By CHRIS POWELL
Poverty is a big and profitable business in Connecticut and throughout the country and yet poverty keeps worsening. Part of that is caused by high inflation, whereby government grows without the formal taxation needed to pay for it, inflation being informal taxation and poorly understood. But part of it is also caused by the failure of the programs and policies government undertakes to ameliorate poverty.
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Last week Connecticut got a good look at that failure from the Connecticut Mirror, which reported that an independent audit commissioned by the state Department of Economic and Community Development of the late Blue Hills Civic Association in Hartford could find no documentation for $2.4 million of state government money given to the association for distribution to what were said to be community-service organizations. Some recipients refused to cooperate with the audit.
The audit was commissioned in response to last year’s scandal about the “earmarking” of millions of dollars in state grants to organizations selected by Democratic state legislators — patronage pork — and particularly about the grants arranged by Hartford state Sen. Douglas McCrory, which he routed through a close friend. Partly because of the scandal, McCrory was defeated last month in a primary for renomination by the Democrats.
Hartford remains desperately poor but as the scandal showed, the poverty business there continues to do well.
Embarrassed by the scandal, the General Assembly and Governor Lamont enacted a new policy requiring patronage grant recipients to report more about what they do generally as well as how they spent their state money. But being in the majority, Democratic legislators will continue to arrange patronage grants, and requiring recipients to submit more documentation won’t necessarily mean that their grants accomplish anything of value for the public. For there is no guarantee that anyone will check on what was actually done.
Indeed, six decades of the “war on poverty” in Connecticut suggest that the only result that matters is the political support generated from the poverty business.
Why are Connecticut’s cities still so poor and dysfunctional? It’s not because of Donald Trump, nor even because so much money has been siphoned away into the graft and waste of poverty pimping, as with the Blue Hills Civic Association. The cities remain so poor and dysfunctional because, as the patronage scandal merely reiterates, no one in authority really cares about the results of poverty policy as long as the poverty business itself thrives.
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In a few weeks the hundred-member “Citizens Assembly” convened by the Connecticut Conference of Municipalities plans to release recommendations from its study of municipal property taxes. But the study isn’t likely to tell the governor and legislators anything they don’t know. CCM is just trying to motivate them to transfer burden of property taxes elsewhere.
The property tax is the state’s largest, collecting about $13 billion a year, a little more than the state income tax collects. But the property tax may be more bothersome politically since most income taxes are paid by the wealthiest few while property taxes are borne widely by the homeowning middle and upper classes. While property taxes are said to be regressive, in fact they are to a great extent taxes on unearned wealth, especially now that inflation and restrictive zoning have produced huge unrealized capital gains for homeowners.
Maybe the most obvious mechanism of property tax relief and fairness would be to have state government assume all costs of “special education,” which should be an expense of general social welfare, not municipal government. Another obvious possibility would be to enact a limited homestead exemption.
But where is the money for such a tax shift to come from? Proposing tax cuts is easy; replacing the revenue is hard.
The Citizens Assembly almost certainly will not propose seriously economizing in municipal government and particularly in local education, the biggest municipal expense. School enrollments keep falling while school costs keep rising, but no one in politics in Connecticut can acknowledge the irony or stand up to the teacher unions.
Chris Powell has written about Connecticut government and politics for many years. (CPowell@cox.net)
Chris Powell column 