Chris Powell column

By CHRIS POWELL

Pervasiveness is a strength of Governor Lamont’s campaign for re-election, since he has so much of his own money to spend on it, but coherence is not.

The governor’s campaign commercials emphasize his support for “affordable health care for everyone” but don’t specify what that means.

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Does it mean “Medicare for all”? If it does, that’s something for the federal government to arrange, something beyond state government’s control.

Does it mean extending state government’s employee insurance to private employers and individuals? That is theoretically possible but implausible insofar as it would be spectacularly expensive, and the first obligation of any supporter of such legislation would be to say where the money would come from. (Would it come from more de-facto borrowing against state government’s pension funds, pushing their obligations deeper into the future? That is how state government continues to finance itself.)

In any case a state government medical insurance system that was truly universal would risk attracting to Connecticut every medically needy person from around the country and even the world, much as California’s medical insurance for illegal immigrants has swamped that state financially and much as Connecticut’s making itself a “sanctuary state” has drawn illegal immigrant social costs here.

Medical insurance is a problem that could be solved reasonably well only nationally, but being honest and coherent about it would not make a 30-second commercial as upbeat as the governor’s commercials that merely hope for nice things.

Last week the governor’s campaign doubled down on the medical insurance issue with a commercial featuring his running mate, Lt. Gov. Susan Bysiewicz. She says she and the governor want to make big corporations like Amazon reimburse state government for the medical insurance the state gives to employees of big corporations who don’t receive medical insurance benefits.

That state medical insurance is the kind given to the indigent. It may be “affordable” but it’s not very good. It is mainly more scaffolding for the country’s current system of tying people’s medical insurance to their employers, a system that inevitably provides grossly unequal levels of insurance, some decent, some not.

Besides, the Bysiewicz commercial’s attack on Amazon is misplaced, since the company provides comprehensive medical insurance not just to full-time employees but also to many part-timers. While many other part-time Amazon workers — those with sharply limited hours, along with the company’s seasonal workers — don’t qualify for medical insurance benefits, of course that is common practice throughout the country.

Unlike government, which can always create as much money as it wants and finance itself with inflation and currency devaluation, businesses large and small survive financially only if they fix an accurate relationship between the value produced by employee labor and its cost. As public education continues to decline, many people enter the workforce without the skills necessary to do work whose value covers both the wages they need and the medical insurance they’d like, what with medical insurance growing more expensive.

Most businesses, large and small, don’t provide medical insurance to part-time and seasonal workers. Some businesses would go broke if they were required to. They’re not evil; they are living in the real world every day, unlike government, which, comfortable in its powers of money creation and cost shifting, inhabits the real world only occasionally.

Making Amazon pay a penalty for its uninsured part-time and seasonal workers will do nothing for Connecticut’s un- and underinsured. Advocating such a penalty is just more scapegoating and demagoguery posing as liberalism.

Maybe the best thing Connecticut could do on its own to ensure that more people have good medical insurance would be to ensure that more of its children got decent educations instead of just social promotion in school.

While the Democratic campaign commercials prattled this month about affordable health care, the Connecticut Business and Industry Association reminded the state that its manufacturers have 86,000 job openings for skilled workers, jobs offering good salaries and insurance. But it’s hard for the manufacturers to find such workers, since Connecticut’s schools don’t produce enough.   

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

By CHRIS POWELL

Election campaigns are supposed to cause candidates to clarify where they stand on important issues. But nothing seems likely to induce Governor Lamont to take a position before the election on a particularly controversial issue. It’s whether Connecticut will participate in the new federal program giving tax credits to people who donate to charitable organizations awarding private-school scholarships to students in kindergarten through high school. Federal law leaves Connecticut’s decision to the governor.

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But the program would create competition with Connecticut’s “public schools,” the euphemism for schools controlled by teacher unions. That is, the schools subject to the state law requiring binding arbitration for teacher union contracts, the state law prohibiting municipalities from reducing school budgets, and the state law prohibiting disclosure of teacher evaluations. 

So Connecticut’s teacher unions, part of the Democratic Party’s army, are hysterically opposed to the program, and the governor, a Democrat, is broadcasting campaign commercials boasting of the “record funding” he has arranged for “education,” which in Connecticut is itself a euphemism for teacher unions. 

Still, while the governor never mentions it, he probably has noticed what others increasingly notice — that “record funding” has no connection with student learning and that schools in Connecticut’s cities continue to perform terribly, with high chronic absenteeism, appalling test scores, and deteriorating facilities. 

Many students would benefit by escaping those schools. Indeed, the last half-century’s flight of the middle class from the cities to the suburbs was in large part a manifestation of the desire for school choice — a desire to get away from the burgeoning urban underclass that “Great Society” welfare programs generate by destroying the two-parent family. 

Connecticut’s establishment of dozens of public regional schools in the last 20 years was another manifestation of the desire for choice — a desire for choice particularly among racial minority households in the cities, parents who wanted their children to get out of schools with children who, because of neglect at home, were already two or three grades behind when they entered kindergarten.

Of course the best solution would be to stop destroying the family and manufacturing poverty. But the poverty business is huge and profitable and there is no political will to re-orient it toward self-sufficiency. Nor is there any political will to restore standards in public education in Connecticut by eliminating social promotion. 

So most city schools and their teachers may be stuck indefinitely with most of the underclass kids. Those kids are expendable, since Connecticut’s de-facto educational policy is sauve qui peut.

Hence the federal scholarship program, since sauve qui peut is better than saving no one. The program would help a few children to get into schools with higher standards and better fellow students whose parents want higher standards.

The program is hardly revolutionary. It would give a federal tax credit of up to $1,700 to people who donate to a charitable scholarship organization, and those scholarships could be awarded to students seeking to attend all sorts of schools, including religious ones. 

Like most of what the federal government does, the program would increase the federal deficit, but it would not take any funding away from “public” schools. Insofar as the program would move students out of those schools while Connecticut’s minimum budget requirement law remained in place, the program might actually facilitate an increase in school spending.

The teacher unions complain that the program would profit “the rich,” since most scholarship fund donors probably would not need a tax credit. But most scholarship recipients probably would be relatively poor. No matter — to the unions, competition in education is worse than ignorance.

It’s strange that the governor keeps postponing a decision on Connecticut’s participation in the program. It would seem that if he wanted to keep pandering to the unions as he does in his commercials, he would have rejected the program by now. Might he authorize it after the election, deciding the issue on the merits instead of politics? 

Maybe that’s what is making the unions so hysterical.

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

By CHRIS POWELL

From the beginning of time to the Rape of the Sabine Women at the founding of Rome right up to the present era of what calls itself higher education, predatory young men and scatterbrained young women always have had a talent for finding each other. Lately these same old circumstances are being framed as a national scandal, fueling more righteous posturing by the indignation industry.

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Thousands of people are marching around wearing T-shirts or carrying signs emblazoned “I am Jane Doe.” But they’re not Jane Doe — not even close. For they’re sober.

Jane Doe is, of course, the student at Cornell University in Ithaca, N.Y., who, according to the general account, got drunk at a bar two years ago, visited a friend at a fraternity house, drank more and took drugs with him there, and agreed to have sex with him and another man before more men joined in and she lost consciousness while she was being used. For a while she shrugged it off but eventually realized that it became rape once she lost consciousness and the ability to consent, even though she had consented at first.

So now she is suing some of the men she believes to have been her abusers and wants to press criminal charges after all, and the governor and attorney general of New York, enmeshed in election campaigns, want to signify their own righteousness. They and those protesting on Jane Doe’s behalf are sure that everyone connected with the fraternity should be imprisoned. As the Queen of Hearts said, “Sentence first, verdict afterwards.”

Proving criminality in situations that begin with consensual intimate contact is always difficult and tawdry, but it can be a lot easier when due process of law and the presumption of innocence are cast aside, as they are being cast aside here, with the accuser’s identity being concealed while the accused are identified.

But determining criminal guilt isn’t most important here. What’s most important is to try to alter the behavior of the predators and scatterbrains.

Cornell University has gotten a clue, if belatedly. It has banned parties at fraternity houses for the remainder of the academic year, apparently presuming that it can enforce the new rule. The university will hire counselors to assist students who claim to have been assaulted. But it’s not enough. 

Cornell and all colleges and universities should simply prohibit on-campus fraternity houses, as some long have done, since giving young men their own enclosed playpen, with no independent supervision, liberates their predatory, mob, and criminal instincts. The 1978 movie “Animal House” was a hysterical parody of the excesses for which college fraternities long have been noted. What happened at Cornell was not funny.

And it’s not just Cornell. Sexual assaults are common in college, and quite apart from fraternities. Connecticut’s Hearst newspapers reported the other day that there were dozens of rape complaints last year at colleges in the state, with Yale University leading the list.     

Unfortunately danger is part of growing up and learning how to be safe physically and emotionally. There is no learning without being at least bruised. But young women must understand that no one can protect them as well as they can protect themselves.

You can’t blame people for being assaulted; blame for assaults belongs to the assaulters. But you can blame people for putting themselves at risk as Cornell’s Jane Doe did disastrously. Any young woman in college who gets drunk and high and enters a fraternity house is begging for trouble. Any young woman in college who is sober and enters a fraternity house is asking for trouble.

But of course many people will not always know better. While the Jane Doe controversy was exploding in the United States, a young man in Britain did his own Jane Doe imitation. He climbed a fence at a wildlife park, tried socializing with the tiger on the other side, and was fatally mauled. He was as innocent as Jane Doe, and as foolish.

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

By CHRIS POWELL

Lessons keep pouring out of the Connecticut State Colleges and Universities System but they have nothing to do with student learning, just the misconduct and negligence of system personnel.

For months the system has been losing executives and board members over various scandals, and last week Marc E. Fitch of Inside Investigator, a project of the Yankee Institute, reported that the CSCU system’s nonprofit foundation, which has more than $700,000 in assets, claims to have helped hundreds of students and thousands of families but hasn’t helped anyone in years.

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The foundation’s tax filings for 11 of the last 12 years are missing from its internet site, along with the foundation’s annual reports, if there were any. The man listed as the foundation’s president says he left more than a year ago.

A spokesman for the CSCU system didn’t dispute the report, saying the system’s management — whatever is left of whatever it had until recently — is “reviewing” its foundations and developing a policy “to strengthen oversight” and “enhance financial controls.”

It’s hard to see how oversight can be “strengthened” when there hasn’t been any for a long time, but the spokesman had to try to give the impression that someone is still home.

Also last week WFSB-TV3’s Cassidy Williams disclosed that one of the CSCU system’s universities, Eastern Connecticut State in Windham, told faculty members in April that the university is investigating financial “irregularities” with its own foundation dating to 2022. (There appears not to have been any announcement to the public about the investigation.)

But a month later faculty members were told that the investigation had been delayed because the system’s general counsel, Karen Buffkin, who was to have been an investigator, had been put on leave because she was being investigated herself for her handling of sexual harassment complaints against the system’s chancellor, who quit when the complaints became public.

So now an outside investigator is to be hired.

There aren’t enough people in state government to investigate the misconduct and negligence in the CSCU system — maybe the system should establish a School of Investigation — and the General Assembly never investigates anything. So it’s good that news organizations are getting interested. Imagine, if it’s not too scary, what additional investigative journalism might find in other state agencies. 

In light of how the CSCU system operates, it’s also probably better if its foundations don’t do anything. But the foundation at Eastern still may be doing “irregular” things. So maybe someone in the system who has not yet resigned, been fired, been placed on “paid administrative leave,” or run screaming from the premises with his hair on fire could ask the state treasurer, comptroller, or the state auditors to keep an eye on whatever money may be left in the foundations.

Making their rounds of agencies the state auditors do brave and expert work catching violations of financial and personnel regulations. But they can’t be everywhere at once, and the auditing of compliance with regulations is not the auditing of an agency’s performance with its nominal objectives.    

For example, no one audits the state Education Department for an explanation of its long failure to improve student achievement despite constantly increasing spending. No one audits the various state welfare agencies for an explanation of the steady rise in poverty and welfare dependence despite constantly increasing spending there too, or the state Correction Department for its failure to deter most of its wards from returning to crime upon their release.

Of course those matters are more complicated than compliance with regulations; they are matters of broad policy and concept. But like the laughable ineptness of the higher education system, these matters are reminders that state government has grown far too big even as it keeps assigning itself more to do and creating more goodies to distribute. 

State government has become far bigger than the civic virtue and journalism available to manage it in the public interest. That is, it has grown beyond control, and it will not stop growing by itself.

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

By CHRIS POWELL

Has any candidate in Connecticut ever repudiated his own campaign television commercial as quickly as Governor Lamont, a Democrat seeking election to a third term, did the other day? 

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The governor’s commercial calling the state’s schools the best in the country included a pledge to arrange pay raises for teachers. Some people wondered if that meant the governor would support enacting a statewide minimum starting salary for teachers of $60,000. But questioned by Connecticut’s Hearst newspapers, the governor said he was not advocating that and offered no explanation of what, if anything, his assertion in the commercial meant.

In any case the commercial provided an opportunity for the president of the state’s largest teachers union, the Connecticut Education Association, to make another pitch for raises. The union’s president, Kate Dias, noted that while the estimated average salary for teachers in the state is, at $91,000, the sixth highest among the states, the states with the highest teacher salaries also have the highest cost of living. 

Even for a single person in Connecticut, Dias said, that $91,000 is barely a living wage, especially since the cost of housing in the state is so high. For a teacher trying to support a family, she said, that salary is “woefully short.”

But this isn’t much of an argument. For teachers are not the only Connecticut residents under financial strain. Indeed, most people are feeling pinched lately amid inflation, and the latest report from the state’s United Way organization said that about 40% of Connecticut residents are financially unstable and unable to afford essentials.

These people just don’t have a politically influential union to represent them. They have to rely on their state legislators, who listen more carefully to special interests like teacher unions.

Besides, teachers receive valuable compensation that doesn’t get counted in their salaries: medical insurance and pension benefits that are much better than what private-sector workers have, as well as job security under the teacher tenure law. 

Some teachers still may deserve a raise. But most teachers, covered by union contracts, will get raises even when many private-sector workers won’t, and if teachers deserve raises larger than what their union contracts get them, it will be mainly because their students increasingly are unparented and poorly behaved.

So rather than be given special treatment, teachers should be welcomed to the growing club of financially strained Connecticut residents and should pursue policy solutions that benefit people generally — more housing construction, which will require curtailing municipal zoning, and ending inflation, which will require reducing government spending. 

Since solutions are probably impossible politically amid state government’s subservience to special interests, change is unlikely.

Lamont’s campaign commercials tout the many goodies the Democratic state administration has bestowed on Connecticut, while the commercials of his Republican challenger, Greenwich state Sen. Ryan Fazio, promise big cuts in taxes. So it’s fair to conclude that, as usual, the Democrats will spend more, the Republicans less.

But Fazio isn’t leveling with people much more than the governor is. 

Big cuts in taxes eventually will require big cuts in spending, and Fazio isn’t strong on specifics there. In an interview with the Connecticut Examiner the other day he talked about “unfunded state mandates” on municipalities and cited the requirement for them to put legal notices in newspapers — a small expense — but didn’t mention the elephants in the budget room, binding arbitration of municipal employee union contracts and the minimum budget requirement for school systems. Those laws actually prohibit public control over most municipal spending even as they can’t be discussed because it would upset the biggest local special interests, municipal government employee unions.

Polls suggest that Fazio is yet to catch on with voters, and President Trump’s unpopularity may bring down all Republicans in Connecticut next month. So when you’re likely to lose anyway, you might as well try candor and telling the truth. Shocking people like that will get lots of attention and make it easier for the next guy who might try candor and the truth.

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

By CHRIS POWELL

Police provide basic information following most serious assaults or murders in Connecticut, and to prevent panic they often add that there is “no threat to the public” and that the assault or murder was “an isolated incident.”

But nearly every day Connecticut is full of “isolated incidents” that, if taken together, would constitute a crime wave, and while the perpetrators of the day may not be imminent dangers to others, they probably will pose danger to others eventually.

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For as is often indicated by news reporting about crime, Connecticut is full of chronic offenders who aren’t in prison. Indeed, news reports about an arrest for a serious crime often disclose that the accused has “a long criminal record,” though such reports seldom provoke indignant demands from the public to know why the chronic offender was free.

Many years ago some politicians in Connecticut portrayed themselves as “tough on crime,” but today it’s hard to find any politician pressing the crime issue, especially in regard to chronic offenders. While serious crime is said to be declining and the state’s prison population has fallen from a high of about 20,000 in 2008 to just less than 11,000 today, a drop of about 45%, this may not be so comforting.

For most serious crime charges long have been and continue to be heavily discounted in the criminal-justice system through plea-bargaining, which prosecutors and judges believe is necessary to prevent the system from being overwhelmed. They know that the courts are only as effective as they are ready for trial, and only a tiny fraction of criminal cases go to trial, because the system isn’t so ready. Criminals expect plea bargains.

Connecticut would have plenty of room for locking up chronic offenders if it wanted to reopen the prisons that have been closed in recent years. But the state’s Democratic administration accepts the damage done by chronic offenders because it is offset by savings in the prison budget and because imprisoning more people would worsen racial disproportions in the prison population. Suppressing those racial disproportions helps elected officials overlook the racial disproportions in crime itself and the poverty and educational failure that cause them.

Indeed, the obsession of the Democratic state administration with gun ownership is a distraction from the crime issue. 

A new state law seeking to ban the sale of certain Glock brand guns was suspended in federal court last week and likely will consume hundreds of thousands of dollars in legal expenses over the next year or two even as the law would do little against crime if it was enforced.

The law would ban sale of certain Glock pistols that can be converted to full automatic firing with an inexpensive plastic attachment that already has been outlawed. Full automatic firing — firing in which a single sustained pull of the trigger discharges all the bullets in the gun — is what machine guns have, and ownership of machine guns is virtually prohibited by federal law. No one outside the military should have one, especially now that the country grows crazier politically and the threat of terrorism rises.

But Glocks are not machine guns unless they are modified, the manufacturer has changed its design so its new pistols can’t easily be modified, and the automatic-firing feature of modified Glocks has seldom been used in crime. Glocks are used in crime just because, like most other guns used in crime, they are handguns. So the new law against old Glocks would have little impact on crime.

Similarly, the new law’s only inconvenience to gun owners is that it would prevent owners of older Glocks from selling them to registered gun dealers, diminishing the resale market. But the older Glocks still could be sold or traded privately. So the new law would hardly impair Second Amendment rights.

Crime might be reduced by increasing the criminal-justice system’s readiness for trial, by not plea-bargaining gun charges, and by permanently jailing chronic offenders. But that would cost money, while posturing about machine guns is free. 

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