How much should Connecticut let parents be irresponsible?

By Chris Powell

Government’s subsidizing and thereby encouraging and legitimizing parental irresponsibility isn’t the only cause of the country’s long-worsening child neglect. Government causes the problem in other ways too.

The next most important cause of child neglect may be persistent inflation, which is always underreported in government economic data, since the criteria for measuring inflation have been changed opportunistically to make inflation look lower than it is. This deception has facilitated the stagnation of real wages — wages adjusted for inflation — while inflation produces great unearned wealth for property owners.

Also contributing to child neglect is the repeal of educational and disciplinary standards in public schools and their replacement with social promotion and the acceptance of disruption of classes. Undereducated young people coming out of high schools are not qualified for the better-paying jobs needed to support families. Such young people may have to work longer hours or take second and even third jobs just to survive, sacrificing family time. Undereducated young people are also unprepared for life generally, lacking the understanding needed for taking care of and getting along with others.

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That Connecticut steadily has been getting poorer is implied by the ever-increasing number of state government programs and subsidies said to be needed to sustain the poor or lift them out of poverty. 

For example, last week Governor Lamont announced a substantial expansion of Connecticut’s free school breakfast and lunch program. The program will not yet provide free breakfast and lunches for all students, but the governor said universal free school meals is the objective and he hopes the necessary money — estimated at $90 million — can be found during next year’s session of the General Assembly.

Making breakfast and lunch in school free for all students, rather than just students from poor families, would set an egalitarian tone. But mostly it would provide a subsidy to parents who are not poor, and would presume that even many well-off parents can’t find the time to ensure that their children are fed when they go to school.

Within living memory parents of all incomes — even poor parents — were expected to see that their children were fed, and most did. What do today’s parents have to do that is more important than providing proper care for their children?

But the same sort of question can be put to state government itself. If child nutrition is as important as the governor, legislators, and social-service advocates contended last week as expansion of the school meals program was announced, why couldn’t state government find the extra $90 million for universal free school meals this year?

After all, in the course of any two or three weeks the governor may announce tens of millions in grants to municipalities and social-service organizations for lesser purposes.       

Recently inflation in food prices has been especially high. But who in authority in Connecticut is pressing the question of political responsibility for rising food prices? Certainly not the advocates of free universal school meals, though free meals purchased with “free” money from the federal government — as the expansion of Connecticut’s free school meals program will be financed — may add to inflation.

Is sending another billion or two to Ukraine every month more important than properly feeding all schoolchildren? The state’s congressional delegation seems to think so. For unlimited federal government spending now is being financed by unlimited borrowing, which not only increases demand for real things without increasing supply but also raises interest rates, inflationary in both respects.

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That is, inflation — currency devaluation — now is a primary mechanism of government finance, in state government as well as the federal government, since all states lately have gotten huge amounts of “emergency” federal aid.

But inflation doesn’t help parents provide proper care for their children. It just induces them to seek to transfer more of their own responsibility to the government. What’s next in this cycle of parental default — having students stay in school for dinner too and then being taken home at night with their teachers to ensure that homework gets done?

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

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