Hartford mayor’s solution is to wait for more bailouts

By CHRIS POWELL

Despite the claim made by former Hartford Mayor Luke Bronin’s congressional campaign that he had “straightened out” the city, his successor, Arunan Arulampalam, has found himself with a lot more straightening out to do. Hartford’s financial condition remains dire even after the $500 million state governor bailout enjoyed by Bronin’s administration.

Behind chronic absenteeism; and two mistaken rebuttals

Only one rationale remains for casinos in Connecticut

Here’s what Lamont calls ‘safe’; and Fazio’s half-hearted tax cap

Arulampalam fears that the city’s property revaluation, due to take effect in October, will devastate what’s left of Hartford’s homeowners, whose numbers city government is striving to increase.

The problem isn’t Arulampalam’s fault. It’s mainly a matter of inflation, technology, and state government’s mistaken policies. 

Inflation has driven up residential property valuations, which homeowners like in theory until they realize that they can’t benefit from a higher valuation until they sell their homes, until which time they must pay more in property taxes.  

State government’s long failure to facilitate enough housing construction has also driven up residential property values. After all, everyone who owns residential property has a financial incentive to keep housing scarce.

Then there is the simultaneous collapse of commercial property values as white-collar workers increasingly work from home. Downtown Hartford’s office towers are now half empty and while demand for housing is high, converting office buildings to housing is difficult and expensive. 

The collapse of office building valuations might not be so bad in Hartford if the Lamont administration hadn’t just defaulted again to the state employee unions about “telework,” failing to achieve a new master union contract that would have authorized state agencies to require employees to come back to their offices. The Lamont administration’s nominal policy is that state government employees are so efficient that they don’t need in-person supervision. The administration’s real policy is that it must capitulate to the unions on anything important to keep them supporting the Democratic Party in an election year.

Then state policy — collective bargaining for state and government municipal employees and binding arbitration of their contracts — makes it almost impossible for Hartford city government and all municipal governments to economize with their biggest expense, employee compensation. In effect state government policy is that when times get tough economically, financial sacrifice must fall exclusively on taxpayers. 

When he was Hartford’s mayor Bronin tried to get financial concessions from city employee unions, and he was denounced for it by his rival in the recent primary campaign for Democratic nomination for Congress in the 1st District. Bronin was called an enemy of organized labor for seeking those concessions, as if the only labor that counts is members of government employee unions, not people who work in the private sector, unionized or not. Bronin easily survived the charge and won the primary.

Quite apart from the impediments in state labor law, Hartford city government doesn’t try too hard to reduce its own expenses, as shown by the recent scandal in City Hall, where the recently resigned treasurer spent tens of thousands of dollars on luxury junkets. 

But Mayor Arulampalam’s solution to the looming disaster of Hartford’s property revaluation is just to delay it by a year. State government has authorized the delay and now it’s up to the City Council. This would perpetuate the unfairness to owners of business property, risk more real estate bankruptcies, and discourage business relocations to city properties whose valuations remain artificially high. 

Since business owners are a minority, they are easily sacrificed to solve the political problem. But sacrificing them won’t solve the city’s financial problem. The city always operates at a loss, dependent on frequent bailouts from state government through increased financial grants, often euphemized as “aid to education.” 

Arulampalam seems to think that if the revaluation is postponed a year, safely past this November’s state election, the city will get more bailouts from state government without having stirred up controversy and taxpayer fears and resentment during the campaigns for governor and the General Assembly, thereby helping the Democrats to retain power. The mayor may be right, if not courageous or imaginative. But then no hardly anyone in authority in Connecticut is.

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

Behind chronic absenteeism; and two mistaken rebuttals

By CHRIS POWELL

Chronic absenteeism in Connecticut’s schools fell substantially in the school year just ended, state officials announced last week. But their data shows the problem remains at what should be appalling levels in many places, especially the state’s cities, and the official diagnosis of the problem is incomplete.

Only one rationale remains for casinos in Connecticut

Here’s what Lamont calls ‘safe’; and Fazio’s half-hearted tax cap

Like Groucho, Connecticut won’t let education encroach on football

Students are classified as chronically absent if they miss 10% of their school days, and the new state average for chronic absenteeism is down to 16.4%. Officials attribute the decline in part to the state’s Learner Engagement and Attendance Program, in which school employees visit the homes of chronically absent students, inquire about problems, and offer help. It’s basically social work. This is said to address the “root causes” of chronic absenteeism.

As might be expected, the new data shows that chronic absenteeism correlates heavily with a community’s poverty. Hartford’s rate is 33%, New Britain and Bridgeport are at 30%, New Haven 28%, Norwich and New London 25%, and Waterbury 22%. In turn poverty correlates with family dysfunction and demoralization.

But Connecticut and the country have always had poverty, and today’s high levels of chronic absenteeism are new. So what changed?

First, government stopped enforcing student truancy laws and policies. Today there are no penalties for parents who fail to see that their children get to school. 

And second, educational standards were eliminated and replaced with social promotion. Now there are no tests for advancement and graduation. Nearly all students are advanced from grade to grade and given high school diplomas irrespective of learning, and they and their parents know this. While schooling grows ever more expensive to taxpayers, there are no reprimands or penalties for treating it with contempt.

So why should the demoralized attend school consistently if advancement and graduation will follow anyway if they don’t? This policy may be the biggest “root cause,” but educators and elected officials don’t dare to address it.

* * *

Two recent columns of mine were criticized falsely last week in replies by elected officials.

The first column, questioning whether southeastern Connecticut is ready for the massive expansion of employment for submarine construction at Electric Boat, was criticized in an essay by U.S. Rep. Joe Courtney. Courtney’s essay stressed the region’s efforts with workforce training. But my column never cited workforce training. Its references to unpreparedness involved only housing and transportation.

The second column, criticizing Connecticut’s new law restricting police officers from getting near polling places, was denounced in an essay by Stamford state Rep. Matt Blumenthal.

Blumenthal wrote: “Powell writes that our new law ‘forbids police officers from getting within 250 feet of a polling place.’ Not so. State and local police can do their jobs just as they always have. The law’s catch-all exception says just that: All a department or officer needs is the permission of the moderator or the secretary of the state.”

But the column explicitly acknowledged the exception. It said: “The law forbids police officers from getting within 250 feet of a polling place unless they are responding to a serious emergency or their presence is approved by an election moderator.” Blumenthal deceptively omitted the latter part of that sentence.

Continuing, Blumenthal claimed that the new law has no application to state and local police. He wrote: “What does the law actually do? It stops federal agents and troops — people with no lawful role in Connecticut elections — from being stationed at polling places to intimidate voters.”

But Blumenthal simultaneously noted that Connecticut Secretary of the State Stephanie Thomas issued state and local police a partial exemption from the law. She wouldn’t have done that if the law didn’t apply to state and local police, an application Blumenthal now strangely denies.

In any case state law can’t restrict the disposition of federal agents and troops, since the Constitution establishes the supremacy of the federal government in such matters. Otherwise General Sherman never would have taken Atlanta and the South would have won the Civil War with a simple court injunction.

There was nothing inaccurate or misleading about either column.

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

Only one rationale remains for casinos in Connecticut

By CHRIS POWELL

Back in the 1990s several rationales were offered when Connecticut approved its two Indian tribal casinos following enactment of the federal Indian Gaming Regulatory Act.

Here’s what Lamont calls ‘safe’; and Fazio’s half-hearted tax cap

Like Groucho, Connecticut won’t let education encroach on football

Public campaign financing has yet to improve the state

First was that since neighboring states had no casinos and did not seem to want any, Connecticut’s casinos might draw far more customers from out of state than from in state and thus collect more gambling tax revenue from them than from the state’s own residents.

Second was that the casinos, opened on tribal land in the sparsely populated eastern part of the state, would boost the area economically.

And third was social justice. The casinos were portrayed as mechanisms of reparations for the mistreatment of the ancient Pequot and Mohegan people by the European culture that nearly destroyed them.

The third rationale was bogus. The last Pequots and Mohegans who had been mistreated by the Connecticut colony and its successor state died a century or more before Indian casino gambling was established. While members of Indian tribes in Western states were still suffering segregation and poverty, people of Indian descent in Connecticut long had been integrated into society and were living like everyone else.

But that didn’t matter, for the social justice rationale corresponded with the advent of political correctness and gave people the impression that casinos were good if their owners were distant descendants of people who had been treated badly. Political correctness also gave the impression that anyone who objected to government’s basing patronage on ethnicity was racist. This was intimidating and effective.

Now the first and second rationales for casino gambling in Connecticut have collapsed as well.

There are 20 other casinos in New England — two in Maine, 13 in New Hampshire, three in Massachusetts, and two in Rhode Island. There are five in New York State. Connecticut’s two casinos increasingly draw their patrons from within the state’s own borders.

As a result, they have started taking more out of the state’s economy than they add to it. The two casinos still have thousands of employees, but they are sustained mainly by tens of thousands of customers who are Connecticut residents, people who, but for casino gambling in the state, might spend their entertainment money elsewhere in the state or at out-of-state casinos — or even save it.

Casino gambling always has been a mechanism of taking money from the many and giving it to the few — casino owners and their employees, with government skimming some in taxes. Connecticut got around that at the outset with its regional monopoly on casinos. But no more. Economically Connecticut’s casinos now redistribute money from the bottom to the top of the income scale in the state as most forms of gambling do — and the other day the Hearst Connecticut newspapers calculated that the money being redistributed is in the many billions of dollars.

According to the Hearst report, legal gamblers in Connecticut have lost at least $56 billion since 1993, an amount that doesn’t include casino table games. Now that Connecticut has authorized internet gambling — from which the Indian casinos are paid a tribute for sharing their duopoly — Hearst calculates that in the last five years gamblers in Connecticut have lost $922 million via FanDuel, Draft Kings, and Fanatics.

Since politics in Connecticut is so left-wing and sanctimonious, it might be expected to ask a few questions here, what with billions being transferred from the many to the few in an undertaking that produces so little value, and with gambling addiction exploding, destroying lives and families and causing ever-more bankruptcies.

But no questions are asked, perhaps because, as the Hearst report notes, state government’s total take from gambling — from the state lottery, started in 1972, to the slot machine tax — has reached $22 billion, and gambling revenue is now 2.5% of the state budget.

That much money for government seems able to salve most liberal consciences, no matter how it’s obtained. It’s now the only rationale for casino gambling in Connecticut. 

—

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

-END-

Here’s what Lamont calls ‘safe’; and Fazio’s half-hearted tax cap

By CHRIS POWELL

Governor Lamont’s campaign in the Democratic primary for governor often broadcast a television commercial emphasizing a comment he made during his welcoming address to the General Assembly in February. Referring to agents of the federal Immigration and Customs Enforcement Agency, the governor commanded: “ICE, go home! We’re keeping Connecticut safe without you.”

Like Groucho, Connecticut won’t let education encroach on football

Public campaign financing has yet to improve the state

Despite CEA’s backing Lamont, many teachers may pick Elliott

Within a week of the governor’s easy victory in the primary, these headlines appeared in Connecticut newspapers:

Hartford Courant: “One person gunned down, four others also shot amid ‘very large crowd’ in Hartford.”

New Haven Independent: “2 die in 2 unrelated downtown stabbings.”

New Haven Register: “New Haven man accused of killing ex-girlfriend threatened to stab her days earlier.”

Connecticut Post: “Person slashed in Bridgeport attack on Railroad Avenue” and “17-year-old charged with murder in killing of Connecticut basketball standout.”

Of course this was just another week in Connecticut and the horrible incidents it produced are considered normal. So while the state may not need federal immigration agents to keep it safe, maybe only a governor seeking re-election could imagine that the state is any safer under his administration than it was under his predecessors, or any safer than it would be with someone else as governor.

Meanwhile the Republican candidate for governor, Greenwich state Sen. Ryan Fazio, has been saying he wants to “cap” municipal property taxes. It’s a lovely idea but there’s not much capping in his proposal.

With property tax rates varying widely, a single rate for all municipalities would either devastate high-taxed municipalities by draining their revenue or provide little restraint to municipalities with low or average rates. So Fazio proposes that state law limit property tax increases to the rate of inflation or 2% annually, except when a municipal referendum votes by a supermajority to suspend the limit for a year.

This wouldn’t really “cap” property taxes. At best it would just slow their steady rise.

Neither Fazio nor most others who complain about property taxes note the bigger underlying issue. That is, most property tax revenue is used to pay unionized municipal employees. If property taxes were ever really “capped,” then the compensation of those employees would be capped as well, provoking controversy, insofar as municipal government employee unions are the largest and most influential local special interests.

Fazio’s proposal dodges the big issue of the local tax burden. 

If referendums on larger property tax increases are OK, why not just require referendums on all property tax increases and even municipal employee union contracts? This would be far more effective in restraining and democratizing property taxes. Transferring the taxing power directly to the people would also relieve municipal elected officials of a big responsibility they don’t want, and diminish the power over them held by the special interest.

The ultimate reform for municipal government in Connecticut would be for state law to create in every city and town the elected office of arbiter of government employee union contracts. Under Connecticut’s binding arbitration law, such contracts now can be settled by unelected arbiters who almost always favor unions over taxpayers. 

That is, in Connecticut the biggest expenses in both state and municipal government, and the biggest political issue in municipal government — property taxes — are removed from the ordinary democratic process and settled by someone who answers to no one. 

This system — a system of taxation without representation — was in effect in Connecticut 250 years ago and the colony joined a revolution to overthrow it, only to disenfranchise itself two centuries later. 

The public needs some clarity on these issues and only Fazio can provide it during the campaign. 

Last week he and the governor spoke to a convention of state employee union leaders. The public and journalists were excluded but Fazio says he stressed a governor’s responsibility to taxpayers. The unions constitute the Democratic Party’s army and the governor promised them raises every year forever.

If Republicans think that trying to make nice with the other side’s army will help them, they have already lost the election.

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

Like Groucho, state won’t let education encroach on football

By CHRIS POWELL

Having smiled benignly at Hartford Public High School’s graduation of an admittedly illiterate and innumerate student two years ago, Governor Lamont and the General Assembly this year passed a law formally lowering academic standards in public high schools.

Public campaign financing has yet to improve the state

Despite CEA’s backing Lamont, many teachers may pick Elliott

Primary campaign shows Lamont frantically pandering to leftists

It was almost as if they were re-enacting the 1932 Marx Brothers movie “Horse Feathers,” in which Groucho becomes a college president and declares to the faculty: “This college is a failure. The trouble is, we’re neglecting football for education.” He proceeds accordingly.

But “Horse Feathers” was a parody. Governor Lamont and state legislators are supposed to be operating in real life.

Connecticut’s Hearst newspapers reported last week that the new law forbids public high schools from enforcing academic standards for student athletes that are higher than the standards set by the Connecticut Interscholastic Athletic Conference, standards that are laughably low. The CIAC standards require student athletes to pass just four classes per grading period even as most students must take six classes in a grading period if they are to graduate on time. Under the CIAC standards, a student taking six classes can receive four D grades and two F grades and remain eligible for varsity sports.

But until now Connecticut high schools have been free to enforce higher standards, and many have done so, as by requiring a minimum grade average of C or by disqualifying students if they fail even one class. 

Under the new law, higher standards will be forbidden.

State Rep. Jason Rojas, D-East Hartford, the House majority leader, says the lower standards are necessary to be fair to students from poor households and to encourage them to stay in school to preserve their connection to the one thing they like about it — sports. 

But what is the point of staying in school if a student is going to graduate uneducated? What incentive does a sports-loving student have to become educated when standards for participation are essentially eliminated? Only one high school athlete in a thousand has a chance of making a living as a professional athlete even for a few years.

The new law emphasizes to student athletes what most high school students in Connecticut already know: that they will be advanced from grade to grade and given a diploma even if they learn nothing. Now student athletes will be told that they can be completely ignorant and still enjoy the honor of wearing their school’s uniform.

Of course, as “Horse Feathers” suggests, this is an old racket. But back then it wasn’t as damaging. Sports were not as big a business, schools weren’t yet corrupted by political correctness, the world wasn’t as competitive economically with the United States, and society had self-respect. 

In his campaign commercials Governor Lamont proclaims that Connecticut has the best schools in the country. Someone should ask him how his assertion squares with the new law requiring high schools to dumb their students down. And even if Connecticut still has the best schools in the country, God help the country.

* * *

STATE ALREADY LOSES WEALTHY: Will wealthy people leave Connecticut if their taxes are raised substantially? 

The state’s 19 billionaires may be less sensitive to taxes to some degree, since they have so much money. But what is that degree? Tax too much and anyone will depart.

In any case Connecticut long has had a problem with people departing because of high taxes and the state’s high cost of living generally. Florida, with no state income tax, and other Southern states with lower taxes are full of former Connecticut residents from the middle and upper classes. Migration is not entirely a matter of warmer winters, since many former Connecticut residents keep their homes here and return in the summer.

Connecticut’s population wouldn’t be growing at all but for the illegal immigration state government facilitates.

Raising taxes isn’t the only way for state government to address more public needs. Improving government’s efficiency would be better, if politically impossible as long as state government operates mainly as a pension and benefit society.

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

Public campaign financing has yet to improve the state

By CHRIS POWELL

Connecticut’s system of “public” financing of election campaigns, the Citizens Election Program, established in 2005 under Gov. Jodi Rell, still sounds good in principle. Candidates for state office who restrict themselves to small donations and raise a threshold amount qualify for fairly substantial grants of campaign money from state government. 

Connecticut Democrats fear police at the polls more than lawbreakers

Despite CEA’s backing Lamont, many teachers may pick Elliott

Primary campaign shows Lamont frantically pandering to leftists

The idea was to encourage more people of ordinary means to seek public office and to discourage candidates from selling themselves for special-interest campaign money. It was hoped that the system would increase diversity among elected officials, especially state legislators, who had come disproportionately from the ranks of lawyers, bankers, business executives, and retired people, and increase political competition.

The system does seem to have increased the diversity of legislators a bit. But it has not made state politics more competitive, state government more effective, or legislators less susceptible to special-interest influence.

Indeed, Rell, who left office in January 2011, was Connecticut’s last Republican governor, and since the Citizens Election Program started Democrats have steadily controlled both the governor’s office and both houses of the General Assembly, with one slight exception, in 2017-18, when the Senate was evenly divided at 18. Then the two parties agreed to share Senate patronage, and the lieutenant governor was a Democrat who, as presiding officer, could decide ties in the party’s favor.

Just as disappointing, the legislature seems as submissive to special interests as ever, especially to the government employee unions, the Democratic Party’s army. State employee union support helps negate the small-d democratic aim of the Citizens Election Program, since union members provide campaign assistance that is often more useful than financial donations — the donation of personal time by union members to work in Democratic campaigns. State government employees receive huge amounts of discretionary paid time off, and when they use it to help Democratic campaigns, it’s both a kickback and a hidden and one-sided form of government campaign financing.

But people in Connecticut don’t seem as thrilled with Democratic administration as the party’s overwhelming control of state government suggests. Poverty long has been worsening and state government’s response has been only to put more people on welfare. Even ordinary Democrats are complaining about the state’s ever-increasing cost of living. (Housing costs cause many complaints, even as many complainers oppose housing construction anywhere near them.)

Connecticut’s Republican opposition is weak but largely because it has had little of substance to say. The cost of its employees is state government’s biggest expense and state employment is full of excesses that might offend voters if politicians highlighted them. But most Republicans are as scared of the unions as Democrats are subservient to them.

Maybe nothing will make any difference. But what would be the harm if a candidate for state office campaigned simply with 60-second television and radio commercials in which he made presentations about government policy and the choices necessary to improve Connecticut? No fancy graphics, happy or sinister sound effects, and no pandering, just an attempt to be thoughtful and candid and to discern and appeal to the public interest. 

It sure would be different anyway.

MORE ON CHILD FATALITY: A few weeks ago this column complained that the state Department of Children and Families and the Manchester Police Department had offered no account of their investigation into the death of a 3-year-old girl, Akari Cortes, who was struck and killed by a car as she crossed a street unaccompanied just before dawn on June 10. But DCF Commissioner Susan I. Hamilton made a statement last week:

“At the time of the incident, the department was investigating two reports alleging lack of supervision. During those investigations the family installed additional door locks to prevent Akari from leaving the home without adult supervision. However, there was continued lack of supervision resulting in this fatality, and the parents have been substantiated for physical neglect. The case remains open, and the other children are safely placed with a relative.”

So while journalism may have forgotten the little girl, at least DCF hasn’t.

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

Connecticut Democrats fear police at the polls more than lawbreakers

By CHRIS POWELL

Given Connecticut’s worsening social disintegration, most people are probably glad to see police officers  patrolling on foot or in cruisers. Residents of cities, where crime is worst, often ask for more police visibility.

Despite CEA’s backing Lamont, many teachers may pick Elliott

Primary campaign shows Lamont frantically pandering to leftists

Can eastern Connecticut get ready in time for its future?

But Connecticut’s Democratic state legislators and even Governor Lamont lately seem to consider police officers more as perpetrators of misconduct than as protectors against it. 

Last week the Hartford Courant reported about a new state law that got little attention when the General Assembly passed it and the governor signed it this year. The law forbids police officers from getting within 250 feet of a polling place unless they are responding to a serious emergency or their presence is approved by an election moderator.

The Democrats say ordinary police presence at polling places might cause disruption, especially because the Trump administration may send immigration agents there. 

While arrests by state or federal officers anywhere can be disruptive, officers are authorized to make arrests anywhere and polling places should be secure. In any case since Connecticut forbids state and municipal police from assisting federal immigration agents in most respects, disruption at polling places by state and municipal officers in immigration matters is not going to be a problem.

So the Democrats have to pretend that it would be. Stamford state Rep. Matt Blumenthal says that while “we have no reason to believe that state and local law enforcement would engage in any misconduct like that, we want to send a message here in Connecticut that this sort of conduct will not be tolerated.”

Apparently the Democrats could think of no way of letting police officers know that their misconduct at polling places would not be tolerated other than by prohibiting them from getting near one. So what about police misconduct at other places, like town halls, schools, supermarkets, and power and water plants? Should cops be banned there too? 

There are good reasons for police to patrol polling places. Politics can get heated. Arguments can develop between voters, between voters and poll workers, and between campaign workers for competing candidates. Crowded parking lots present easy targets for burglary and vandalism. After all, if cops on the beat are deterrents to crime, any location may benefit from having one around or stopping by.

So what’s really going on with the new law?

It’s the consequence of the Democratic Party’s having become, especially in Connecticut, the party of open borders and using illegal immigration to rig legislative districting in the party’s favor. So the Democrats purport to believe that the mere sight of a police officer at a polling place will scare away some of the party’s supporters. With the new law being so excessive and ridiculous, the Democrats protest too much. They have given their scheme away.

SEN. MURPHY’S RECKLESSNESS: President Trump started the war with Iran with a sneak attack and has been waging war with no more authorization than Congress’ refusal to cut off its money. This is typical Trumpian recklessness.

But too much can be made of it, since the United States and Iran long have been waging undeclared war against each other. Since Iran’s regime is theocratic and fascist, almost anything that destroys it would do humanity a favor, and whether Americans like it or not, the war is underway with much at stake.

That’s why Connecticut U.S. Sen. Chris Murphy’s stance on the war is so irresponsible. He says the United States should end it “unilaterally,” giving Iran control of the choke points of the world’s oil supply and leaving longstanding U.S. allies at Iran’s mercy — not just those near Iran but all that import oil.

Murphy thus would facilitate the greatest victory for totalitarianism since World War II. 

Iran needn’t be militarily occupied. It should be neutered and blockaded until it gets a less threatening government. With some patience and courage the United States and its allies can accomplish that. 

Murphy imagines himself presidential timber while he is as reckless and weak as Trump and naive besides.

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

Despite CEA’s backing Lamont, many teachers may pick Elliott

By CHRIS POWELL

Connecticut’s largest teacher union, the Connecticut Education Association, has endorsed Governor Lamont for renomination in the Democratic primary and re-election in November. “Governor Lamont’s partnership with the education community has strengthened our schools and our profession,” CEA President Kate Dias says.

Primary campaign shows Lamont frantically pandering to leftists

Can eastern Connecticut get ready in time for its future?

Will state ever reduce poverty or just keep manufacturing it?

Connecticut’s schools are always getting more money from state government. But whether that has “strengthened” them or just the teacher unions is a fair question, since in recent years student proficiency has correlated inversely with rising school spending and teacher compensation. 

The dirty little secret of education in Connecticut remains that student proficiency is mostly a matter of parenting and enforcement of academic standards, and no one who reveals the secret stands a chance in politics, since that would set both the teacher unions and parents against him. The governor won’t be revealing the secret, especially not while being challenged from his party’s extreme left by Hamden state Rep. Josh Elliott, who promises salvation to the government class — a lot more taxation and spending.

Indeed, most CEA members who are Democrats might vote for Elliott despite their union’s endorsement of the governor. 

The New Haven teachers union, an affiliate of the state’s second largest teachers union, the American Federation of Teachers, has endorsed Elliott in the delusion that the city’s schools perform so terribly because of a lack of spending. 

But nearly a third of New Haven’s students are chronically absent from school and about half are living in single-parent households, so their academic performance would not improve even if their teachers each were paid a million dollars per year. Elliott wants them to keep dreaming that student proficiency is just a money problem, state government’s failure to liquidate Connecticut’s 19 billionaires.

All this is especially unfortunate, since teachers see the state’s social disintegration more intimately than anyone else except maybe police officers and social workers for the state Department of Children and Families. Teachers may be not only best-positioned but also most trusted to tell state residents what’s really going on, not just in schools but in homes and on streets, and to pose questions like: Why should kids go to school and why should parents bother to get them there when they will be promoted from grade to grade and given a high school diploma even if they learn nothing? 

You can keep telling parents that, as in Lake Wobegon, all their children are above average, but the more that parents are told this, the more of a shock awaits everyone when the kids reach adulthood and the real world. 

But then with binding arbitration of their union contracts, tenure, and exemption of their evaluations from disclosure under the state’s freedom-of-information law, Connecticut’s teachers are as removed from accountability as students and parents are. Teachers have no incentive to change that for anyone.

Elsewhere on the social disintegration front, a member of the Hartford City Council, Alex Thomas, a former youth pastor, recently pleaded guilty to stealing $15,000 from his church and laundering the money. But he plans to remain on the council anyway. 

The judge suspended Thomas’ prison sentence, so he won’t have to miss any council meetings, and there is no clamor in the city for him to resign.

* * *

AUDIT FOR ILLEGAL VOTERS: Not that anyone in authority wants to find out, but there might be a simple way of discovering whether illegal immigrants have registered to vote in Connecticut. 

Secretary of the State Stephanie Thomas could commission an audit of the more than 60,000 “drive-only” licenses issued by the Motor Vehicles Department to people who chose not to affirm that they are citizens. The audit would check the names and addresses on the licenses against the voter rolls. 

The same could be done with the more than 10,000 identification cards New Haven city government has issued to help illegal residents pose as legal. This audit might be more difficult, since city government keeps the ID card list secret to protect lawbreakers, but maybe it could be subpoenaed.

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

Primary campaign shows Lamont frantically pandering to leftists

By CHRIS POWELL

In the demagoguery festival that is the Democratic primary for governor, Governor Lamont shouts, “ICE isn’t getting our voter rolls!” 

Can eastern Connecticut get ready in time for its future?

Will state ever reduce poverty or just keep manufacturing it?

Governor Lamont ignores more misconduct by state police

But the secretary of the state’s office confirms that Connecticut’s voter rolls are public records subject to disclosure under the state’s freedom-of-information law, with driver’s license and Social Security numbers redacted along with the day and month of a voter’s birth. An electronic list of all voters, minus the redacted details, is available for $300. As with other public records, anyone should be able to inspect the list without charge. 

So what’s the problem if the federal Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency should get a copy of Connecticut’s voter rolls? After all, as ICE recognizes, the voter rolls would be a good place to go looking for all sorts of lawbreakers, as would a list of the driver’s licenses issued by state government, and especially a list of the special driver’s licenses issued by state government to people who confess that they are not U.S. citizens, the “drive-only” licenses issued by state government to facilitate illegal immigration. 

Another good place to look for lawbreakers would be the list of recipients of the identification cards issued by New Haven city government since 2007, documents also issued to facilitate illegal immigration.

It’s hard to see how disclosing these lists to the federal government would be an invasion of privacy, as is sometimes maintained by leading Democrats. The federal government already has the Social Security numbers and birthdates of people enrolled in Social Security even as millions of people are using false or stolen numbers to evade identification requirements, and the “drive-only” licenses are themselves evidence of crime.

The governor’s campaign is broadcasting commercials showing him addressing ICE during his speech to the General Assembly in February, saying: “ICE, go home. We’re keeping Connecticut safe without you.”

That was more demagoguery, since it implied that the federal government enforces immigration law on the false premise that most illegal immigrants are largely criminals in ways other than their breaking immigration law. In fact, on average these days illegal immigrants may be better behaved than the native-born.

But many illegal immigrants are criminals and the country deserves protection against them. The country also deserves to have everyone coming here, even as a mere tourist, to be at least nominally reviewed for suitability and safety. 

Beyond that, the country deserves having all entrants aspiring to stay here evaluated for their readiness to support a democratic and secular government with equal rights for all and their readiness to assimilate into the country’s culture rather than to try to turn it toward the theocratic fascism and ethnic and religious hatreds that now infect Western Europe as the result of its own open-borders catastrophe.

Frantically capitulating and pandering to the leftist fanatics who seem to be taking over his party, the governor has been essentially proclaiming that even basic immigration law is illegitimate and should not be enforced. He also has been busily traversing the state distributing or promising more seemingly free stuff to hungry Democrats. This week his administration promised to give laptop computers to welfare recipients, purchased with federal money left over from the virus epidemic rescue package five years ago. That political slush fund endures. 

The governor’s campaign ads boast that he has the courage to stand up to President Trump. But that hardly takes courage in overwhelmingly Democratic Connecticut, where Republicans are few and most are sulking because the president is so megalomaniacal, reckless, and ill-mannered, even if not always wrong on policy. As his support for illegal immigration shows, the governor lacks the courage to stand up to those in his own party who want to turn Connecticut into a people’s republic.

Pushing Lamont in that direction was always the point of Hamden state Rep. Josh Elliott’s challenge to the governor’s renomination. While Elliott is unlikely to wrest the nomination from Lamont in the primary next week, as a practical matter he may have already won.

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

Can eastern Connecticut get ready in time for its future?

By CHRIS POWELL

Fifty-six years ago Alfred M. Bingham of Salem, an elderly liberal lawyer and author with a national reputation whose father had been a U.S. senator from Connecticut in the 1920s, sought the Democratic nomination for Congress from eastern Connecticut. Bingham didn’t get the nomination but unlike many candidates he tried to think seriously and say what he thought. The most notable thing he said was that he didn’t think the people of eastern Connecticut were happy that massive instruments of death kept being built in and sailing out of New London harbor.

Will state ever reduce poverty or just keep manufacturing it?

Governor Lamont ignores more misconduct by state police

Voter registration case is more than an anomaly

Back then liberals in Connecticut sometimes gave a second thought to their state’s economic dependence on the munitions industry. Of course without that industry the world might not have been saved from tyranny during the world wars, the Union might not have won the Civil War, and the American Revolution might have been lost. But maybe back then liberals, including Bingham, still remembered the remarkable lament President Dwight D. Eisenhower offered a few weeks after taking office in 1953. While Eisenhower was the foremost U.S. general of his time, he wouldn’t glorify the military business.

“Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed,” Eisenhower said. “This world in arms is not spending money alone. It is spending the sweat of its laborers, the genius of its scientists, the hopes of its children.” 

Leaving office eight years later Eisenhower warned more famously about the “military-industrial complex,” over which he had helped preside.

No second thoughts were expressed last week as Connecticut celebrated the U.S. Navy’s new $77 billion contract with the Electric Boat division of General Dynamics to build nine attack submarines and five ballistic missile submarines by 2038, largely at EB’s shipyards in Groton and Quonset Point, Rhode Island. Instead there were joy and even delirium, since the contract promises many years of prosperity and growth for southeastern Connecticut and redevelopment for its two impoverished cities, New London and Norwich.

Indeed, if Connecticut is not going to be chastened by such massive preparation for war, it at least should be chastened by what will have to be done, and fast, to get the submarines built here. EB has already hired 4,000 more employees so far this year and plans to hire another 12,000 by the end of next year. Where will they come from and where will they live?

Connecticut is notoriously deficient with housing, and together New London and Groton are reported to have increased their housing by only about 900 units in the last five years, an average of fewer than 200 per year. The new sub contract is being called a “signal” to housing developers about the opportunity awaiting them, but they don’t need a signal. A signal is needed by 20 or so municipal governments in the area, and if their usual zoning procedures are followed, southeastern Connecticut may require five years just to produce another 900 units when thousands more may be needed next year.

So state government should take charge not just of zoning in southeastern Connecticut but also local transportation, with commuter buses and even trains and ferries. 

The increasing aggressiveness of China, a ruthless totalitarian power, may justify the expansion and modernization of the U.S. submarine force and may fairly suppress concerns about the diversion of resources from human needs. But second thoughts still may be in order for eastern Connecticut. For the indefinite future life in the region will be based on war materiel and casino gambling. 

Better than nothing, perhaps, but the best that could be done? What if peace and good sense ever break out?

In any case, will anyone in authority in overwhelmingly Democratic Connecticut who is celebrating the submarine contract thank the people who most made this future possible — not just eastern Connecticut’s U.S. representative, Joe Courtney, a Democrat, but also President Trump and congressional Republicans?

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