Connecticut’s Democrats don’t understand their working-class problem

By Chris Powell

With their party having lost much support from the working class in last November’s election, many Democratic state legislators in Connecticut think that a good way of making amends is to give unemployment compensation to strikers. 

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Last year Democrats introduced such legislation and disgracefully and stupidly tried to keep it secret, to pass it without anyone outside their caucus discovering what the bill would do. The bill was exposed but passed anyway, whereupon Governor Lamont vetoed it. He still opposes the idea, since government’s subsidizing strikers would scare businesses away, but Senate Democratic leader Martin M. Looney hopes to change Lamont’s mind.

Democratic legislators also hope to enact new restrictions on residential landlords, as if that won’t discourage construction of apartments to ease the state’s housing shortage. 

The Democratic objective isn’t to strengthen Connecticut’s economy, reduce housing costs, and make the state affordable as much as to harm business and strike leftist poses.

Unemployment compensation for strikers will do little for the working class. Fewer than 7% of Connecticut’s private-sector workers are unionized and strikes are rare. They seem most frequent in the nursing home industry, whose employees indeed tend to be low-paid. But since most nursing home patients are government’s charges, increases in nursing home costs fall mainly on taxpayers.

The Democrats’ problems with the working class are much different.

First is the inflation the federal government unleashed through its spectacular spending increases of recent years, for which the virus epidemic was cited as license. Much of this spending was given as cash grants to states. But it all was financed by borrowing that was essentially money creation, and it was so extreme that it caused severe inflation worldwide.

The Democrats’ second problem with the working class is the downward pressure the federal government put on wages by admitting millions of low-skilled illegal immigrants. Meanwhile their housing and welfare expenses, underwritten by government, fueled inflation as well.

As a result most of the good things Democrats think they have done in recent years have been nullified by rising prices. The working class didn’t start defecting to Donald Trump because he is a great humanitarian but because the Democratic national administration smashed their standard of living. 

More government spending financed by deficits and borrowing are likely only to keep boosting inflation. While the new president considers himself a genius, he’ll need more than that to improve living standards while the country is already living at least 25% beyond its means.

Nevertheless Connecticut’s political left will push state legislators to induce state government to experiment with what may be the holy grail of their something-for-nothing philosophy — formally guaranteed annual incomes for the poor.

Frustration with government’s long failure to eliminate generational poverty is understandable. It is fair to wonder whether the poor might be rich today if the billions spent during the last 60 years in the name of elevating them had simply been given to them in cash.

But philanthropy-based experiments with guaranteed income have shown little success in enabling poor people to support themselves, and the danger is obvious in encouraging people to think the world owes them a living. Indeed, Connecticut’s welfare system is already a system of guaranteed income that has given tens of thousands of people the impression that they are not obliged to support their own children since the government will do it for them. So their children are often neglected and badly disadvantaged when they reach adulthood.

Guaranteed incomes, along with guaranteed jobs, job training, basic housing, and medical insurance, are necessary in one respect: for people being released after serving substantial prison terms. 

Most former convicts are employable only for menial work and are destitute upon their release and unable to support themselves. Predictably enough, half are back in prison in two or three years.

If government can’t ensure that the lives of parolees are being rebuilt decently, there’s no point in releasing them. Every prison sentence might as well be a life sentence.

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