policy. Property tax exemptions per property owner should be sharply limited, starting with a gradual reduction of Yale’s exemption to $1 billion. Eventually that would bring tens of millions of dollars in additional revenue to New Haven city government each year, allowing a reduction in property taxes and state financial aid.

Yet state government pays little attention to the issue.

Chris Powell has written about Connecticut government and politics for many years. (CPowell@cox.net)

At last Linda McMahon finds a school that will listen to her

By CHRIS POWELL

U.S. Education Secretary Linda McMahon at last has found a school in Connecticut willing to listen to her. 

McMahon’s visit to speak at a civics program at an elementary school in Fairfield in January was canceled when parents objected and the school administration decided that public education’s usual exaltation of “diversity” doesn’t apply to political views.

Democrats’ legislation would turn Connecticut into a people’s republic

Another bailout won’t reveal why Hartford’s schools fail

Overlong legislative hearings are for venting, not persuading

Her visit to Thomaston High School for a similar program this month was canceled when school officials worried that they couldn’t provide a safe and orderly environment. The Thomaston police department has only about 15 officers and so presumably might be overwhelmed by the local anti-fascist brigade. 

But now the Buckley Institute at Yale University in New Haven will welcome McMahon on April 16 to speak about “the roadmap for restoring American education.” The institute, named for the late Yale graduate and conservative writer William F. Buckley Jr., was founded 15 years ago by people at Yale who had tired of the university’s stifling leftism, and, lest it risk proving their complaint, the university doesn’t get in the institute’s way.

New Haven Mayor Justin Elicker, a liberal Democrat who holds two master’s degrees from Yale, doesn’t object to McMahon’s appearance but says she and President Trump “don’t have a ‘roadmap to restore education’ and, conversely, seem to be hell-bent on undermining public education for our most vulnerable students.”

Yes, Trump pledged to eliminate or at least hobble the U.S. Education Department, and McMahon accepted his appointment for that purpose. But then the department was established 46 years ago mainly as a reward to the national teacher unions for their support of the Democratic Party. The premise was that the unions would control the department and it would spend much more federal money that would find its way to union members.

Of course indications are that education in the United States has declined substantially since the department was established. For indeed the department is most of all a source of educator patronage and leftist ideology, so Republicans have a case for getting rid of it. They also can argue that Democrats, especially in Connecticut, including Mayor Elicker, who is also a member of his city’s school board, don’t have much of an educational record to defend.

It’s not the fault of Trump and McMahon that about a third of New Haven’s students and teachers alike are chronically absent, missing 10% or more of their classes, and that, when they do manage to show up, so many students chronically misbehave, causing their teachers to burn out faster. Nor is it the fault of Trump and McMahon that New Haven’s students, like those in Connecticut’s other cities, perform so poorly on the few proficiency tests the state dares to give them even as education spending keeps rising while enrollments fall.

Those failures are part of a bigger societal problem — the explosion of poverty, the welfare system’s destruction of the family, and government’s growing reluctance to enforce standards generally.  

McMahon, the zillionaire co-founder of a wrestling entertainment business, may not be the ideal exponent of a “roadmap for restoring American education.” But such a map would be compelling if it ever went beyond the map now in use by the education establishment: Throw more money, never hold anyone accountable — not students, parents, teachers, or administrators — socially promote everyone, even the illiterate, and make sure that results are not measured and publicized much.

If McMahon wants to be really outrageous at Yale, she could remark on the stunning recent improvements in the education of the poorest and most disadvantaged students in the schools of darkest Mississippi and other Southern states — the result of a new concentration on phonics to teach reading and the refusal to promote students past Grade 3 unless they are competent readers. This promises, or threatens, to be the end of social promotion and the beginning of accountability.

But will Yale and New Haven have enough police on duty to allow such a reformist message to be heard in the citadel of political correctness?    

Chris Powell has written about Connecticut government and politics for many years. (CPowell@cox.net)

Democrats’ legislation would turn Connecticut into a people’s republic

By CHRIS POWELL

Apparently afraid that Democrats in California and Illinois are getting ahead of them, Connecticut’s Democratic state legislators have pushed into overdrive their campaign to destroy the private sector and turn the state into a people’s republic.

Another bailout won’t reveal why Hartford’s schools fail

Overlong legislative hearings are for venting, not persuading

Why should Connecticut waive law enforcement anywhere?

Not only have the Democratic legislators revived their bill to award unemployment compensation to strikers — that is, to have government pay people for walking off their jobs (except state government jobs, of course) — legislation Governor Lamont vetoed last year, but now they want state government to control the intricacies of the supermarket business.

A bill approved last week by the General Assembly’s Labor and Public Employees Committee would require supermarkets to operate one cashier-staffed checkout station for every two self-checkout stations and to limit self-checkout stations to eight per store.

What is the point of taking these decisions away from supermarket management? The supermarket business has a low profit margin, there is fairly good competition in the business in Connecticut, and customers have choices if they are not satisfied with checkout arrangements. If checkout is too slow for them, they’ll shop elsewhere.

The legislation’s only point seems to be to guarantee cashier jobs by suppressing automation. So why not also prohibit supermarkets from using universal product codes on the goods they sell? Entering prices manually into the cash register, as was done in the old days, would force supermarkets to hire many more cashiers while lengthening checkout times. How have the Luddites on the labor committee missed that idea? 

Of course restricting checkout automation in supermarkets would drive up costs and prices even as Democratic legislators prattle about making Connecticut more affordable. 

But many supermarket employees are unionized and their unions support the Democrats, so protecting supermarket employees against technology comes first.

Meanwhile Democrats are advocating a bill that has been cleared by the legislature’s Housing Committee and would essentially expropriate owners of apartment buildings. 

The bill would restrict landlords from evicting tenants at the end of their leases. A landlord would have to allege some specific fault on the tenant’s part. A landlord’s wanting to raise the rent without risking a bogus racial or religious discrimination complaint wouldn’t be a good enough reason. Nor would a landlord’s simply disliking a tenant’s demeanor be good enough, though tenants would remain free to terminate their lease for not liking their landlord’s demeanor. While requiring landlords to be loyal to their tenants, the bill would not oblige tenants to be loyal to their landlords.

Such expropriation of rental housing is the real Democratic response to Connecticut’s housing shortage. The only way of alleviating the shortage is to build housing, and expropriation of landlords will discourage new rental housing. But getting more housing built is more controversial politically than demagoguing against landlords, so the Democrats choose demagoguery. 

Their expropriation legislation shows that Democrats aren’t serious about “affordable” housing despite their defense of the controversial state law that limits use of municipal zoning against housing construction in towns that lack inexpensive housing. Despite the controversy, that law isn’t getting much housing built.

If Connecticut was serious about housing, the Housing Department would be directed to get aggressive — to condemn and acquire some of the hundreds of dilapidated or vacant former industrial and commercial properties around the state that are already connected to roads and utilities. The department would put the properties out to bid to developers for multi-family housing construction and exempt the projects from municipal zoning. 

No pristine areas would be chewed up by new housing and no environmental damage would be done. Only blighted and under-used areas would be reclaimed.

Yes, getting new housing this way would be controversial too, since, while people say they want more housing in general, few want it near them, even if it would replace the ruins of a factory. 

So instead Democrats propose to expropriate landlords, which will only pretend to address the housing shortage, and the shortage will worsen unless more people get fed up and move out of state, as is happening in California and Illinois.

Chris Powell has written about Connecticut government and politics for many years. (CPowell@cox.net)

Another bailout won’t reveal why Hartford’s schools fail

By CHRIS POWELL

Eight years ago Gov. Dannel P. Malloy induced a sleepwalking General Assembly to approve a bailout of $550 million for Hartford’s incompetent city government. This week nothing seemed to have changed, with the Hartford Courant reporting that the city’s school system is operating with a likely deficit of $70 million and is asking Mayor Arunan Arulampalam for the $48 million in city government’s emergency fund.

Overlong legislative hearings are for venting, not persuading

Why should Connecticut waive law enforcement anywhere?

Public schools couldn’t meet new home-school standards

Rejecting the request, the mayor noted that it would buy the school system only a six-month reprieve, whereupon the system would be insolvent again unless it made major changes. Unfortunately such changes seem impossible politically at the city level. At the state level, if a $550 million bailout couldn’t make Hartford city government solvent and competent eight years ago, there is not much to be said for another one. 

The biggest part of the problem may be that Hartford, overwhelmed by its impoverished population, lacks the self-sufficient, independent, and property-tax-conscious middle class necessary for competent self-government, just as Bridgeport and New Haven lack it. This isn’t the fault of the cities themselves. They are what decades of mistaken, poverty-inducing, and poverty-concentrating state policy have made them.      

More than a quarter of Hartford’s students are learning-disabled enough to be classified as needing “special education.” About 40% of the city’s students — most of them the better-parented ones — attend regional schools instead of the city’s own. 

This is the consequence of state policy arising from the state Supreme Court’s 1996 decision in the school segregation case of Sheff v. O’Neill. The policy sought to transfer out of the city’s schools as many students who wanted to get out, instead of making the schools better. The concentration in those schools of less-parented and learning-disabled students may make it almost impossible for them to improve, but as long as the most motivated students can get out, nobody cares now. Hail the majesty of civil-rights law!

As a matter of fairness, state government should have assumed all “special education” costs in all school systems long ago. These are general social costs of poverty and disability, and sticking municipalities with them is virtually a proclamation that state government means to concentrate poverty in the cities.

But the problems of Hartford’s schools are largely offset by the hugely disproportionate state financial aid they get, which allows them to spend about $30,000 per student per year, far above the state average. The failure to get good results from all this spending indicates poor administration on top of the usual obstructions to management inflicted by state labor law and union contract.

The situations in Bridgeport’s and New Haven’s schools are similar. Because of some serious embarrassments that were publicized statewide in the last two years, Bridgeport’s school system lately has been getting extra supervision from the state Education Department. But except for the additional work for the department, it’s hard to see why it shouldn’t be providing similar supervision to Hartford and New Haven as well. 

Indeed, the three city school systems have been failing for so long that it’s hard to see why state government hasn’t acknowledged its obligation to take them under its own direct management, except that state government doesn’t know what to do about the bigger problem — worsening poverty — other than to throw more money at it, which hasn’t improved education but at least buys off politically active local people and can be construed as concern.

But how Connecticut’s elected officials still prattle piously about education! At the moment legislators are again rummaging through state government’s finances in search of another $150 million to be marked “education” and funneled to municipalities, though there is no inquiry in the legislature about the results being produced by education spending.

A serious legislative inquiry about results — student learning — might discover that higher education spending in Connecticut correlates mainly with the quality of the cars driven by teachers and school administrators, while student learning correlates not with per-pupil spending but per-pupil parenting.

Maybe that’s why there is never an inquiry about results.

Chris Powell has written about Connecticut government and politics for many years. (CPowell@cox.net)

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