By Chris Powell
For the third time in four years, Connecticut’s state auditors have chided the state police for the excessive overtime paid to many troopers and even dispatchers. The most recent audit surveyed the records of 25 state police employees and found that 20 of them were earning more in overtime than in base pay and 16 were working an average of 13 hours per day in 14 consecutive days.
Apart from the financial inefficiency, this is a recipe for burnout and poor performance. This was famously demonstrated two years ago when a state trooper was video-recorded exploding, unprovoked, into crazed rage at a motorist he had stopped in New Haven, screaming that he hated his job and the crummy civilians he had to deal with and couldn’t wait to retire. It turned out that he too had been working far too much overtime.
But as the state government employment system does generally, the trooper employment system encourages excessive overtime, with troopers eligible to retire with full pensions after only 20 years and with their pension pay calculated as half the average of their three highest-paid years. Thus a trooper can retire at age 45 with an annual pension of $100,000 or more and have another 20 years to build a second career.
This incentive to work overtime is perverse for the public interest. It would be far better financially and for upholding standards of service to hire more troopers and remove overtime pay from pension calculations.
The state police have expressed concurrence with the last three audits about excessive overtime. The Lamont administration acknowledges that state police ranks are much lower than authorized and that it means to get to full strength. But somehow it never happens, and state legislators don’t make a fuss over it. They too seem not to take the auditors’ work seriously.
ELECTRICITY SHELL GAME: Electricity prices in Connecticut are going up because energy prices worldwide have gone up. Since the state’s electric utilities have been barred from the generation business for more than 20 years, elected officials can’t as easily resort to their usual scapegoating.
Since most of Connecticut’s elected officials are Democrats, they don’t want to do the most [ITALICS] relevant [END ITALICS] thing — press the national Democratic administration to reverse its insane policy against domestic production of conventional energy.
So now Connecticut’s elected officials are contemplating more mere [ITALICS] shifting [END ITALICS] of electricity costs among users or throughout society generally, along the lines of what the state Public Utilities Regulatory Authority already is doing by requiring the electric utilities to reduce rates for the poor and raise them for everyone else — to make electricity rates part of the tax and income redistribution system.
Progressive taxation — higher tax rates on higher incomes and greater wealth — can be sound policy to an extent if it is forthright. But hiding taxes and other social costs in electricity bills is not forthright — it’s a shell game. Nor is it really fair, since poverty is not automatically a virtue and sometimes is the result of vice. Should irresponsible people get a discount on electricity and responsible people get a surcharge?
At a certain point government’s cost shifting not only misleads people but also distorts and corrupts the entire market economy, which is a far more efficient and far mechanism for distributing production of goods and services than government is.
The French economist and statesman Frederic Bastiat may have seen Connecticut coming two centuries ago. “Government,” he wrote, “is the great fiction by which everybody tries to live at the expense of everybody else.”
PRONOUN DISTRACTION: What’s the most pressing problem in Bridgeport’s schools?
It’s not the awful academic performance, what with more than 70% of students lacking proficiency in reading and nearly 90% lacking proficiency in math.
Instead of solving that problem Bridgeport’s Board of Education is developing a policy on the pronouns to be used for transgender and gender-ambivalent students, lest they be “misgendered” — that is, addressed as members of their biological gender.
Will the kids even be able to spell their new pronouns? Like the chronic excessive overtime for the state troopers, that’s an old challenge Connecticut seems to keep declining.
Chris Powell is a columnist for the Journal Inquirer in Manchester, Connecticut. (CPowell@JournalInquirer.com)
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Chris Powell column 