Chris Powell column

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.

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

Fix Connecticut’s big problems before trying to seize utilities

Governor goes retrograde with Medicaid penalty tax

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.

Fix Connecticut’s big problems before trying to seize utilities

Governor goes retrograde with Medicaid penalty tax

Many TV and radio ads make Connecticut look terrible

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.

Governor goes retrograde with Medicaid penalty tax

Many TV and radio ads make Connecticut look terrible

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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.

Many TV and radio ads make Connecticut look terrible

State’s anti-ICE law is a fraud, and so is ‘believe all women’

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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)

-END-

Many TV and radio ads make Connecticut look terrible

By CHRIS POWELL

Trends in television and radio advertising in Connecticut give a distressing impression of the state.

No one can watch TV or listen to radio for an hour without hearing from one tax delinquency resolution agency or another. Their clients claim to have evaded huge amounts of federal taxes only to have had them largely forgiven by the Internal Revenue Service after engaging a tax relief agency. Who knew that Connecticut had so many tax cheats?

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Commercials for casinos, internet gambling, and state lottery games are just as ubiquitous. One on TV shows a pretty young woman sitting on a couch at home, mesmerized by her mobile phone, before bouncing up, running outside, and jumping exuberantly and fully clothed into a swimming pool because she just won $25,000 at an internet casino. Maybe the casino has devised that commercial in the hope of reversing what used to be meant by “taking a bath,” which is what most casino patrons usually do. Public-service commercials warning about the gambling addiction increasingly suffered by young people have little effect.

Then there are the commercials for new prescription drugs, some targeting ailments most people have never heard of, including new drugs that are said to be safe even for people also taking “mental health medication.” The mentally ill apparently are now numerous enough to be profitable to advertise to. Some of these commercials spend less time citing the new drug’s benefits than they spend hurriedly warning about its dangerous potential side-effects. By the end of the side-effects viewers may have forgotten what the drug is meant for.

Maybe most boisterous are the commercials of the personal injury law firms, including a firm that claims a national reach and boasts that it can sue anybody for anything any time and recover huge damages. Viewers might start looking forward to a collision with a tractor-trailer.

Another law firm commercial depicts insurance company executives as grizzled old grifters as if Connecticut isn’t a center of the insurance business and as if insurance isn’t a great boon, crucial to nearly every aspect of life.

Some law firms stress in their commercials that they never charge a fee in personal injury cases unless their clients win, as if this is the firm’s special humane practice and hasn’t actually long been standard procedure in the personal-injury law business.

These commercials imply that Connecticut is full of people who evaded taxes but got away with it because a fixer pulled some strings; that the state is also full of casino jackpot winners, since the losers at the casinos never appear in commercials; that Connecticut residents are contracting strange new afflictions all the time on top of their longstanding psychological troubles and that the pharmaceutical industry is ready to cure them if it doesn’t kill them first; and that whatever bad stuff happens, it will be the fault of someone else, preferably someone covered by an insurance company that will be terrified by a chest-thumping personal-injury lawyer.

At least now that summer is here people can get a completely different impression of the state just by turning off the TV and radio and going outside on a warm and sunny day. At this time of year Connecticut may be the most beautiful place in the world. But hurry — election campaigns for governor, Congress, and the General Assembly have begun and soon will be flooding the airwaves with their own hyperbolic commercials.

When their campaigns rev up state legislators will be able to boast that their main wildlife policy is working well. For the state Department of Energy and Environmental Protection says bears are steadily expanding their range in the state.

“Reports of home entries, livestock attacks, beehive and other agricultural damage, damage to vehicles and structures, as well as physical altercations with pets and people are following a long-term upward trend,” the department says.

Yes, soon every town will have at least several bears disrupting daily life, since legislators think that’s better than having a bear-hunting season.

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

State’s anti-ICE law is a fraud, and so is ‘believe all women’

By CHRIS POWELL

The most recent politically correct charade of Connecticut’s nullifiers — including Governor Lamont, Attorney General William Tong, and the Democratic majority in the General Assembly — has been quickly exposed. It’s the new state law, enacted with the governor’s signature a month ago, purporting to prohibit federal immigration agents from wearing masks while on duty in the state. It’s a fraud.

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News organizations have reported video recordings of masked immigration agents being challenged about the law by bystanders in Hartford and Danbury, with the agents telling the bystanders, in effect, to drop dead. One agent replies: “Who’s going to arrest me?” Another says: “We’re federal. We’re over state. Go back to social studies.”

The Trump administration is suing in federal court for an injunction against the new law and in the meantime the Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency is openly defying it.

Despite supporting the legislation, Governor Lamont has not ordered the state police to try enforcing it. Chest-thumpers among the nullifiers, like state Attorney General Tong, are nowhere to be seen amid the defiance. If the nullifiers really thought the law was legitimate, they’d be demonstrating a little physical courage on its behalf or at least be erecting barricades to keep immigration agents out of Connecticut.

So was the law just a scheme to please the far-lefties who control Connecticut’s Democratic Party and keep them riled up in an election year? That’s one of many fair political questions about illegal immigration that won’t be answered because it won’t be asked.

Of course this doesn’t mean that federal agents shouldn’t be unmasked and identified by name and badge number whenever they make arrests, just as state and municipal police officers are. That is basic accountability and public safety. You’re entitled to resist arrest if you don’t know who is arresting you. But this is for Congress and the president to legislate. Democrats in Connecticut won’t comply voluntarily with the Constitution’s supremacy clause until their party regains power in Washington.

* * *

Two years ago many Democrats purported to be unable to understand how some sane, decent, and politically moderate people could support Donald Trump for president over the incumbent, Joe Biden, and then, when Biden’s senility exploded on national television and he was compelled to withdraw, how they would not support his cackling airhead of a vice president, Kamala Harris. After all, many of those sane, decent, and politically moderate people have acknowledged Trump’s repulsiveness.

Maybe the U.S. Senate campaign in Maine will help those Democrats understand.

For the party in Maine has just nominated a faux populist, Graham Platner, who had himself tattooed with a Nazi SS death’s head, who purported not to know what it stood for, who has called himself a communist, and who has abused a number of women. So what used to be the party of “believe all women” has just discovered an exception. Women now may be disbelieved or disrespected if believing or respecting them might cost the party control of the Senate.

This is fair enough if one thinks, as was thought by some of those sane, decent, and moderate people who reluctantly voted for Trump two years ago, that certain policy issues — like illegal immigration, late-term abortion, and the erasure of gender differences in restrooms, sports, and prisons — outweigh a candidate’s character defects. Two years ago many of those sane, decent, and moderate people thought that stopping illegal immigration, late-term abortion, and erasure of gender differences in law and policy were more important than preventing Trump’s return to the White House. They thought awful Trump was right on the biggest issues.

Now, with Platner’s candidacy, many Democrats think that continuing to facilitate illegal immigration, late-term abortion, and erasure of gender differences in law and policy is more important than keeping a proto-Nazi, Communist, and abuser of women out of the Senate — as long as he will vote with Democrats to organize the chamber and help thwart Trump.

Fair enough as well. Clarity often results when the jackboot is put on the other foot.

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

Child protection agency will never fix a society that’s disintegrating

By CHRIS POWELL

Connecticut doesn’t seem to have been bothered much by last week’s especially horrible fatality, that of a 3-year-old girl who was struck by a car and killed while crossing a street in Manchester, apparently unaccompanied, at 4:30 in the morning, 45 minutes before sunrise. The state Department of Children and Families quickly acknowledged that it had been investigating two complaints made a week earlier about a lack of supervision in the child’s home.

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Some people in Manchester felt punched in the stomach by the incident, since a doorbell camera showed the child trying to open a neighbor’s door, presumably for help, without awakening the occupants, and then hurrying back toward the street.

At least the state Senate’s minority Republican caucus noticed with a statement, citing two other recent deaths of children in households that had been under DCF review.

The incident, the Republicans said, “underscores how DCF is a train wreck. DCF cannot handle the cases they are already monitoring, and they are making catastrophic mistakes.”

That criticism may have been hasty, since the details of the Manchester fatality remain unclear. Very young children sometimes manage to leave their homes without their ordinarily attentive parents noticing. Were this child’s parent or parents awake, sleeping, intoxicated, or drugged? Was the child hungry and seeking food? What exactly did those complaints say about lack of supervision? They were only days old, so how much could DCF have resolved by then?

Presumably the police and DCF itself will answer soon.

But what Connecticut does or should know is more compelling, and goes far beyond DCF.

If, as it seems, DCF is understaffed and suffers debilitating turnover, it is not so much because the agency is badly managed as because child neglect is an overwhelming problem, probably the worst facing both the state and the country. Millions of children have only one parent, if that, receive much less parenting than they need, and live in poverty — largely because welfare policy presumes that fathers are no longer needed in their children’s homes and that childbearing outside marriage is so good that it should be subsidized heavily.

Inflation and drug and alcohol abuse keep handicapping such households even more, and 17% of Connecticut’s public school students are chronically absent, the rate reaching 25% or more in the cities, where poverty is concentrated.

A third or more of the state’s high school students graduate without proficiency in English or math. Some even are graduated illiterate. These young people are sent into adulthood qualified only for menial jobs and primed for demoralization in which a life of childbearing outside marriage and welfare dependence can seem like their most practical option.

Even the best-managed child protection agency could not keep up with child neglect on this scale. Indeed, it would be no surprise if child protection employees are so appalled and themselves demoralized by the worsening social disintegration they see on the job that they soon look for other work.

Most children who come to DCF’s attention might do much better in another household, but the agency is damned if it leaves the children in place and damned if it tries to remove them. Since foster parents are in short supply, there will never be as many removals as might be justified. As a result many child-protection cases will always have bad outcomes.

Democrats and Republican legislators alike probably will join Governor Lamont and respond to the child protection problem by throwing more money at it — including by increasing welfare benefits. That is, more of the same. But the iron rule of economics will continue to operate: Whatever you subsidize you’ll get more of.

What is needed is policy change that compels people to take more responsibility for themselves: to pursue education seriously, go to work, learn skills, advance on the job, and not have children before marriage and gaining the capacity to support a family.

All this used to be obvious. Then government began paying people not to be responsible.

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

Governor punts ‘telework’ issue safely past November’s election

By CHRIS POWELL

No one in journalism in Connecticut seems to have noted it except for Hartford Business Journal Editor Greg Bordonaro, but Governor Lamont defaulted this year on an issue he repeatedly said he wanted to address: the need to get state government employees back to work in their offices and reduce the time they spend claiming to work from home.

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Somehow working from home has secured a place in the long list of state employee rights and can’t be changed by ordinary public administration, only through arbitration or a new master state employee union contract. The governor negotiated another contract this year, with generous raises for a workforce that was already extremely well paid, but it changed nothing about the right of state employees to work from home via the internet, e-mail, and telephone.

That they might do better work in the company of their colleagues and in sight of their supervisors is not yet of much official concern.

Instead the governor and the state employee union coalition agreed to create a committee to study the issue and make recommendations early next year — that is, safely after the state election in November, when the governor, a Democrat, and the big Democratic majority in the General Assembly will be relying on state employee union members for their usual pluralities.

Voters surely will forget about the “telework” issue during the campaign ahead unless some candidates or other news organizations remind them.

Will the Republican nominee for governor, Greenwich state Sen. Ryan Fazio, find the courage to do that?

The other day Fazio mocked the governor’s proposals for legislation that might help bring electricity prices down. The proposals deserved a little mockery, since they are in large part philosophical stuff for which the state Public Utilities Regulatory Authority would need to develop specifics. Maybe that will work out, especially since the governor recently reconstituted the authority, his previous appointees having been rather ineffectual and, in the case of the chairwoman, so dishonest and corrupt that the state’s largest electric utility, Eversource, defeated the agency in important litigation this year.

But candid discussion of electric utility issues is probably impossible anyway, most people being furious about electricity prices, and about prices generally, and being so susceptible to demagoguery by politicians against large corporations. Few people notice that government itself is far worse about controlling its costs than utilities are, and few politicians remind them about that either.

A spokesman for the governor’s re-election campaign shot back, somewhat fairly, at Fazio’s criticism of the governor’s electricity proposals.

The spokesman said Fazio and other Republican senators have only one idea about electricity — eliminate the public benefits charge on electricity bills — “and it doesn’t even work. It moves costs from your electric bill to your tax bill. That’s it.”

Almost but not quite. For moving the public benefits charge and its constituent parts from the obscurity of electricity bills to the relative sunlight of the state budget would force the governor and state legislators to appropriate and tax plainly for them. It would force everything financed by the public benefits charge to compete for appropriations against everything else in the state budget. That might spark a debate about, for example, just how much electricity should continue to be a component of welfare benefits and whether various environmental programs are worthwhile.

Of course Republican legislators might not want to face such questions any more than Democratic legislators and the governor do. When it comes to supervising state government spending, most Republican legislators are less like junkyard dogs than cuddly bunnies. And why bother being more conscientious? Taxpayers pay less attention to government than its employees and special interests do, and they don’t get as angry when crossed.

But ending the taxation of electricity, a necessity of life, would be progress, and even liberal Democrats might realize this if they didn’t prefer raising money for government by any means, so spending can be increased, to the more progressive taxation they purport to favor.

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

Taxes in Connecticut can’t be cut while personnel costs stay exempt

By CHRIS POWELL

For the second straight year hundreds of people in Bloomfield are sore that while their side prevailed overwhelmingly in a referendum on the town budget, which they opposed, they still lost and the budget again has been deemed approved, this time with a 3% tax increase. Some property owners will end up facing a tax increase approaching 11% because the town is still implementing updated property valuations, which have soared with inflation.

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According to the Hartford Courant, the vote was 1,959 against the budget to 305 for it, a margin of 6½ to 1. But the protest failed because Bloomfield has an ordinance requiring budget referendums to gain the participation of 15% of the town’s voters. To meet that requirement another 2,287 people would have had to vote.

Bloomfield’s ordinance isn’t unique. Other towns have similar provisions. They are based on the old presumption that silence implies consent, which is especially undemocratic in the context of elections and referendums, since many townspeople who didn’t vote could have opposed the budget’s tax increase if they had bothered to think about it. Maybe they’ll think about it when their next tax bills arrive, but it will be too late.

The ordinance’s presumption is also that elected officials who go through the trouble of developing a budget deserve some deference and shouldn’t be stymied by a small minority of voters. After all, those officials won their own elections with more votes than were cast against the budget.

Presuming that silence signifies consent, Bloomfield Mayor Anthony Harrington told the Courant that people who didn’t vote realized that the budget was a lean as it could be.

The mayor asked: “Where would the budget reductions come from? Would the Board of Education, town services for seniors, human services, leisure services, our new Prosser Library, the Department of Public Works, or Town Hall be impacted negatively by these changes?”

Indeed, perpetrating what are called the Washington Monument and Punish the Public syndromes, the town manager’s budget initially had proposed saving money by eliminating municipal trash collection and closing the town swimming pool.

But while the mayor’s question may have been rhetorical, it deserves a serious answer, especially since the question is often posed elsewhere and never gets one.

Yes, Bloomfield’s budget could have been reduced in all the aspects cited by the mayor, as well as many others, without devastating services to the public. For the biggest single expense in government in Connecticut is personnel, and with laws requiring unionization of state and municipal government employees, binding arbitration of their union contracts, and insulation for government employees against discipline for misconduct or negligence, state government has essentially put the costs of government personnel beyond economizing.

All together these laws result in compensation for government employees that is far more generous than what is received by private-sector employees in comparable jobs.

That is what state and municipal elected and budget officials are hinting at when they shrug and say their budgeting options are limited by “fixed costs.”

You can eliminate trash collection, but you can’t readily freeze or reduce government employee salaries.

You can close the town pool but you can’t require government employees to give up their paid day off purportedly honoring Columbus.

You can suspend an employee for a day or two for being intoxicated on the job but you can’t fire him.

So practically every year brings property tax increases on the municipal level and, on the state level, direct tax increases or tax increases hidden in consumer prices or financed by de-facto borrowing from the state pension funds, which increases state government’s liabilities.

The solution is obvious but always unspoken: To freeze or reduce taxes, you have to unfix the “fixed costs.”

Those costs weren’t fixed by God but by legislators and governors who long have been subservient to a particular special interest — a special interest that has come to control an entire political party, a special interest that the other major party is usually too timid to challenge.

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

State will never get to education if it keeps detouring to poverty

By CHRIS POWELL

If you want to see where Connecticut’s cities are, you don’t need a road map with their names on it and the densely populated areas highlighted in yellow. A report the other day in Connecticut’s Hearst newspapers carried a map of the state with orange dots signifying schools with good scores and blue dots signifying schools with bad scores on the recent proficiency tests issued by the National Assessment of Educational Progress.

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The sad blue dots correlated perfectly with the impoverished cities and some of their inner suburbs — including Hartford, East Hartford, Bloomfield, New Britain, Waterbury, Danbury, New Haven, Hamden, Ansonia, Bridgeport, Stratford, Windham, Norwich, and New London.

The happy orange dots were almost uniformly elsewhere.

For those who didn’t immediately grasp the correlation, the map also included the percentage of each municipality’s students who qualify for free or reduced-price school meals, with high percentages signifying poverty. That helpful data won’t be available much longer now that, with poverty worsening, state government is making school meals free for all students in all towns.

But even now the free-meals data isn’t necessary to understand what long has been going on in Connecticut’s schools — why students in wealthier municipalities score much higher than national averages and students in the poor municipalities score much lower, with some of the latter scores showing that Connecticut has students who are several grades behind where they should be.

Decades ago at the outset of the computer age the Connecticut bureau of the Associated Press gathered all sorts of data about the state’s schools and found that the academic performance of students correlated only with the property wealth of their parents — not with school spending, teacher salaries, or teacher experience.

That is, educational success was and remains mainly what it has always been, a matter of parenting.

As Connecticut might have learned by now from the chronic student absenteeism in the schools of its poorest municipalities, it’s hard to educate children whose parents don’t reliably get them to school.

Chronic absenteeism is an overwhelming clue about the essential problem of education. But this clue has not yet been heeded by the state’s elected officials and school administrators, insofar as they have yet even to wonder aloud if their policy of advancing students from grade to grade and graduating them from high school regardless of their academic performance might be breeding contempt for education.

Since the correlation of poverty with terrible academic performance is so great, it would seem that education could be improved greatly if government set about to try to understand poverty’s causes and to distinguish policies that tend to eliminate poverty and promote self-sufficiency from policies that tend to perpetuate poverty and dependence on welfare.

Since most children in the impoverished cities and inner suburbs are growing up with only one parent and thus with only half the parenting that, within living memory, was the natural order of things, the collapse of the family would seem to deserve urgent review. What has made people and government think that two parents aren’t really necessary and that unearned self-esteem beats self-reliance?

But so far state government’s response to poverty has been only to throw money at it without regard to results.

Along these lines, the Yankee Institute’s Meghan Portfolio recently reported that while Connecticut has been increasing its minimum wage annually for seven years, the state’s poverty rate has barely changed, declining only slightly from 10.5% to 10.2%, even as enrollment in Medicaid, free medical insurance for the poor, has risen substantially.

This suggests that there is far more to earning power than indexing the minimum wage — that the decline in living standards, a decline in wage-earning power, is also a matter of the decline in education, which in turn is a matter of the decline in parenting.

In any case, while spending more in the name of education buys the votes of teacher unions, it doesn’t buy education. Poor kids in Connecticut don’t matter that much yet.

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