‘Affordability’ in Connecticut this year will be just for government employees

By CHRIS POWELL

A brief chronology from the last four months may explain Connecticut’s political economy better than any so-called political scientist could.

Child’s suicide should prompt a review that goes beyond DCF

Property tax isn’t broken; our political backbone is

Party balloon litter is bad but ‘nip’ bottle litter is profit

In February, with the state’s high and ever-rising cost of living — its “affordability” — beginning to get political attention, Governor Lamont said state government was doing so well financially that it should bestow tax rebates of $200 on more than 2 million taxpayers, an expense that would total about $400 million. The governor’s proposal prompted much cynicism and derision, since the rebates would be delivered a few days before the election in November, in which Lamont will probably be the Democratic nominee for re-election. But at least the governor’s proposal was a token of respect for those paying government’s bills. 

But then the General Assembly convened and the major interests that rely on state government appropriations descended on the state Capitol. They maintained that their own affordability challenges were more compelling than those of mere taxpayers. 

The governor already had promised generous raises to the state employee unions, since government employees are the biggest component of his political party and the Democrats overwhelmingly control the legislature. So the governor negotiated and the legislature approved a new master union contract for the state employees, estimated to cost $675 million more over the next three years than is now being spent for their services.

Municipal government officials were well represented at the Capitol too, and the governor and legislative leaders promised them an extra $270 million in state financial aid, much of it for “education,” the euphemism for raises for unionized teachers, another big component of the Democratic Party. Most of the rest of the extra aid will cover raises for other unionized municipal employees, another Democratic-leaning group. 

These raises are euphemized as “contractual obligations” as if the obligations are forces of nature or acts of God, beyond the control of mere mortals, though municipal elected officials helped write and agreed to the contracts imposing the obligations.

So when the legislative session was through, the governor’s proposal for $200 rebates for taxpayers had disappeared. He didn’t fight for it. He was persuaded to abandon it by a more accurate political calculation — that the unionized government employees pay far more attention than taxpayers do and would notice and act on the extra money much more than taxpayers would.

So this year in Connecticut “affordability” will be for government employees. They have earned it with their political activism for the Democrats. Other state residents will have to keep bearing their tax burden, which they have earned with their apathy and will keep earning if, as expected, they return the Democrats to power in November. 

For as the journalist James Reston observed, the first rule of politics is the indifference of the majority. Government money keeps going to the minority that is most mobilized politically to claim it, not necessarily to where it might do the most good for the public. That’s Connecticut’s political economy.

Even so, a recent poll of Connecticut residents taken by the University of New Hampshire’s Survey Center suggested a surprising undertone of dissatisfaction with Governor Lamont and his administration. The poll found that Lamont’s job approval is trending gradually down, with 48% approving and 46% disapproving, and with majorities unhappy with his handling of the state’s cost of living, taxes, housing, and the economy. 

It’s not that the governor has been raising taxes. That complaint in the poll may reflect resentment of municipal property taxes, which rise steadily in part because of longstanding state mandates on local government, like binding arbitration of government employee union contracts.

It’s not clear whether the governor is judged poorly on housing because there is a shortage and prices are high or because he supports controversial legislation that would slightly constrain municipal zoning to encourage housing construction in the suburbs.

But in any case the poll hints at openings for the governor’s challengers — not that they yet have the campaign money, the wit, or the courage to exploit them. 

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

Child’s suicide should prompt a review that goes beyond DCF

By CHRIS POWELL

Last week state legislators had nearly won their campaign to persuade Connecticut that home-schooled children are the most endangered in the state when state government’s child advocate disclosed another disaster at the Department of Children and Families.

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Party balloon litter is bad but ‘nip’ bottle litter is profit

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In an open letter to the DCF commissioner, the child advocate said a child in a family that long had been scrutinized by department had committed suicide an hour after telling a department social worker that he or she felt unsafe at home and wanted to enter foster care, and the social worker rejected the request. 

The child advocate wrote that in addition to its long history with the department, the child’s family lacked stable housing and had repeatedly moved in and out of state, and none of its children were in school.

The child advocate charged that DCF had not followed proper procedure in the case.

The commissioner promised to investigate. 

Meanwhile, just coincidentally, the General Assembly was advancing legislation to increase funding for foster care and to create a committee to study child welfare services, such studies being the legislature’s usual method of abdicating with tough issues.

The suicide case will now probably just disappear. The child advocate has provided no identifying details that would facilitate independent verification of her account by news organizations, and since DCF itself did not disclose the case to the public, the department has already impugned whatever investigation it may undertake.

Some accountability to the public might be guaranteed only by police investigation producing a criminal charge and prosecution in open court, or by the legislature’s own public investigation. But the child can’t talk to detectives, and the legislature never does serious investigation.

A public investigation of the suicide case might be revealing and even shocking. For compelling questions are obvious. 

Why did DCF not remove the children from the household despite its longstanding troubles? Why did the department countenance the failure to enroll the children in school? What exactly did the child who went on to commit suicide tell the DCF social worker about feeling unsafe? How exactly did the social worker reply, and why? What supervisors at the department oversaw the case and what if any direction did they provide? Were procedures violated? What if any corrective action is to be taken? Will anyone responsible here be identified publicly?

Child protection cases can be difficult and are usually a matter of judgment, and there will always be some mistakes, some of honest misjudgment and some of negligence. Some will prove fatal. To ensure correction, serious mistakes must be examined in public, not concealed. 

There also will be mistakes of policy in child protection. DCF policy is ordinarily to try to keep families together and, if children must be removed, to place them with relatives or friends to reduce trauma. This makes sense. But how much incompetence, negligence, and risk is to be indulged?      

Such policies can be formulated and evaluated only by the example of specific cases. So the child suicide case should be detailed fully in public, not just to achieve accountability with the personnel involved but also to achieve some accountability with policy — and not just policy within DCF but also child welfare policy in the broadest sense. 

In the past when children involved with DCF have died or been badly injured, whatever accountability has been achieved has ended with the department and with any perpetrator convicted criminally. But anyone held accountable for mistakes at DCF may be entitled to rebuke the indignant public for its own lack of accountability — its failure to appreciate the worsening social disintegration and depravity throughout the state, social disintegration and depravity engendered by a welfare system that has been destroying families and perpetuating poverty for generations and an educational system that long has been replacing learning with empty self-esteem.

It is long past time for Connecticut not just to try to remediate the worsening child neglect and abuse but to ask: Where are all the disturbed kids coming from?  

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

Property tax isn’t broken; our political backbone is

By CHRIS POWELL

The Connecticut Conference of Municipalities plans to convene a hundred state residents, a “citizen assembly,” to consider the many resentments people have about municipal property taxes and recommend changes to the General Assembly.

Party balloon litter is bad but ‘nip’ bottle litter is profit

One scandal after another with dodgy college regents

Legislators are worrying most about the wrong students

Advocates of the gathering say the property tax system is broken. But the system still works well. It reliably produces a huge amount of money every year and is less vulnerable to evasion than other taxes. For every acre in every municipality is mapped, the real estate on it is impossible to hide, and the taxes due on it are fully collateralized. That is, if their taxes aren’t paid, municipal government can put a lien on delinquent properties, preventing them from being sold, or can foreclose on and take possession of the property.

By contrast, taxes on personal and business income and wholesale and retail sales — the other big sources of tax revenue in Connecticut — can be evaded simply by not reporting what is owed. Many smaller transactions are always being conducted “under the table.” It is estimated that $3 billion or more of state income, business, and sales taxes are evaded every year.

The problem with the property tax isn’t the tax itself but rather the disproportionate burdens put on it. State government has decided that certain government functions, particularly schools, should be financed largely on a municipal level. By leaving property zoning largely to municipalities, state government also has decided that poor people, the cause of great public expense, can and should be largely confined to the cities, where residential development is denser and less expensive. Additionally state government has decided that nonprofit organizations should be exempt from property taxes, thereby substantially reducing city tax bases.

With extra financial aid to cities, state government does much to offset their property tax burden but it’s never enough, in part because the cities have lost their self-sufficient middle class and, with it, their capacity to operate local government efficiently. So Connecticut’s cities now function mainly as poverty factories.

In theory the disproportions in property tax burdens might be fixed easily.

School systems constitute most municipal government expense and state government could take them over and finance them through its own taxes, which are equal statewide. If state government didn’t want to raise its taxes to finance municipal schools, it could finance them with a statewide property tax, at a single rate or with a higher rate on more valuable properties. Municipalities would continue to levy their own property taxes to finance the remainder of local government — police, public works, sanitation, and such.

But this solution and probably any solution to the burdens and disparities of municipal property taxes would collide with what may be the highest value of civic life in Connecticut: local control. Few people want what seem like local matters to be handled by distant government officials and employees they don’t know and can’t easily locate. Such a system almost surely would be less responsive and efficient.

Local control is exactly what causes statewide disparities and inequalities. The virtue is also the sin.

Another solution to the burden of municipal property taxes is also simple in theory: Repeal the state laws that prohibit municipal government from controlling the biggest part of their expenses, labor costs. That is, repeal binding arbitration of government employee union contracts and the law that forbids municipalities from ever reducing their school budgets, even as enrollment declines. 

Those laws were enacted to serve not the public but the government employee unions, the most influential special interest — to guarantee that any financial savings in government flow not to taxpayers but to government employees. Those laws also were enacted to relieve cowardly elected officials of the politically fraught duty to oppose that special interest.

The only tax that will ever be popular is the tax that only someone else has to pay. But even such a tax will never make government more efficient and effective. A “citizen assembly” that pursues efficiency in government rather than another shell game with taxes is the one Connecticut needs.

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

Party balloon litter is bad but ‘nip’ bottle litter is profit

By CHRIS POWELL

State legislators think they have found a new way to protect Connecticut’s environment. They are about to criminalize releasing party balloons into the air, subject to a $20 fine. The pending legislation would replace the current law that imposes a $500 fine on anyone who releases 10 or more balloons within 24 hours, as if anyone is really counting.

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Legislators are worrying most about the wrong students

Lamont, Tong, and Elicker escape immigration queries

Of course the legislation will turn out to be an idle gesture. Who is going to call the police about balloon releases and litter? Which departments will hurry to dispatch officers to investigate such complaints? Which prosecutors will put aside plea-bargaining felonies to handle party balloon cases?

The bill takes the wrong approach to the problem even as a better approach is practically staring legislators in the face: the approach they have taken to the extensive litter caused by the sale of tiny liquor bottles, “nip” bottles. 

Rather than impose a return deposit on the bottles, which liquor stores don’t want to take responsibility for and which are not recyclable, Connecticut has imposed a 5-cent-per-bottle wholesale tax on “nips” with the revenue distributed to municipalities in accordance with the number of “nips” sold in each. Municipalities can use the money for environmental purposes of their choosing, and most spend it on anything except collecting the “nip” litter that continues to deface roadsides and parks.

So why not a wholesale tax on party balloons too? It might not raise much but it would raise far more than any fines collected from balloon-release scofflaws.

If legislators really cared about the environment more than they care about feeding the insatiable pension and benefit society that is state government, they wouldn’t bother with party balloon legislation. They would impose on “nip” bottles a deposit fee large enough to incentivize people to return their bottles or to collect them from roadsides and parks — say, a dollar per bottle — and require liquor stores to refund the deposits and dispose properly of the litter they have generated. 

Or else legislators should just outlaw sale of “nip” bottles. A hefty deposit fee would probably have the same effect, since liquor stores would stop selling them if state government stopped letting liquor stores profit from covering the state in trash.

But the legislature won’t even impose a special fine on anyone caught improperly discarding a “nip” bottle, a fine like the one about to be imposed — in theory — on party balloon scofflaws.

Why the disparate treatment of these two littering industries?

It’s because while the litter caused by party balloons is nothing compared to the litter caused by “nip” bottles, balloon sellers are few, while “nip” bottle sellers have outlets — sometimes dozens — in every legislator’s district, fiercely defend their privileges, and finance a trade association that has controlled liquor legislation for decades, trampling the public interest by inducing the legislature to forbid price competition in liquor.

The liquor industry in Connecticut is a fat target for reducing both consumer prices and litter. But no legislator dares to pop that industry’s balloons.

CLEAN SLATE, DIRTY RESULT: A near-disaster has just inaugurated Connecticut’s ill-conceived “clean slate” law.

The law conceals court records of misdemeanor and lesser felony convictions on the premise that such records prevent people from getting jobs and housing. Of course criminal records don’t help, but people have far more trouble getting jobs and housing because they lack work skills. In any case the “clean slate” law denies employers and landlords their right to know about the people they may assume responsibility for.

The near-disaster was the plan of the Republican Party in an eastern Connecticut district to nominate for state representative a man who nine years ago was convicted of vandalism for spray-painting Nazi swastikas on buildings and traffic signs. While his conviction was recently removed from court records, some people remembered and called attention to it, so he ended his candidacy.

State law now says people shouldn’t be able to know such things about candidates for public office.

—–

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

One scandal after another with dodgy college regents

By CHRIS POWELL

Now that the Connecticut State Colleges and Universities system has lost a second straight highly paid chief executive — the “chancellor” — because of misconduct of some kind, maybe Governor Lamont should find some agency other than the system’s Board of Regents to appoint the next one. 

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Maybe better still, the governor should ask for the resignations of all 15 regents and replace them with people who will strive to fill the chancellor’s position with more competence and integrity than “diversity.” The regents should realize by now that people of all races, ethnicities, religious affiliations, sexual orientations, and career backgrounds can be corrupted by power and privilege, or just be lousy.

Last year the regents shuffled Terrence Cheng out of the chancellor’s job and into a contrived position as “strategic adviser” to the board at the same compensation — nearly $500,000 per year — after he was caught abusing his expense account and failing to move to Connecticut despite accepting a bonus to do so. The regents were afraid that the contract they brilliantly had given Cheng might be construed in court to forbid firing him. 

So Cheng is enjoying in luxurious leisure the year that remained on his contract and seems to be advising the board mainly via telepathy, if at all. When his days as “strategic adviser” are over, Cheng’s contract guarantees him a tenured English professorship at Western Connecticut State University in Danbury. Then Cheng will receive a comfortable pension.

That is, thanks to the Board of Regents, Connecticut may never be rid of Cheng’s expense, but no one will ever be held accountable for the disaster he was.  

Last week the regents placed Cheng’s successor, O. John Maduko, on administrative leave as he came under investigation for an unspecified violation of policy, whereupon he resigned without explanation. At least the regents didn’t appoint him a “strategic adviser” too.

The regents refuse to explain the problem with Maduko and are cloaking their refusal with government’s worst non-sequitur: that it can’t be explained because it’s “a personnel matter.” But of course most of government is “a personnel matter” and while news organizations seem to be vacantly accepting the non-sequitur’s cover-up, nothing in state law prevents the regents from explaining. 

When a government agency refuses to explain something because it’s “a personnel matter,” it means that the agency is too embarrassed and cowardly to account for itself.

As a matter of state freedom-of-information law, any documents held by the colleges and universities system about Maduko’s suspension and resignation would be disclosable. Of course the Board of Regents may refuse to comply with the law until the Freedom of Information Commission or a court orders such documents released, but journalistic and political clamor for an explanation should be directed at the governor, who could order that an explanation be given and who indeed should do so, given the recent reports by Connecticut’s Hearst newspapers about his administration’s hostility to transparent government, including the governor’s own improper use of private e-mail and text messages to conduct and conceal government business.

Maybe no one expects much proper conduct from state government anymore, but the mess at the colleges and universities system should embarrass someone in authority in state government — that is, some Democrat somewhere — even as it gives the Republican minority in the General Assembly more evidence for complaining that Connecticut’s smug political regime should be replaced.

Unfortunately the regime’s smugness is hardly noticed anymore even as it is on display in municipalities throughout the state. In the name of responding to inflation, municipal administrators, councils, and school boards are seeking big increases in spending and property taxes.

But the political presumption is that the burden of inflation and tax increases must fall on taxpayers alone even as municipal government employees are insulated against inflation by raises promised in their union contracts. Government employee salaries must not be reduced, only the salaries of taxpayers, who, having no contract with state or local government, may still believe naively that their elected officials represent them.

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

Legislators are worrying most about the wrong students

By CHRIS POWELL

In principle children can’t have too many people looking out for them. So state legislators are fairly concerned about the recent alleged abuse of three children who were withdrawn from public school on parental claims that they would be home-schooled. One of the children was murdered at home. Another died at home in circumstances said to involve sexual assault. Another says he was imprisoned by his stepmother for 20 years.

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The reasonable premise of legislation being pursued in the General Assembly is that these awful results might have been prevented if the children had been presented to school or child-protection authorities once a year for a wellness check and maybe an educational proficiency test as a condition of home-schooling.

But a new amendment to the proposal would require the parents of home-schooled children to identify everyone living in their home for a background check by the state Department of Children and Families (DCF), as if state government should have the authority to determine who lives with a home-schooled child. That’s totalitarian.

It’s also hypocritical. For Connecticut is full of abuse and neglect of public-schooled children, abuse and neglect that schools and the DCF don’t catch even as catching it would be much easier where children are already gathered in a government institution. There are no formal wellness checks on public-school students, even as so many of them are not properly fed at home that state government wants to provide free breakfasts and lunches to all public-school students. 

Two years ago the grotesque neglect of a public-schooled student in Hartford became a scandal. The girl was graduated from Hartford Public High School even though she was illiterate and arithmetically could do only simple addition. How could she go through 12 years of schooling without her teachers, school administrators, and parent noting and doing something about it? 

Hartford’s school superintendent and the state education commissioner promised investigations but never produced any. No legislators asked and none proposed wellness checks for public-school students or even occasional education proficiency tests to ensure that they were learning sufficiently before being advanced a grade. 

Even now legislators seem to assume that none of the thousands of learning-disabled and troubled children receiving “special education” in the state’s public schools need annual wellness checks, since teachers and school administrators see them every day. But as is shown by the case of the illiterate Hartford graduate and the vast need for free meals in the public schools, merely seeing the students provides no assurance that they are in good condition. 

Proficiency testing for advancement to the next grade would produce valuable evaluations, but the results of such evaluations would horrify the public and might mortify educators and legislators. 

So as a political matter only potential problems with the small number of children who are home-schooled can be examined officially, only home-schooling parents can be held to account by state government, and public education in Connecticut must remain an accountability-free zone. Hence the obsession of legislators with the few kids who manage to escape it.

EUPHEMISM CURES NOTHING: Another liberal euphemism is in play in the General Assembly. Some legislators want to allow drug addiction-treatment clinics to become “harm-reduction centers” where the addicted will be encouraged to inject themselves with heroin, fentanyl, and other poisons under the supervision of people trained to administer opioid-reversal medicines like Narcan. The clinics also would distribute new syringes and drug-testing devices to the addicts so their next drug use might avoid infection and overdosing.

Addiction is a tough issue, but “harm-reduction centers” facilitate and rationalize addiction as much as they help cure it. Additionally, the drugs involved remain illegal under federal law, the centers could never be sure of the potency of the drugs their clients would be injecting, and state government’s facilitating their use could get Connecticut in more trouble with the federal government.

Regular drug rehabilitation would be better, but facilitating more drug use would be cheaper, which may be why legislators are more enthusiastic about it.

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

Lamont, Tong, and Elicker escape immigration queries

By CHRIS POWELL

Connecticut’s laws forbidding state and municipal police from cooperating with federal immigration authorities may not be unconstitutional, as is alleged by the lawsuit brought last week against state officials by the Trump administration, but the objective of those laws is exactly what the suit alleges: to turn Connecticut into a “sanctuary state.”

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That is, Connecticut is emphatically a state that welcomes and shields illegal immigrants from enforcement of federal law.

State Attorney General William Tong, named as a defendant in the lawsuit, responded: “Connecticut is not a ‘sanctuary’ state, whatever that means. This term is meaningless and has no basis in Connecticut law.”

Despite the attorney general’s demagoguery, everyone knows what the term means. The lawsuit may hinge on whether Connecticut’s extensive facilitation of illegal immigration and its refusal to assist federal immigration law enforcement are enough to constitute a violation of the U.S. Constitution’s supremacy clause. Constitutional or not, as a practical matter there is no doubt about what the state has been doing.

Governor Lamont, also named as a defendant, was more rational and precise than Tong. “Our laws do not prevent federal authorities from enforcing immigration law,” the governor said. “Rather, they reflect a longstanding principle: The federal government cannot require states to use their personnel or resources to carry out federal enforcement responsibilities.”

But that’s only part of this issue. Maybe someday a journalist will put a follow-up question to the governor: Exactly why should Connecticut forbid assisting federal immigration law enforcement if not to interfere with and nullify immigration law, much as the former segregationist states sought to nullify federal civil rights law? 

Connecticut has not forbidden its police from assisting federal law enforcement in other respects. Assistance is usually granted routinely with everything else, though, as the governor notes, such assistance is not required. So what is so horrible particularly about helping the federal government control the country’s borders and regulate admission to the country? The danger of not regulating admission is obvious.

A third defendant responding to the lawsuit, New Haven MayorJustin Elicker, came closest to candor and honesty. “We’re proud to be a welcoming city and welcome immigrants,” the mayor said. “If people want to be a productive part of our community, we welcome people — period.”

The mayor seems to have faced no follow-up questions either, like: So do you welcome people who have entered or remained in the country illegally? Are you indifferent to whether people entering the country are first reviewed for suitability? Do you support open borders?

Such questions for the mayor are necessary only to clarify things for people new to the issue. For New Haven answered them in 2007 when it began issuing its Elm City Resident Card to illegal immigrants precisely to facilitate their violation of immigration law — to help them live in the country illegally.

With “we welcome people — period,” Mayor Elicker seemed to expect to foreclose discussion of the implications of city government’s position. But that position still invites many more questions. 

How many more illegal immigrants — or, for that matter, legal immigrants as well — do New Haven city government and state government believe they can afford amid Connecticut’s desperate shortage of housing and the soaring costs of its schools, including the costs of educating thousands of children who don’t speak English and arrive without educational records? 

How about the soaring costs of state government’s medical insurance for the poor and the financial strain on the state’s hospitals? How much more medical care for the indigent can Connecticut afford? 

New Haven and Connecticut have not provided for these costs already, so how much money should be put aside for them, and should it come from raising taxes or reducing spending elsewhere? Which taxes and which spending?

Or is the objective of Connecticut’s open borders policy really to sustain the state’s representation in Congress and the Electoral College as the state continues to lose population relative to states that are glad to assist federal immigration law enforcement?

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

Raising state taxes on the rich is just an excuse for plunder

By CHRIS POWELL

Connecticut is already nearly the highest-taxed state in the country, as well as nearly the most expensive (in part because its taxes are so high), but last Wednesday — the deadline for submission of state and federal tax returns — a hundred people from what calls itself the Connecticut for All coalition gathered at the state Capitol to urge state government to raise taxes on the rich.

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When it showed up at the Capitol in March, the Connecticut for All coalition was supporting legislation to increase state government’s obstruction of federal immigration law enforcement. That’s what Connecticut for All means by “all” — open borders admitting all illegal immigrants — as if the state doesn’t already have a desperate shortage of housing and expensive schools whose costs are rising in part because they must enroll so many illegal immigrant students who don’t speak English.

Connecticut for All’s arguments for higher taxes on the rich are as flawed as its arguments for open borders — especially its argument that taxes should be raised on the rich because some lower-income people pay a higher share of their income in state and local taxes than rich people do.

As is the case with federal taxes, the rich also already pay the overwhelming majority of state and local taxes in Connecticut. 

Poor people pay no income taxes and often get various income supports from the government, like earned-income tax credits, medical insurance, and food and housing stipends, which help refund the taxes they pay indirectly — sales taxes, municipal property taxes (paid through their rents), and federal and state energy taxes.

Besides, the percentage-of-income argument doesn’t accurately indicate the practical burden of taxes. 

Twenty percent of the annual income of someone earning minimum wage in Connecticut — $16.94 per hour or $35,000 per year — is $7,000. 

But just 19% of the annual income of someone earning $350,000, who is subject not just to sales and property taxes, as the poor are, but also to state and federal income taxes, is $66,500, more than nine times as much. 

Who really bears more of the burden of government?

Yes, inflation — currency devaluation — benefits the wealthy, since they own property and stocks, whose value rises even as inflation ravages the poor, who own little property. But then why do Democrats, supposedly the tribunes of the poor, like and perpetuate inflation even more than Republicans do? 

Maybe what is most disgraceful about the clamor for raising taxes on the wealthy is its sense of entitlement, as was expressed by a college instructor at the Connecticut for All rally at the Capitol last week. “It’s time to tax the wealthy and the ultra-wealthy and redistribute those funds to the hard-working people of Connecticut,” she said.

Of course many wealthy people are not “hard-working” at all but mere beneficiaries of inherited wealth or government patronage. But many poor people aren’t so “hard-working” either but collectors of welfare benefits, people who are already beneficiaries of much income redistribution. Poverty is not virtue.

Yes, taxation is always a mechanism of income redistribution, but its original objective in this country was the maintenance of a decent government and a prosperous society. Contrary to the suggestion of that college instructor who spoke at the Capitol, the tax system was not originally meant for plunder, and it should not be regarded as a device for making one’s living from the sweat of others. That attitude has produced vast waste and corruption in government. 

Raising taxes on the rich in Connecticut isn’t yet a matter of fairness; the people advocating it are not trying to calculate mathematically what tax rates are fair. They just want government to control and spend more money.

All able-bodied people, no matter how poor, should share and feel the burden of government, for as was said by a great liberal authority from a century ago, Theodore Roosevelt, the first duty of a citizen is not to vote himself more government subsidies but to pull his own weight.

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

Better education is impossible but maybe not fairer taxation

By CHRIS POWELL

No issue in Connecticut generates more comment with less effect than public education, and now Governor Lamont is doubling down. He is arranging the appointment of the Governor’s Blue-Ribbon Commission on K-12 Education Funding and Accountability, which, in the hope of making education funding fairer and more effective, will study state government’s main mechanism for financing local education, the “education cost sharing” grant, which distributes nearly $2.5 billion to municipalities every year. 

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Of course every year the General Assembly discusses state funding for municipal education and the resounding conclusion is only that everybody who gets education money wants more. No special commission is likely to receive a different response, not even one with a reporting deadline as far off as the one the governor is establishing — Jan. 15, 2027, nine months away.

Announcing the commission last week, the governor acknowledged that it wouldn’t help anyone for a long time. So he added that he will work with legislative leaders to find extra money, as much as $500 million, to throw at local education this year. Like most education money, most of this money will end up in the pockets of members of teacher unions, the state’s most influential special interest. After all, this is a state election year, the governor and legislative leaders are Democrats, and the unions are the party’s largest component, slightly ahead of the state employee unions, for which the governor also has just arranged generous raises.

But at least the governor last week specified one huge unfairness in education funding — the burden of “special education,” the extra expense of schooling children with learning and physical disabilities and behavioral problems. These students come disproportionately from impoverished households in the cities and inner suburbs. 

There is no fairness in requiring municipalities to bear most of the expense of “special education.” These are general societal costs. Indeed, the “education cost sharing” grant was established nearly three decades ago with the aim of distributing over the whole state the higher costs of educating the poor. 

For three reasons it hasn’t succeeded.

First, equalization of school funding burdens contradicts a higher principle of education in Connecticut: local control. Wealthier towns will always be inclined and able to spend more on their schools — unless state government takes control of local education. That will never be possible politically. Even liberal Democrats in the suburbs would never stand for it. 

Second, school performance is only slightly, if at all, a matter of per-pupil spending and almost entirely a matter of per-pupil parenting. Single-parent households are disproportionately poor and on the whole their children get much less parenting. Only less welfare and more fathers in the home can fix that.

Third is that equalizing education would require frequent measuring of and accountability for results, which is also politically impossible. Public education in Connecticut operates almost entirely on social promotion. Proficiency tests are minimized and discouraged and even when administered carry no consequences for students, teachers, and schools. In Connecticut student performance simply doesn’t matter at any level. Any requirement for performance would spark comprehensive revolt — including revolt from voters and legislators.      

It would be shocking if the governor’s new commission approached these issues.

But the commission still could strike a small blow for fairness in educational taxation if it recommended that state government assume responsibility for all “special education” costs. Lifting those costs from the cities would give them a theoretical chance to reduce their excessive property tax rates. 

Of course the governor’s commission is hardly necessary for such a policy initiative. Instead of throwing another $500 million at members of teacher unions this year, the governor and legislature could use the money to start having state government cover all “special education.”

While the teacher unions might be sore about this, there still would be some political consolation, since the state Education Department would have to hire dozens more employees to administer the new “special education” system, and they’d all be unionized and vote Democratic.

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

ICE should explain faster but protests want ‘no nations’

By CHRIS POWELL

Even people who want federal immigration law enforced and who voted for Donald Trump for president in the belief that the open borders policy of the Biden administration and the Democratic Party was national suicide should be aggravated with the federal Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency.

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ICE often seems to forget that government’s obligation to account publicly for arrests goes back eight centuries to Magna Carta and English common law and was assumed by this country’s founders to be a principle of decent government and so was incorporated into the Constitution. 

But this month news organizations, the state’s highest elected officials, and community leaders could not induce ICE to account for its arrest of a Cheshire High School student from Afghanistan who had been legally admitted to the country. Eventually a federal judge concluded that the young man’s detention was the result of a clerical or typographical error in the expiration date of his authorization to remain in the United States. He remained in detention but further proceedings should release him.

This sort of thing compromises all immigration law enforcement.

But then opposition to ICE, especially in Connecticut, is aggravating too. While protests in support of other ICE-detained immigrants are frequent, they seldom show any interest in the circumstances. That is, was the arrested and detained person in the country legally or illegally? The protests brazenly assume — as Governor Lamont and most other leading Democrats in the state do — that anyone who enters the country illegally or remains illegally when a visa expires and who reaches Connecticut should be exempt from immigration law enforcement.

That was the case the other day when a hundred people gathered at Southern Connecticut State University in New Haven to demand the release of a nursing student who had recently been arrested by ICE and taken to a detention center in New Hampshire.

Fortunately this time ICE responded publicly within a few days. The student, ICE said, was a young woman from Ecuador who had entered the country in 2021 on a six-month tourist visa. That would make her an illegal immigrant for more than the last four years. ICE added that she twice had been charged criminally, though the charges don’t sound serious. 

Of course visa overstays are a common form of illegal immigration, signifying the illegal immigrant’s confidence that even when your lawbreaking is a matter of record, the government isn’t likely to bother you. In most cases that confidence has been justified but now things are changing.

The protesters at Southern chanted: “Say it loud, say it clear, immigrants belong here.” But legal or illegal immigrants or both? The protesters more or less answered with another chant: “No borders, no nations, stop the deportations.”

John Jairo Lugo, the director of Unidad Latina en Accion, an open-borders group in New Haven, urged the crowd to join a national strike on May Day to bring the country’s economy to a halt in protest of immigration law enforcement. Lugo concluded with obscenity that has become a big part of such protests.

A few days earlier dozens of students at Hamden High School left their classes and walked to Town Hall to demand an end to immigration law enforcement in their town. 

One student carried a sign reading, “We’re skipping our lessons to teach you one.” But just whom did the students presume to be teaching? For nearly everyone in state government and municipal government in Hamden supports open borders and opposes immigration law enforcement. Indeed, while the school administration cautioned students that their walkout was not approved, school Superintendent Gary Highsmith said afterward that no one would be disciplined for it. That sure sounded like approval.

Maybe someday a few brave and enterprising students at Hamden High will stage a walkout for a politically incorrect cause to see if the precedent set by the superintendent still holds or is suddenly reconsidered. After all, forgiveness of school walkouts implies that, despite the huge expense of schools, students who skip classes don’t miss anything important.

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