Indignation industry triumphs at New London’s post office

By CHRIS POWELL

Connecticut has been just about conquered by the indignation industry, as was indicated again the other day when the post office in New London inadvertently offended a customer — the president of the city’s chapter of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People — because its doorbell chime happened to play, among other songs, a few bars from “Dixie” during the Juneteenth holiday weekend. The customer complained that “Dixie” is racist because it was sung in minstrel shows and was adopted as an anthem by secessionists during the Civil War.

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Instantly intimidated, the post office got rid of the chime’s “Dixie” melody. But the complaint was just a matter of guilt by association.

There is nothing racist about “Dixie.” Its lyrics are a simple celebration of the South. Many inoffensive songs originated with or were popularized by minstrel shows. While secessionists adopted “Dixie,” they weren’t the only ones who liked it. It was written by a Northerner prior to secession, first became popular in the North, and the great liberator himself, the destroyer of slavery — Abraham Lincoln — declared it a favorite song.

At the White House on the day after the surrender of the Confederate Army of Northern Virginia, the president told a serenading crowd: “I have always thought ‘Dixie’ one of the best tunes I have ever heard. Our adversaries over the way attempted to appropriate it, but I insisted yesterday that we fairly captured it. I presented the question to the attorney general, and he gave it as his legal opinion that it is our lawful prize. I now request the band to favor me with its performance.”

The band did so, and the song is still enjoyed by people of good will even if some people of bad will might like to make hateful use of it.

Music and lyrics can stand on their own. 

Francis Scott Key, author of the “The Star-Spangled Banner,” the poem that, set to an old British melody, became the U.S. national anthem, was a slave owner and as federal attorney for the District of Columbia persecuted abolitionists. But there is nothing racist in his poem, which, if somewhat ironically in light of the author’s background, proclaims “the land of the free.”

The German composer Richard Wagner hated Jews. But he is associated with hatred of Jews less because of his operas, which are not explicitly anti-Jewish, than because Adolf Hitler fervently promoted the composer’s work as part of the Nazi movement. Even today performing Wagner’s operas is informally banned in Israel.

Mark Twain joked that Wagner’s music “is better than it sounds.” Twain might agree that while the melody and lyrics of “Dixie” are better than the politics of some people who liked them or still do, the singer and the songwriter are not necessarily the song.

Besides, to live in Connecticut and be offended by a few bars from “Dixie” played by the post office door chime may require one to be almost blind to many worse things. Even as the controversy in New London was developing, a national survey reported that Connecticut is among the most racially and economically segregated states. The racial performance gap in the state’s schools long has been notorious, along with the state’s big racial disproportions in poverty, housing, crime, imprisonment, and health.

Ever preening in self-righteousness, political correctness celebrates its intimidation and shaming of people who have meant and done no harm. So it might have been better if a postal clerk in New London had dared to tell the customer who complained about the door chime that Juneteenth is not what it is said to be — the anniversary of the end of slavery in the United States — but just a P.C. contrivance, since slavery actually continued in the United States for six months beyond June 1865 until the 13th Amendment was ratified on December 6. That’s the day for celebration, with “Dixie” on the musical program, as it was for Lincoln.          

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

Bronin didn’t fix Hartford; and ‘fair’ just means ‘more’

By CHRIS POWELL

What’s the point of former Hartford Mayor Luke Bronin’s candidacy for the Democratic nomination for Congress in Connecticut’s 1st Congressional District?

Of course Bronin’s immediate objective is to defeat the incumbent Democrat he is challenging in a primary, U.S. Rep. John B. Larson, who has represented the district since 1999. But why must Larson be replaced when the 1st District will elect a Democrat again no matter who wins the party’s nomination?

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Bronin doesn’t say Larson is wrong on any issue important to Democrats. The two agree on nearly everything, the more so every day as they pander to the extreme liberals expected to constitute the most voters in the primary. 

The problem with Larson, Bronin says, is that, at 77, he is old and tired, though Larson has been campaigning furiously after being shocked by Bronin’s challenge. President Trump “is out of control,” Bronin says, but Democrats “keep doing the same thing. We need to bring a whole new kind of energy to this fight.”

But what exactly should Democrats do differently? Bronin doesn’t say. He implies that it would be enough just to elect him and thereby discard Larson’s great seniority in Congress on the eve of regaining a Democratic majority in the House.

Bronin is well-connected to wealthy Democrats around the country, probably will raise more campaign money than Larson by primary day, and is doing a lot of advertising emphasizing what he sees as his successes as mayor of Hartford from 2016 to 2024. Hartford has had worse mayors but the claim of some of Bronin’s advertising — particularly the claim that he “straightened out a bankrupt city” — is ridiculous.

A $500 million bailout from state government, not Bronin’s adept administration, is what kept Hartford out of the bankruptcy that might have been the best way to straighten out the city. Even as Bronin’s television commercial with the “straightened out” claim was airing last week, Hartford was making the same old distressing news.

A story in Connecticut’s Hearst newspapers was headlined: “About 50 gunshots fired in Hartford early on Fourth of July, police say.”

The Connecticut Mirror had this headline: “Police escort former Hartford treasurer off city property.” She had resigned abruptly amid suspicion of scandal.

With wonderful irony Bronin’s “straightened out” commercial was inserted into a report on the internet site of WTNH-TV8 in New Haven that was headlined: “2 dead, teen injured in stabbing, shooting in Hartford.”

Of course Hartford hasn’t been “straightened out” any more than Connecticut’s other cities have been. They are still, by design, poverty factories with little capacity for self-government. It’s a problem of demographics, the concentration and perpetuation of poverty by welfare and education policies. 

Bronin and the other mayors aren’t to blame for that problem. But only Bronin is pretending to have solved it, and only he has used his mayoralty mainly to advance himself politically.

Doing “something different” for the Democrats would start with regaining the House majority. So why should the party be spending millions to determine a nomination in a district sure to elect a Democrat again anyway? Why not spend the money in competitive districts where the next majority will be decided?

Is Bronin’s ambition more important than that?   

* * *

Democratic campaigns in Connecticut and throughout the country are tedious for their clichéd calls to make “the rich” pay their “fair share” of taxes. Governor Lamont and his challenger in the Democratic primary for governor, Hamden state Rep. Josh Elliott, are working this cliché very hard.

But exactly who are “the rich,” exactly what is the “fair share,” and how is it to be calculated? 

Everyone agrees that “billionaires” constitute some of “the rich,” but candidates are seldom clear about who else might make that infamous cut. No one explains the criteria for calculating a “fair share.” 

That’s because as a practical matter “fair share” is just the Democrats’ euphemism for “more,” and a proper calculation is impossible, because if “fair” was ever achieved, higher taxation would be foreclosed as unfair.

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

Can Elliott make waste and fraud an issue in primary for governor?

By CHRIS POWELL

Maybe Hamden state Rep. Josh Elliott, challenging Governor Lamont’s renomination in the Democratic primary August 11, has their party perfectly figured out. Elliott speaks almost entirely of enlarging government, increasing its dependents, taxing and spending more, and giving government more power over the economy and society generally. 

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Elliott seems to presume that most Democrats who will vote in the primary are members of the government class or aspire to become members and that they can be convinced that he really will do more for them than Lamont has done, even as the governor often announces new subsidies for one group or another, also seeming to presume that the primary will be decided by the government class and its aspirants.

So is there any other constituency in the Democratic Party these days — like a constituency for plain old honest, efficient, transparent, and effective government, government that actually accomplishes what it purports to do?

This month an anti-poverty nonprofit organization in Waterbury, New Opportunities Inc., was found for the second time to have misused state money, this time nearly $3 million, to conceal various financial losses. The misconduct was discovered not by government auditors but only because last December electric utility Eversource reported that a check from the organization for $1.5 million, money for home heating assistance, had bounced.

Is this the only recent misuse of state money awarded in the name of alleviating poverty? The recent scandal of state grants arranged by state legislators as political patronage for nonprofit groups suggests that more auditing of state-financed nonprofits is in order.

A few days ago the state Medical Examining Board recommended canceling the $71,000-a-year disability pension of a Republican state senator, Paul Cicarella of North Haven, because he is not really disabled after all and for years has been earning good incomes in other jobs, including his legislative job, despite the supposedly disabling fall he suffered as a prison guard.

State Comptroller Sean Scanlon is trying to clean up the disability pension mess and it is said that Cicarella broke no law. But is it likely that he is the only former state employee to have exploited the laxity of the system? What would an in-person examination of all disability pensions find? No one seems to be calling for one.

There have been many scandals of mismanagement during Governor Lamont’s 7½ years in office — not necessarily more than in previous administrations but enough to constitute valid issues in the campaign for governor. Maybe Republicans will raise some eventually, but if Elliott doesn’t raise some in the Democratic primary — and he hasn’t done so yet, though the offender in the recent pension case is a Republican politician — the indifference may be taken as confirmation that no Democrat running for governor sees anything to be gained by making state government more honest and efficient.

At least the Yankee Institute has been noticing many financial management lapses in state and municipal government. 

Yankee’s Meghan Portfolio has even proposed that the General Assembly and governor should address these lapses with new legislation that she deliciously would name after former New Britain Mayor Erin Stewart, whose grifting with her city credit card was exposed just in time to prevent her from getting the Republican nomination for governor.

Portfolio would call it “ERIN’s Act” — the Expenditure Records and Information Notification Act. It would require executive branch agencies to post on the internet the purchases government officials make with government credit cards.

Portfolio notes that many recent reports by the state auditors have found misuse of such credit cards, sometimes even after misuse had been identified in previous audits, failures including “missing receipts, inadequate supporting documentation, unauthorized card users, untimely reconciliations, purchases lacking proper approval, split transactions, and failures to comply with established policies.”

Of course nothing can force government administrators to look at the credit card records they have been ignoring. But posting them on the internet at least would make what’s left of investigative reporting easier.

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

Poll finds strong undercurrent of dissatisfaction with Lamont

By CHRIS POWELL

Most political observers believe that Governor Lamont will win re-election easily, if the leftist faction of the Democratic Party doesn’t dump him in the primary for renomination in favor of Hamden state Rep. Josh Elliott.

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The governor is believed to be popular. He has great inherited wealth and can spend virtually infinite amounts on his campaign. President Trump is unpopular in Connecticut and though he is not on the ballot this year he is still expected to taint the entire Republican ticket. That ticket is undistinguished and its leader, Greenwich state Sen. Ryan Fazio, either is not yet making himself heard or else has little to say.

But while it received little notice, the most recent Nutmeg State poll, conducted by the University of New Hampshire Survey Center with 946 respondents, implied contrary possibilities.

On a general election ballot the poll gave the governor a solid lead over Fazio, 49% to 36%. But the governor’s job performance was approved by only 49% and disapproved by 44%. Only 21% strongly approved the governor’s performance.

More telling, poll respondents were evenly divided at 44% on whether Connecticut is heading in the right or wrong direction. Predictably, “right direction” drew 74% of Democrats while 87% of Republicans said “wrong direction.” But remarkably unaffiliated voters overwhelmingly responded “wrong direction,” 61% to 25% — and uaffiliated voters are the largest voter group in the state at 42%, 35% of voters being Democrats and just 22% being Republicans.

If the poll is valid, the state has a substantial constituency believing that, despite the many commercials already being broadcast by the governor’s campaign, happy days are not here again, a substantial constituency that might be receptive to alternative policies and personalities.

If Republicans ever tried to address this constituency the governor might have more to worry about than Elliott and his lefties.

Recent news reports have raised the questions of why political parties in Connecticut don’t have more primary elections and why the primaries we do have are “closed,” limited to party members, rather than “open,” primaries in which anyone can vote regardless of party affiliation.

The answer to the first question is terrible. The state’s political party organizations — municipal party committees — want to keep the nominating power close to themselves. They tend to resent what they see as interference by ordinary party members. That is, they resent democracy. 

So any candidate for a party nomination who is not favored by party committees can qualify for a primary only by winning 15% of the votes at a nominating convention or by collecting the signatures of party members on petitions and submitting them to municipal clerks or the secretary of the state. For any important nomination the number of signatures needed to qualify may be in the thousands. This process is usually tedious and expensive, so there aren’t many primaries.

There is one halfway valid reason for this undemocratic system: the danger that extremist candidates could win primaries by mobilizing a small minority of party members to vote while the great majority of party members aren’t paying attention and neglect to vote. The danger is real, but only because Connecticut has no habit of holding primaries. People aren’t used to them. Primaries are not a regular part of the electoral process every year.

That problem could be solved by making primaries automatic — by having them prior to every election, even if there is no formal competition for a nomination — while easing requirements for getting on the ballot. But this would entail the expense of a whole second election every year, and there may not be enough civic engagement left in the state to justify it.

As for “closed” primaries instead of “open” ones, primaries in which people who are not party members can vote facilitate political sabotage and indeed may make it impossible for any party to define itself. Since joining a party is so easy, just as leaving a party is, demanding only simple enlistment or resignation, “closed” primaries are no impediment to  democracy.   

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

Will Connecticut have a campaign or just Lamont’s commercials?

By CHRIS POWELL

Governor Lamont may have the campaign for governor all to himself. His vast wealth is being deployed again and is stuffing Connecticut’s airwaves and internet channels with commercials and deluging journalist e-mailboxes with press releases. 

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While the governor’s challenger in the Democratic primary, Hamden state Rep. Josh Elliott, has almost qualified for $3.75 million in state Citizen Election Program campaign funds, he hasn’t received the money yet and so hasn’t deployed it yet even as the primary is only six weeks away, on August 11. People who are eager for state government to grow and spend know that Elliott is their candidate and don’t need advertising to push them, but the volume of the governor’s advertising may be effective with other Democratic voters even if it never criticizes Elliott directly.  

Meanwhile the Republican nominee for governor, Greenwich state Sen. Ryan Fazio, lets most days go by without having anything to say, not even via “earned” news coverage. This is too bad, since news reports frequently expose mismanagement in state government. Even the governor’s press releases and commercials should prompt some talking back from his rivals but aren’t getting any.

For example, Lamont recently joined nine other governors in opposing federal legislation that would immunize oil and natural gas companies against state laws seeking to fine them for the pollution caused by use of their fuels. The silly rationale for these state laws is that oil and gas producers fooled the public into thinking that oil and gas are pollution-free, as if, since the industrial age began, nobody ever noticed what was coming out of smokestacks and tailpipes, and as if every state government and the federal government didn’t accept that pollution is the price of the most practical forms of energy and didn’t happily tax them rather than outlaw them.

Of course the oil and gas producers didn’t burn most of their fuels themselves. Ordinary people did — the constituents of the governors who, like Lamont, now want to blame the producers for pollution. Also, of course, those governors are not prepared to give their constituents much practical alternatives to oil and gas. They want to pretend that conventional fuels are the result of an evil conspiracy of plutocrats and not the result of longstanding policy.

Lamont and the other governors opposing the federal legislation to foreclose state laws punishing oil and gas producers are scapegoating and demagoguing. One proof of this is Lamont’s failure to propose legislation to prohibit use of oil and gas in Connecticut. Like the other governors opposing the federal legislation, Lamont doesn’t want to outlaw oil and gas and thereby stop pollution; he wants to tax them more in the name of recovering the damages of pollution, which could never be quantified specifically in regard to any particular producer.

Lamont is airing a commercial in which he claims to be protecting Connecticut against President Trump’s “chaos.” Trump is indeed producing chaos in Washington and around the world but Connecticut has plenty of its own chaos that has little to do with the president. 

Apart from all the mismanagement and even corruption in state government, every week brings the usual murders, shootings, and stabbings, as well as incidents of child abuse and neglect that are overwhelming the state’s child protection agency; more reckless and even crazed driving; fires in dilapidated housing in the impoverished cities; worsening drug and alcohol abuse; and more psychotic episodes from troubled people. Trump didn’t cause those things. Neither did the governor. But getting them under control in Connecticut is the governor’s responsibility, not Trump’s.  

Another Lamont commercial says he wants to end “corporate welfare.” But he has been governor for 7½ years and if Connecticut still has corporate welfare, he must approve of it. 

Connecticut should discuss these things. But the only thing Elliott seems to find wrong about state government is that it doesn’t spend enough enriching the government class. As for Fazio, for the state to know what he thinks, he’ll have to show up.     

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

Looks like Democrats oppose any immigration enforcement

By CHRIS POWELL

Democrats in Connecticut are always looking for opportunities to deplore the federal Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency. But this week they jumped on what looked like an opportunity before determining what it was really about. They might have been embarrassed if journalists followed up about it.

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It began when U.S. Rep. John B. Larson called a rally outside West Hartford Town Hall in support of a local businessman, Seyo Cecunjanin, who had been arrested and taken away by ICE agents nine days earlier as he exited a doughnut shop with his sons. Larson, joined by U.S. Sen. Richard Blumenthal, some state legislators, and a few others demanded Cecunjanin’s release, and Larson and one of the arrested man’s sons described the arrest’s circumstances, which included guns and big black cars with covered license plates.

But WTIC-AM1080 talk show host Reese Hopkins also had shown up at the rally, and unlike everyone else he had brought a critical question: Did anyone know exactly why ICE had arrested Cecunjanin?

No one did — not Larson, not Blumenthal, and none of the rally participants, including former Hartford Mayor Luke Bronin, who is challenging Larson in the Democratic primary for the party’s nomination in the 1st Congressional District, charging that Larson is too old and tired even as the rally was another proof that Larson is furiously running circles around him.

As good Democrats, they didn’t care why Cecunjanin was arrested. They came to the rally on the principle that any arrest by ICE is to be protested and in the confidence that as more illegal immigrants are admitted to the country or exempted from immigration law enforcement, the next census will lead to the creation of more Democratic-leaning congressional districts and fewer Republican-leaning ones. (It doesn’t matter that non-citizens aren’t supposed to vote; the Constitution requires that they be counted in the federal census for apportionment of congressional districts, and illegal immigrants concentrate in the Democratic “sanctuary” cities and states that subvert immigration law, states like Connecticut. With enough illegal immigrants, Democrats will have a majority in the U.S. House of Representatives forever.)

But if the rally had been postponed until Cecunjanin’s arrest was clarified, the Democrats might have not been as strident about it. ICE is usually slow to explain itself, but by the end of the day WFSB-TV3 had gotten a response. The agency said Cecunjanin, a native of Montenegro, was arrested because he came to the United States in March 1997 using a fraudulent Dutch passport and six months later an immigration judge had issued a final order of removal for him. Cecunjanin apparently had been violating the order for 29 years until last July, when he left for Serbia, returning two weeks later despite the removal order. In the meantime he racked up a conviction for drunken driving.    

“Cecunjanin has made a mockery of our immigration laws on several occasions for more than two decades,” ICE said.

What do Larson, Blumenthal, Bronin, and the other rally participants think about that? What do they think ICE should have done about Cecunjanin’s repeated violations of immigration law? Should ICE have ignored them because the people at the rally say Cecunjanin is a good guy, or because they think all immigration law violations should be ignored until the violators are convicted of mass murder? 

There was plenty of journalism about the rally. But it is unlikely to extend to critical follow-up questions. For critical follow-up questions about illegal immigration are politically incorrect in Connecticut.

No one would have needed any explanation from ICE to put a critical follow-up question to Blumenthal at the rally. He remarked that the immigration system is “gridlocked and dysfunctional.” He wasn’t asked why the system is overwhelmed and whose control of the federal government overwhelmed it with millions of illegal entrants and for what purpose.

Another follow-up question might be why the Democrats don’t just attempt candor and admit that their preferred solution to the problem they created is another mass amnesty, along with permanent Democratic control of the House.

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

Prisons, Attorney General Tong suppressed inmate death video

By CHRIS POWELL

Eight years after a mentally ill inmate was beaten to death by guards at the state prison in Newtown, last week a Superior Court judge ordered the public release of the video taken of the incident by the body cameras the guards wore. 

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The video confirms that the inmate, J’Allen Jones, serving a sentence for armed robbery, resisted a strip search preparatory to his transfer to a mental health unit at the prison and then suffered pepper spraying, chest compression, blunt trauma, and asphyxiation, the latter because the pepper-spraying aggravated his asthma, about which the guards say they didn’t know. The video also confirms that the guards were slow to respond to Jones’ loss of consciousness. He died as they at last tried to revive him.

While the guards handled the incident badly at least in regard to the pepper spraying, asthma, and delay in medical treatment, a prosecutor concluded that there was no criminal violation. Indeed, the guards kept telling Jones that they were trying to get him help, and Jones is dead in large part because he put up a fight against normal procedure. There is much mental illness among prisoners and dealing with it will always be a challenge.

But the Correction Department is doubly culpable here — not just because the guards failed to restrain the prisoner without killing him but also because the department tried for years to suppress the video of the incident on the bogus rationale that its disclosure would reveal secret prison security techniques. That’s one way of thinking about pepper-spraying a mentally ill man with asthma and putting a spit-mask over his head, preventing him not only from contaminating the guards with his saliva but also from getting enough air to overcome the potentially fatal pepper spray.

When the claim of secret security techniques was deemed unpersuasive in court, the department agreed to let journalists see the video but not have copies of it, a gross contradiction of Connecticut’s freedom-of-information law. If you’re entitled to see a public record, you’re entitled to make a copy of it so others can see it as well. The department and state Attorney General William Tong, whose office represented it, were obviously afraid of the possible consequences of letting the whole state see the video.

This cover-up was disgraceful and against the public interest as well as FOI law, but Tong defended and facilitated it throughout the case even though on most days he can be found thumping his chest in front of other cameras posing as the savior of humanity. 

Yes, the attorney general is obliged to represent the Correction Department and most state agencies, but not to the point of indecency and breaking the right-to-know law. Sad case as he was, J’Allen Jones was part of humanity too, and the public interest is overwhelming in being able to see what happens in closed government institutions where direct public access is impossible and state power is largely unchecked and unaccountable. Otherwise prisons become dungeons and creators of huge potential financial liability for the public, like the liabilities that may result from the Jones family’s lawsuit against the state claiming damages for his mistreatment.

The video of Jones’ last moments will become evidence in that lawsuit, and as long as Connecticut continues to abide by the state and federal constitutional requirements for public trials, the video will also become accessible to the public through the lawsuit. The attorney general should have figured as much even as he was maneuvering to prevent the video’s release. 

Thanks to some guerilla journalism, the video has been posted on the internet but of course even its wide distribution may make no difference. Prisoners are seldom sympathetic characters and it seems that little can be done about mental illness anyway. But “attention must be paid,” if only for our own sake, since, as Justice Felix Frankfurter wrote, “the safeguards of liberty” — everyone’s liberty — “have frequently been forged in controversies involving not very nice people.”   

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

A state tax credit for renters won’t ease Connecticut’s housing shortage

By CHRIS POWELL

Connecticut is not likely to get any time soon the 120,000 additional housing units the state is said to need desperately to bring prices down, but the state’s political left has a terrible idea that may raise housing costs instead. It would have state government spend as much as $575 million each year to pay part of every residential tenant’s rent.

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The idea, promoted by a left-wing public-policy organization called the Connecticut Project and supported by many Democratic state legislators, would give renters a tax credit of as much as $2,500 per year — probably more than many of them pay in state taxes. This proposal is rationalized as making the state’s tax system more progressive. But it’s more like another welfare subsidy.

A tax credit for renters won’t bring rents down. To the contrary, it will help landlords keep rents up. If the tax credit, a rent subsidy, makes tenants more able to pay, they will agree to pay more in rent and landlords will discover that they can charge more. Indeed, landlords will be the ultimate recipients of the subsidy, quite without anyone’s having to create more housing. 

The only thing that will reduce housing prices is more supply — that is, a lot more housing construction. Connecticut lately has been trying to achieve more construction with a law that restricts municipalities from blocking inexpensive housing with exclusive zoning, but that law seems likely to require many years before it meets more than the ordinary annual increase in housing demand. In that case the state’s need for 120,000 new housing units will keep being pushed into the future and become perpetual.

The rent tax credit idea is popular with liberals because it lets them pretend to do something about the housing shortage without actually building any housing that might risk offending people who already have adequate housing, who don’t want their towns to get more crowded, and who fear, reasonably enough, that inexpensive housing will import poverty and cause higher welfare and school costs (particularly with “special education”), costs that won’t be covered by new taxable property or state financial aid.

There is a way to get a lot of middle-class housing built with relative speed but without frightening the neighbors too much, as well as without tearing up and covering more of the countryside with suburban sprawl. 

For Connecticut is full of already developed land, especially in its cities and inner suburbs, that is unused or underused — industrial buildings, office buildings, and shopping centers — property already served by streets, electric lines, and water, sewer, and natural gas pipes. What is lacking is only a government that can take all these properties in hand by negotiated purchase or condemnation, control their zoning, publicize their availability to housing developers, and supervise the development plans and timetables to give the projects urgency.

In Singapore, the multi-ethnic city-state that is the pearl of Asia, the government is in charge of arranging for housing needs to be met and has succeeded spectacularly. The government does the planning and zoning and works with developers to get the housing built. Singapore’s housing developments — mostly condominiums — are beautiful and incorporate shopping centers, schools, transit connections, and civic spaces. In effect everyone’s housing in Singapore is subsidized by the government and nearly everyone who wants to own his housing can do so. An astounding 90% of Singapore’s residents own their own homes. Not surprisingly, there are no slums. 

There is also little poverty, income inequality, crime, and racial tension in Singapore, healthy social conditions that may arise from government’s having solved both the housing problem and the education problem. (Most Singaporeans are highly educated, perhaps because, also unlike Connecticut, the city-state’s schools enforce academic standards and don’t operate by social promotion.)

Connecticut doesn’t have to socialize housing as much as Singapore does. But it needs to build it, and fast. Housing subsidies that don’t actually build housing will just worsen the shortage and let politicians get away with pretending that their timidity has solved the problem.

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

Fix Connecticut’s big problems before trying to seize utilities

By CHRIS POWELL

In principle there’s nothing wrong with government ownership of electricity, water, and gas delivery utilities, since they are natural monopolies. People building a state or country from scratch might do best to start that way — if they have the necessary capital. 

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But lacking the necessary capital, Connecticut did not start that way and now its basic electricity infrastructure is already in place. So advocating municipal government ownership of electric utilities, as Hamden state Rep. Josh Elliott is doing in his challenge to Governor Lamont in the Democratic primary, is a silly distraction from the state’s far more compelling problems. Elliott’s idea is just a way for him to display his leftist inclinations and to demagogue against big utility companies, as if government isn’t far bigger and often far more exploitive.

Elliott would authorize municipalities to commandeer the electrical system within their borders through an eminent domain that would allow purchase to be made at less than market value of the property seized. This would be of doubtful constitutionality. But even such a steal still would require payments in the scores of millions of dollars, money that would have to be borrowed and repaid with interest for many decades, money municipalities often don’t have for their regular capital improvement needs. 

There also would be the challenge of management. The town would have to assemble a staff with a technical expertise it now lacks. 

There would be risk in separating the state’s electrical grid into smaller units. The state already has five municipalities with their own government-owned electric companies and it manages well enough with them, since most have been around for a century, having begun when electrification was new. But having more electric companies would diminish the economies of scale provided by statewide and regional electric companies.    

Establishing a municipal electric company would be doubly expensive because the new company, unlike investor-owned utilities, would be exempt from municipal property taxes, even as investor-owned utilities are the largest property taxpayers in most towns. Municipal electric companies are also unregulated by the state, so they provide less legal assurance of consumer protection.

Yes, electricity in Connecticut is nearly the most expensive in the country, but this is less because the electric utilities are shareholder-owned, strive to earn a profit, and pay some executives excessively than because inflation has increased energy costs generally, the state lacks adequate access to natural gas and won’t use coal, and because state government taxes electricity heavily with its lately infamous “public benefits” charges. 

While municipally owned electric utilities provide electricity cheaper, it’s in large part because they are exempt from property taxes and “public benefits” charges and don’t have regional service obligations as the major electric companies do. The municipal systems don’t generate their own electricity and would be lost if they could not obtain it by connecting to the regional electric companies.

This doesn’t mean that government ownership of utilities can’t be made to work in a broader way. It means that government’s acquisition of regional utilities or local components would be hugely expensive and that socializing them on a scattershot municipal basis, as Elliott contemplates, would be complicated, disruptive, and distracting to government without offering any guarantee of reducing electricity bills in the foreseeable future. 

Connecticut’s schools are failing the poor, remain largely segregated racially, and still cost more every year without improving their results. The state’s transportation system is creaky. The state has a desperate shortage of housing, and homelessness is rising. State government’s pension obligations remain grossly underfunded. Municipal property taxes keep rising, also without an improvement in services to the public. The state’s cost of living is soaring and no one in authority even tries to reduce the cost of government itself lest government’s employees be offended. 

So whether he is elected governor or is just re-elected to the General Assembly, Elliott should apply his socialist inclinations to those problems for a few years before trying to take the electricity business apart. Government in Connecticut has no competence to spare.

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

Governor goes retrograde with Medicaid penalty tax

By CHRIS POWELL

For many years a strong current of thought within the Democratic Party and liberalism has argued for breaking the connection between employment and medical insurance. Why, it is asked, should people be stuck in jobs they may not like just because those jobs are their most practical way of getting vital coverage? It is said they should have realistic, inexpensive alternatives. 

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The idea has been for government to create or facilitate mechanisms for people to get inexpensive medical insurance apart from an employer, either from government directly — what lately is called “the public option” — or with government subsidies for buying it, which is what the federal Affordable Care Act, “Obamacare,” is about.

It’s an important issue, since the United States is the only developed country to rely heavily on private employers to provide medical insurance. Indeed, in a television commercial this week for his campaign for renomination in the Democratic primary, Lamont called for a system of universal and affordable medical insurance.

But the commercial contradicted a legislative proposal he had made just days earlier. He proposed to tax large companies that don’t offer medical insurance to employees. The companies, the governor said, are “forcing their workers onto state public assistance, where taxpayers pick up the tab.” He would make large companies pay state government as much as $1,000 per year for each employee insured through the state’s Medicaid program.

Quite apart from tightening the link between employment and medical insurance, the governor’s premise is silly. No company “forces” its employees onto public assistance for medical insurance any more than any company “forces” people to work for it. Labor is free to choose both employment and medical insurance. If companies don’t offer insurance, it is probably because their employees are not highly skilled and not doing work covering the cost of both wages and insurance. 

Similarly, people take jobs without insurance because they lack the skills or desire to land better jobs.

Indeed, in recent years Connecticut’s schools, by social promotion, increasingly have produced graduates of low literacy and job skills, forwarding them to adulthood qualified only for menial work even as the state’s manufacturers complain that they can’t find enough skilled workers for well-paying jobs offering good insurance.

Besides, contrary to the governor’s presumption, an employer’s medical insurance policy is not automatically good. An employer policy may be so limited and its deductibles so high that people may prefer to chance going without medical insurance if they are holding a job they can tolerate well, even as they might get a job with insurance if they were willing to do work they don’t like.

In any case the governor’s proposal to tax companies that don’t offer insurance is hypocritical. For it would exempt nonprofit social service agencies that are state government contractors doing welfare work, agencies whose employees receive much less compensation than state government pays its direct employees. Compensating the nonprofit agency employees better would be a big expense the governor doesn’t want to incur lest he have to reduce the generous raises he is paying to state government’s direct employees, soldiers in the Democratic Party’s army.

The governor’s proposal is also hypocritical since insurance under the state’s own Medicaid program is poor. Many Medicaid recipients face long waits for treatment if they even can find a doctor willing to accept Medicaid’s low reimbursements.

Poverty has been worsening in Connecticut but it’s not because of big employers skimping on medical insurance, nor because wages for low-skilled labor are low, as they always will be.

Poverty is worsening in Connecticut because the federal government and state government are increasing the cost of living, and because state government has failed to arrange for enough housing construction, has abandoned educational standards, subsidizes and thereby increases child neglect, and keeps raising taxes, particularly property taxes, without improving public services.  

The governor’s scapegoating of big companies may help get him past the leftist challenge in the primary but it won’t make the state more prosperous. 

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

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