By CHRIS POWELL
Connecticut’s minimum wage, having been indexed to inflation since 2019, rose to $16.94 per hour this month and was celebrated by Governor Lamont and state Labor Commissioner Dante Bartolomeo.
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The governor contended that the increases have not impaired business conditions as was feared when they began. But Connecticut’s business conditions are poor. The state lags most other states in economic growth, and raising the minimum wage discourages many small businesses.
Indeed, Commissioner Bartolomeo’s celebration of the minimum wage increase actually implied severe weakness in both the economy and the state’s workforce.
“This is not just something for teenagers,” the commissioner said of the minimum wage. “This is not just an after-school job.” The minimum wage, she said, is disproportionately earned by women of color, and “this is how they support themselves and their families.”
If Connecticut really has so many people trying to support themselves and even families on minimum-wage jobs, then many people have reached adulthood without acquiring substantial job skills, or else the state’s economy is producing too many menial jobs and not enough better-paying jobs requiring skills. Or the problem may be both. And when the minimum wage goes up, inflation quickly nullifies it anyway, in part because the people advocating higher minimum wages, like the people in charge of government, don’t care much about inflation.
Connecticut’s increasing dependence on the minimum wage is an indication of worsening poverty. While politicians are chattering about “affordability,” most of the solutions they have proposed don’t address affordability at all — don’t address reducing the cost of living.
Instead their solutions, like increasing the minimum wage, are mostly matters of increasing government subsidies to the poor at the expense of employers and taxpayers. The subsidies don’t reduce the cost of living but increase the cost of government, distort markets, and — worse — distract from and rationalize the causes of poverty.
After all, poverty correlates overwhelmingly with fatherlessness and inadequate education, and both correlate overwhelmingly with the welfare system’s destruction of the family and social promotion’s destruction of academic standards. But addressing the causes of poverty is not on the agenda of anyone in authority in Connecticut. Government just keeps throwing money at poverty without regard to results.
VOICES FOR HIGHER TAXES: The big thinkers at Connecticut Voices for Children have studied how state government can make up for reductions of hundreds of millions of dollars in federal aid to state social programs and claimed to have figured it out in a report published the other day.
Their solution is to raise taxes and spending. Particularly:
— Diminish the “fiscal guardrails” that have restricted state government spending, prevented budget deficits, and even allowed state government to catch up a little on its pension obligations.
— Raise taxes on the rich and the most valuable estates.
— Do more auditing of taxpayers. That is, raise taxes some more.
What insight! State government can get more money by … raising taxes!
Of course this long has been the platform of the political left in Connecticut, which presumes that since raising taxes generally won’t be popular, even more of the tax burden should be put on a small minority.
In a better world tax rates, even those on the rich, would be set according to what is considered fair, and would be held there until fairness could be shown to require changing them. But in Connecticut tax rates are to be raised whenever the government wants to spend more.
State government is full of excessive spending — from its workforce to education to anti-poverty programs. Identifying and publicizing the excess, showing how it harms both taxpayers and the needy, would be a great service. But, being part of the government class, Connecticut Voices for Children never looks to the excess in state government for money that could be saved or redirected to better purposes.
So the group would be more honest to call itself Connecticut Voices for Higher Spending and Taxes. The “children” part is just sanctimonious and tiresome whitewash.
Chris Powell has written about Connecticut government and politics for many years. (CPowell@cox.net)
Chris Powell column 