Protests haven’t explained what ‘free Palestine’ means

By Chris Powell

Another protest was held at the state Capitol the other day against Israel’s war with Gaza (but not Gaza’s war with Israel). Participants again called for “free Palestine.” But no one seems to have asked what they meant by that and they haven’t explained.

Bears are likely to triumph long before ‘affordable housing’ does

Can Republican state legislators keep up their public-interest clamor?

Murphy smears an industry on which his state depends

What exactly do the protesters mean by Palestine? Their slogan, repeated at the Capitol, is “from the river to the sea” — the Jordan River to the Mediterranean — which includes the entirety of Israel and more. It signifies Israel’s destruction, which indeed long has been the objective of the regime that controls Gaza and invaded Israel two Octobers ago after years of firing missiles into Israel.

And what exactly do the protesters mean by “free”? Do they mean a place with freedom of speech, press, religion, and sexual orientation? Do they mean sexual equality and due process of law? 

Of course there is nothing like all that in the places ruled by Palestinians. 

Or by “free” do the protesters really mean free of Jews? Ironically Israel is the only place in its part of the world where Jews and Palestinians live together in the same political jurisdiction.

Journalists never ask even the simplest critical questions at these protests. Maybe they’re afraid they wouldn’t survive whatever answers they might get. 

WHERE TO PUT HOUSING: Maybe there’s a simple solution to Connecticut’s housing shortage and the disagreement between Governor Lamont and the Democratic majority in the General Assembly over the housing legislation the governor recently vetoed.

Nearly everyone admits that the state needs a lot more housing. The disagreement is over where to put it. So in the special legislative session the governor may call in the fall, he and the legislature could select one town, authorize any and all types of housing to be built there, and change its name to Somewhere Else. That’s where the opponents of new housing always say it should go.

Maybe there’s another solution, almost as simple, for building housing without antagonizing the neighbors.

Connecticut’s cities and inner suburbs are full of dilapidated properties that are eyesores, nuisances, and even dangers: abandoned factories, vacant shopping centers, rundown tenements, and such. Just about anything that replaced those properties would be an improvement.

So state government could legislate punitive annual taxes on those unused or underused properties, foreclose on them if they were not quickly refurbished or the punitive taxes paid, exempt the lots from municipal zoning, auction them to developers exclusively for housing development, and, if the housing wasn’t built within a year, foreclose on them again and repeat the process until the housing was built.

In such a system cities and suburbs would replace unproductive eyesores with new taxpayers and economic growth. Nearby properties would become more attractive. There would be lots of new housing and a new constituency for bus and bicycle transportation without new suburban sprawl. 

The only people offended by this would be those who prefer crumbling eyesores to new homes, and any such people deserve to be offended.

POVERTY ISN’T A VIRTUE: Democratic elected officials are outraged that the new Republican federal budget includes tax cuts for “the rich” and well-to-do but not the poor. Given the soaring national debt, its spectacular interest costs, and the resulting weakening of the dollar, there probably shouldn’t be any federal tax cuts at all.

But complaints from Democrats about tax cuts for “the rich” ring hollow, just as their bleating about the poor does. For taxes can’t be cut for people who don’t pay any, only for people who do, and the poor don’t pay federal income taxes, only federal excise taxes like those on gasoline. Not even Democrats propose cutting gas taxes. They want conventional energy to be expensive, though this batters the poor. 

In any case, contrary to the Democratic bleating, poverty is not a virtue and doesn’t automatically make people deserving. The able-bodied are obliged to support themselves, and even the poor should pay some taxes and feel that they have “skin in the game.”

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

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Bears are likely to triumph long before ‘affordable housing’ does

By Chris Powell

With Governor Lamont’s veto of the wide-ranging housing bill recently passed by the General Assembly, Connecticut towns aren’t likely to reach the “fair share” quotas of “affordable” housing the bill set for them. But the legislature’s failure to approve other legislation may ensure that each town ends up with another quota — a quota of bears.

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Confrontations with bears in Connecticut have been increasing rapidly, and according to the state Department of Energy and Environmental Protection, there were more than 3,000 last year. These included two attacks on people and 67 of what might be called “bearglaries,” in which the hungry creatures broke into people’s houses. Bear attacks on livestock are up too. 

A few days ago a bear attacked a man as he walked with his dog on his property in North Canaan. He escaped with scratches.

According to the environmental department, Connecticut has far more bear confrontations than neighboring states, though neighboring states are estimated to have more bears than Connecticut’s 1,200 or so. Maybe Connecticut has so many more bear confrontations because, except for Rhode Island, Connecticut’s neighbors allow bear hunting while Connecticut doesn’t.

The increasing conflicts with bears prompted some legislators in the recent session to propose authorizing bear hunting. But the bears have a lobby organization as influential as the government employee unions, and it also frightened the legislators out of protecting the public.

The bear lobby argues that people who put bird feeders in their yards or fail to secure their trash barrels are to blame for the increasing confrontations. Certainly bird feeders and trash barrels are attractions, but as the many “bearglaries” show, removing feeders and securing trash barrels has little deterrent value. Providing access to bird feeders and trash barrels may actually discourage bears from breaking into houses for food.

In any case, the bears are already rampant in Connecticut and won’t be going away on their own. Unmolested and having no natural predators, they will reproduce at an estimated rate of more than two cubs per year per mother. A doubling of the state’s bear population every three years seems possible, with the population pushing steadily into the eastern part of the state. As long as Connecticut’s feckless policy toward bears is only to shoo them into a neighbor’s yard, more confrontations are inevitable, with or without bird feeders and trash cans, and within a decade every town in Connecticut could have a dozen bears as permanent residents. 

Unlike housing developers, bears don’t observe zoning regulations. So odds are that, if state law doesn’t change, bears will be disrupting many suburbs and rural towns long before those towns get their first “affordable” housing.

It’s understandable why government employees come first in Connecticut, far ahead of the public interest. They are numerous and politically organized and have their own political party, so politicians are afraid of them. But why do bears have to come second, still far ahead of the public interest? 

Unlike taxpayers, bears are not an endangered species. Other states manage to stand up to them. Except for the political timidity of the state’s elected officials, why should bears be any more protected in Connecticut than coyotes and poisonous snakes?

WHO NEEDS ‘BABY BONDS’?: A month ago Hartford Mayor Arunam Arulampalam announced he had rounded up an extra $3 million in city funds and various grants for the city’s ever-dysfunctional school system.  

Aleysha Ortiz wants that money instead. She’s the recent graduate of Hartford Public High School who is suing the city because, despite the diploma the school gave her, she was illiterate. She’s suing for damages, and last month her lawyers offered to settle for … $3 million.

If Ortiz wins she’ll have invented a great racket for indifferent students and their neglectful parents. Fail to learn in school, say nothing about it publicly until social promotion graduates you, and then sue and cash in for life. By comparison the “baby bonds” about which state government is so proud will be chump change.

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

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Can Republican state legislators keep up their public-interest clamor?

By CHRIS POWELL

Being so small, the Republican minority in the General Assembly struggles just to be heard. Making a difference is usually out of reach. 

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But the Republicans can take credit for what most state residents may consider the top achievement of the legislature’s recent session: the removal of some secret taxes from Connecticut’s electricity bills, so-called “public benefits” charges that have little or nothing to do with the actual generation and delivery of electricity.

For years the legislature and governors have used the “public benefits” charges to conceal the expense of programs that might not have enough support if they had to be financed by ordinary appropriations and taxes. Stuffing the “public benefits” charges in electricity bills not only raised the money for those programs; it also gave the false but politically desirable impression that electricity rates went up because of the big, bad utility companies. 

It has been years since the utilities made any money generating electricity. State law drove them out of that business and, while most people don’t understand it, the utilities just buy electricity from generation companies on behalf of customers who don’t bother to select their own generator. The utilities can be blamed for their delivery costs but the cost of electricity itself is now set by markets in which residential and business users can shop for the lowest rate, though most don’t.

Connecticut’s largest electric utility, Eversource, has estimated that as much as 20% of electricity bills in the state have represented “public benefits” costs, costs that include the electricity used by people who say they can’t afford their bills and so have gotten state government to pay them. Such welfare expense never should have been charged to electricity users particularly; it should have been placed in the welfare budget and financed by regular taxes. 

Republican legislators long have been clamoring about this issue, and this year they gained traction with it by holding informational meetings around the state, urging people to complain. Many did. Most state residents have been sore that Connecticut has nearly the highest electricity costs in the country, and eventually even Democratic legislators and Governor Lamont supported bipartisan legislation that removed many “public benefits” charges from electricity bills.

But the spending at issue won’t stop, since it is virtually forbidden for state government to economize. Instead much of the “public benefits” spending has been transferred to the regular state budget, where it will be financed not by taxes but by borrowing, as incredible as that may seem. Not only will Connecticut residents still be paying what used to be the “public benefits” charges; they’ll be paying bond interest too. But at least the charges will be paid by a broader base of taxpayers, not just by electricity users.

Connecticut needs Republican legislators to continue their clamor about questionable spending. There is plenty of it but attacking it won’t be as easy as it was to attack high electricity bills, which afflict nearly everyone. For most of the questionable spending is attached to influential special interests, especially government employee unions, which can mobilize far more dependents than the so-called environmentalists who believe that the “public benefits” charges are necessary to save the world. Since Connecticut is a one-party state, these special interests now are closely tied to the ruling party, the Democrats.

Even so, a public interest endures in Connecticut, and it isn’t complicated to articulate it. It just requires the courage to defy the special interests and figure out how to gain publicity amid news organizations that are almost as connected to the ruling party as the special interests are.

Since Republican legislators are a small minority, obliging the special interests won’t get them anywhere. For Republicans have nothing to offer them. But even unarticulated, the public interest is vast, and as the Republicans just showed with the electricity issue, and showed six years ago when they assisted the grassroots movement against reinstating highway tolls, the public interest is powerful when mobilized. 

There’s nothing to do but keep trying.

——

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

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What nominated Mamdani in New York City is trouble here too

By Chris Powell

Far-leftists in Connecticut’s Democratic Party are so excited by Zohran Mamdani’s victory in the Democratic primary for mayor of New York City that they are starting to think about challenging Governor Lamont if he seeks the party’s nomination for a third term. 

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Having vetoed unemployment compensation for strikers and a housing bill that, while cheered by the left, was more bluff than substance, the governor has just polished his reputation as a moderate at the expense of leftist support. But Lamont’s reputation as a moderate is still overdone. He has pledged to keep giving the state employee unions everything they want and he remains as much a supporter of illegal immigration, transgenderism, and political correctness as any leftist.

Though Mamdani’s victory scares moderate Democrats as well as the political right, it too may be overdone. For Mamdani’s two top opponents in the primary were badly compromised. A federal criminal indictment, canceled by President Trump, caused Mayor Eric Adams to withdraw from the Democratic primary and to try get re-elected as an independent instead. That left former Gov. Andrew Cuomo, disgraced by a sexual harassment scandal that forced him to resign four years ago.

By some calculations Mamdani’s vote total in the primary was only 9% of all New York City voters, and it’s a long way to Election Day with plenty of time for Adams or a Republican nominee to seize the flag of moderation. There’s also plenty of time for Mamdani’s critics to mock his public record and the likely expense of his platform.

Like many on the left, Mamdani believes that nearly everything desirable should and can be free. He wants free public transit, free child care, a freeze on apartment rents (but not a freeze on the expenses landlords must pay), and groceries subsidized by city-operated supermarkets. 

Who is to pay for all this? Not the recipients of the goodies but “the rich,” on whom Mamdani would raise taxes — if he could, but he can’t, since New York City income tax rates are set by state government, not city government. That is, his platform is a fraud.

But Mamdani has a point, and it resonates especially with city residents: The cost of living is too high. Indeed it is, and not just in New York City but in many other places, like Connecticut. Unfortunately, like most leftists, Mamdani is not interested in bringing costs down; he just wants to transfer them to others, perpetuating a vicious cycle.

That cycle began with government driving up the cost of living, especially the cost of housing, with inflation and taxes, crushing the poor and the once-middle class. This caused people to seek more free stuff and subsidies from government, prompting government to oblige (and, of course, to grow), thereby driving inflation and taxes up more, causing people to demand still more subsidies and free stuff and government to oblige, and so on.

Why can’t so many people afford to feed themselves and care for their children anymore? Why haven’t wages kept up with inflation?

These questions don’t interest elected officials, probably because they would implicate themselves by asking. But answers can be inferred.

Wages aren’t keeping up with inflation because work skills aren’t, since public education, having reduced itself to social promotion, is not producing as many people equipped to support themselves and their children. 

Welfare policy has wrecked the family, depriving millions of homes of fathers and breadwinners. 

Government’s mistaken financial priorities, like the supremacy of government employee unions, has diverted money from important services to the public. 

The admission of millions of illegal immigrants has depressed the wage base for the less-skilled labor being produced by public education.     

Mamdani’s victory is a measure of New York City’s impoverishment by government. People will always vote for free stuff if the plan is to get someone else to pay for it, and, as the French economist Frederic Bastiat discerned long ago, government is the great fiction by which everybody tries to live at the expense of everybody else.

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

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Murphy smears an industry on which his state depends

By Chris Powell

To hear Connecticut U.S. Sen. Chris Murphy tell it, President Trump dispatched Air Force bombers and Navy submarines to destroy Iran’s nuclear bomb-making facilities because the “war industry” is so influential in Washington.

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On the leftist-leaning MSNBC cable television network the other day, the senator agreed with his interviewer’s suggestion that there was a big gap between the opinion of Democratic members of Congress and the opinion of ordinary Democrats about the attack on Iran, with Democrats in Congress far less opposed to it than ordinary party members.

“There is a war industry in this town,” Murphy said of Washington. “There’s a lot of people who make money off war. The military — I love them, they’re capable — but they are always overly optimistic about what they can do. … The war industry spends a lot of money here in Washington telling us that the guns and the tanks and the planes can solve all our problems.”

“All our problems”? That was hyperbole worthy of President Trump. 

Of course there is a “military-industrial complex,” as President Dwight D. Eisenhower warned as he left office in January 1961. But it just wants its products to be manufactured and purchased by the government and cares little about whether they are actually used. 

Contrary to Murphy’s suggestion, Trump didn’t consult military contractors about attacking Iran. The president may have had mixed motives, including bad ones — like the desire to be seen as a tough guy and war leader decades after evading the military draft — but pleasing the “war industry” wasn’t one of them. 

While Eisenhower’s remark long has been construed as scorn for military contractors, he actually acknowledged their necessity. He had been a general of the Army when the United States found itself badly unprepared for the world war into which it was dragged in December 1941.

On reflection Eisenhower said: “Our arms must be mighty, ready for instant action. … We can no longer risk emergency improvisation of national defense. We have been compelled to create a permanent armaments industry of vast proportions. … This conjunction of an immense military establishment and a large arms industry is new in the American experience. … Yet we must not fail to comprehend its grave implications. … In the councils of government, we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex.”

The “war industry” that Senator Murphy accuses of complicity in Trump’s attack on Iran includes jet-engine manufacturer Pratt & Whitney in East Hartford and Middletown, for which 1st District U.S. Rep. John B. Larson is always cheerleading. It includes nuclear-submarine maker Electric Boat in Groton, for which 2nd District U.S. Rep. Joe Courtney spends much time supplicating. And it includes Sikorsky Aircraft in Stratford, whose fortunes are guarded by 3rd District U.S. Rep. Rosa DeLauro. 

In turn Pratt is a subsidiary of Raytheon, EB a subsidiary of General Dynamics, and Sikorsky a subsidiary of Lockheed-Martin, all giants of military contracting.

Yet Larson, Courtney, and DeLauro, all Democrats like Murphy, quickly expressed opposition to Trump’s attack on Iran. While they also voted against impeaching the president for the attack, their voting to impeach Trump for disregarding the War Powers Act when they had condoned similar violations by Democratic presidents might have seemed hypocritical. 

Serious journalism might ask Murphy if his Democratic colleagues in Connecticut, so supportive of the military contractors in their districts, are tools of the “war industry” he thinks induced the president to attack Iran.

Eisenhower was right. As totalitarian nations pursue ever-more devastating weapons, the United States needs to keep ahead of them, even if this country doesn’t need as many nuclear warheads as it has. Whether and how to use those weapons will always be a matter of judgment for elected officials. 

By scapegoating military contractors to gain more approval on the far left, Murphy showed his lack of judgment and exceeded Trump’s own posturing and demagoguery.

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

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Democrats think Trump is a worse enemy than Iran

By Chris Powell

Members of Connecticut’s congressional delegation are probably right that President Trump should have sought the approval of Congress before launching last weekend’s attacks on Iran’s nuclear bomb-making infrastructure. That is the clear implication of the Constitution’s placing with Congress the power to declare war, and it is the command of the federal War Powers Act. 

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But then most of Connecticut’s members of Congress, all Democrats, were in office and offered little objection when Presidents Bill Clinton and Barack Obama, both Democrats, went around the world bombing stuff. Without formal congressional approval, Clinton ordered attacks on Kosovo, Sudan, and Afghanistan, and Obama ordered attacks on Libya and Syria.

But Trump is a Republican.

Of course in principle democracy requires the public’s ratification of decisions to go to war, and the United States now is openly at war with Iran. Vice President J.D. Vance’s contention that the United States is not at war with Iran but with its nuclear bomb-making program is a distinction without a difference, just an articulation of war aims. More to the point, as a practical matter Iran has been at war with the United States for many years, insofar as Iran, as Trump noted last weekend, is the world’s main sponsor of terrorism and this terrorism has killed many U.S. citizens.

Also as a practical matter, Congress retains control over the war with its power of the purse. It can pass legislation forbidding spending for war against Iran. 

But the legal questions are separate from the question of what the U.S. position toward Iran should be. So far the Connecticut delegation has failed on that question.

U.S. Sen. Chris Murphy says Iran poses no immediate threat to the United States. That is contradicted by the many years of Iran’s sponsoring terrorism against Americans and others. Additionally, if the United States has an interest in a stable and peaceful Middle East, where so much of the world’s oil is produced and where the United States has formal or informal allies, Iran’s long campaign of subversion there is very much a threat to this country.

Criticizing Trump’s attack on Iran, U.S. Rep. Joe Courtney quotes Gen. David Petraeus’ query about the second war with Iran’s neighbor, Iraq: “Tell me how this ends.”

This is not really profound. For the second war with Iraq was an invasion, a land war of conquest with thousands of soldiers pursuing imagined “weapons of mass destruction” as well as “regime change.” No one, at least not yet, is advocating the conquest of Iran, whose regime is built on oil installations that can be easily destroyed from a distance with bombs and missiles without conquest.

Yes, there’s no telling how far Iran will go with retaliation. But there long has been good reason to fear that the end sought by an unmolested Iran would be mass murder, especially in Israel, whose destruction the ayatollahs long have pledged and have been very tempted by, Israel being so small geographically, a “one-bomb country.”

Trump says the war with Iran ends with Iran’s capacity to make nuclear weapons, but that is wishful thinking. Even without nuclear weapons Iran’s theocratic fascist regime may remain in power, continuing its terrorism and subversion, chanting “Death to America” along with “Death to Israel,” and pursuing an objective that is broader still — the forced religious conversion of the entire world. If the ayatollahs stay in power, they are sure to continue their war even without nuclear weapons.

The United States is a continental country, not a one-bomb country. But even one nuclear bomb — detonated in Washington or New York or another city — could inflict catastrophic damage that might last a century. Democratic leaders, most still supporting open borders, through which such a bomb might pass, should reflect on this danger, as the Israelis long have been reflecting on it while being attacked by Iran’s proxies. 

At last the Israelis have drawn the proper conclusion. But the only conclusion Connecticut’s Democrats seem able to draw is that if Trump did it, it must be wrong.   

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

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If only Connecticut Democrats hated crime as much as gun rights

By Chris Powell

Most prominent Democrats in Connecticut hate the U.S. Constitution’s Second Amendment and its right to bear arms. They blame the Second Amendment for gun crime and strive to impair gun rights in any way they can. They have yet to notice that Section 15 of the Declaration of Rights in Connecticut’s Constitution is even more emphatic about gun rights: “Every citizen has a right to bear arms in defense of himself and the state.”  

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The Democrats characterize the most commonly owned semi-automatic rifles as “military-style assault weapons,” and, with their longstanding control of the General Assembly and the governor’s office, have outlawed them, though these guns are seldom used in crime. Nearly all guns used in crime are handguns, and nearly all handguns are just as semi-automatic as “military-style assault weapons,” if not as scary-looking. 

Nor have the Democrats paid much attention to the survey done two years ago by the state Office of Legislative Research. It found that two-thirds of the gun crime prosecutions brought in Connecticut from 2013 to 2022 had been dropped, most in plea bargains for convictions on other charges deemed more serious. Any elected official who really believed his rhetoric about the awfulness of guns would be working to change the law so that use of a gun in commission of a crime would be the most serious charge short of murder. But it hasn’t happened.  

Meanwhile 40% of offenders released from prisons in Connecticut are convicted and imprisoned again within three years, and many serious crimes are committed by repeat offenders, many of whom are not caught. But Governor Lamont and Democratic legislators often boast about the decline in the state’s prison population. 

Rather than get tough on gun crime, the Democratic majority in the General Assembly has just passed legislation that the governor expects to sign to try to put gun manufacturers, distributors, and retailers out of business by letting them be sued for failing to take “reasonable” precautions against selling guns to people who use the guns in crime or give them to others for use in crime.

Gun manufacturers and licensed retailers are highly regulated and are not the cause of wrongful gun possession. The problem is the country’s huge informal market in guns and the huge number of guns in private hands. This market is impossible to control short of aggressive prosecution and severe sentences for gun crime — exactly what Connecticut has refused to undertake lest the prison population be increased with a sharply disproportionate number of offenders from impoverished minority groups.

Instead of increasing prosecutions, convictions, and imprisonments, Connecticut’s new law will incentivize gun haters and opportunistic lawyers to contrive lawsuits against gun makers and retailers and win enough financial damages or settlements to bankrupt them or drive them out of state. This won’t reduce gun crime but it may make the gun haters feel better about themselves and their failure to reduce gun crime and the generational poverty that leads to it.

Connecticut’s U.S. senators, Democrats Richard Blumenthal and Chris Murphy, are pursuing a similar agenda in Congress. They want to repeal the federal Protection of Lawful Commerce in Arms Act, enacted in 2005, which exempts gun manufacturers from lawsuits brought by victims of gun violence. Repealing the law and unleashing more damage lawsuits is another way of putting gun makers out of business and impairing the right to bear arms.

An argument can be made for repealing the Second Amendment and Section 15 of the Connecticut Constitution’s Declaration of Rights. But Democrats are too dishonest to make it. The Democrats want to nullify the Second Amendment and the gun rights provision of Connecticut’s Constitution but they don’t dare pursue their objective plainly, since honesty would arouse much more opposition than their indirection and would call attention to state government’s refusal to prosecute most gun crimes.

Amid their dishonesty, the Democrats should remember that, at least for the next few years, when guns are outlawed, only outlaws — and Donald Trump — will have guns.

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

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Housing bill will do little when state could do so much more

By Chris Powell

Opponents of the wide-ranging housing legislation recently passed by the Democratic majorities in the General Assembly have been loud enough to induce Governor Lamont to equivocate on the bill. Will he sign it, veto it, or try to negotiate its revision?

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Many of the bill’s opponents, including municipal officials, contend that its enactment would be the end of local control over development.

Arguing to the contrary, the bill’s leading advocate, House Majority Leader Jason Rojas, D-East Hartford, insists that the bill wouldn’t require any municipality to build any housing at all.

There’s much wrong with both sides of the argument and with the bill itself.

Rojas makes the bill seem like another of the meaningless poses struck by the legislature — big talk implying bold action that never comes. The bill will produce little housing and, by extending rent control to every municipality, may prevent more housing construction than it achieves.

Connecticut’s housing costs are so extreme, grinding the poor and middle class down, that action is needed urgently to build at least 100,000 multi-family units — apartments and moderately priced condominiums. 

But opponents of the housing bill want to continue worshipping local control and exclusive zoning, a big cause of the shortage.

Fears of more “affordable” housing in the suburbs long have been justified. The suburbs are full of people or the children of people who fled the cities as pernicious federal and state welfare policies turned them into poverty factories. People don’t want city pathologies following them. 

But even many of the gainfully employed young-adult children of suburbanites can’t find suitable housing in their hometowns or nearby. Connecticut seems to believe they should live in their parents’ basements or leave the state.

As long as building housing in Connecticut remains a matter of asking the permission of 169 municipal governments, little housing will be built. That’s the state’s recent history. While the country’s housing supply has increased 9.4% in the last decade, Connecticut’s has increased by only 3.9%. Not so coincidentally, the state’s economic growth has badly lagged the nation’s as well. 

The only way to get housing built is to push the obstacles aside and build it.

Fortunately Connecticut has many opportunities to build housing without tearing up the countryside with more suburban sprawl. The state abounds with vacant industrial, office, and commercial properties in the cities and inner suburbs, properties already served by the necessary infrastructure — roads, sewers, utility lines, and schools. Recent news reports have highlighted the scores of vacant lots in Bridgeport and Hartford.

But can inexpensive housing for people of modest incomes be built without creating instant slums, as housing opponents long have feared?

Yes, but it requires a central authority to take the whole situation in hand and put the interest of the entire state first, not the interest of the people who have their housing and don’t care if others go without. It also requires giving the poor and struggling a chance for property ownership. 

That is, the situation requires a state government housing construction authority to purchase unused properties and auction them to developers to pursue housing plans approved by the authority. The authority could be run by a board drawn from all parts of the state.

Of course state government often fails to demonstrate the competence and integrity to do much of anything right. Yet the city-state of Singapore somehow has found the necessary competence and integrity with housing.

In Singapore the government arranges housing construction and then finances people who want to buy their units. As a result 80% of the population lives in housing built by the government and 90% of its residents own their units. In such a scheme people gain and respect property and become middle-class. With adequate housing for all, the cost of living is reduced and prosperity grows. While multi-ethnic and multi-lingual, Singapore has social stability, little poverty and crime, great prosperity, and high educational attainment.

Couldn’t Connecticut at least experiment with this model, starting with its many decrepit factories, vacant shopping centers, and half-empty office buildings?

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

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Democrats aren’t against kings, they just want a new one

By Chris Powell

Last weekend’s “No Kings” rallies in Connecticut and around the country, protesting what were said to be President Trump’s excesses, were as hyperbolic as the president himself, and, insofar as most of the protesters were Democrats and liberals, largely hypocritical.

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Yes, the president is laughably vain and has ridiculous megalomaniacal tendencies, exemplified by the military parade he ordered in Washington, purportedly to salute the Army on its 250th birthday, coincidentally also the president’s 79th birthday. Associating with the military is much more fun for Trump now than it was years ago, when he escaped military service with a claim of bone spurs.

But Trump, a Republican, isn’t the first president to enjoy ruling by executive order. His two immediate predecessors, both Democrats, issued many such orders — indeed, some of Trump’s just undo them — and many of his orders have been stalled by court injunctions that themselves exceed law or precedent.

It would be great if Democrats and liberals are starting to see some virtue in limited government. But if presidential powers have become too large and tempting, the Democrats themselves legislated or consented to them when they were available to Democratic presidents.

It would have been nice if the people protesting Trump’s supposed lawlessness last weekend had also protested when President Joe Biden refused to enforce immigration law, followed his predecessor Barack Obama in refusing to enforce federal marijuana law in states that don’t want it enforced, and forgave student loans without legal authority. But Democrats liked that lawlessness. Similarly, most people at the “No Kings” rallies refused to acknowledge any difference between legal and illegal immigration, since breaking immigration law is fine with them and enforcing it an outrage.

The Democrats’ hypocrisy hints that their hysteria about Trump arises less from his recklessness and overreach than from his attempt to take away the government patronage, employment, subsidies, and grants the Democrats and the political left have come to consider their birthright. Government in the United States has grown vastly in recent decades, financed by a spectacular increase in the national debt, an increase that has rocketed inflation and is prompting the world to withdraw from financing American overconsumption.

Americans are living far beyond their means, and Trump and the Republican majority in Congress have just produced a federal budget that will keep increasing debt and devalue the dollar. But the policy objective originally articulated by Trump’s treasury secretary, Scott Bessent, was sound: to shrink the government sector, much of which is mere overhead, and grow the private sector, which produces wealth. 

No one seriously aspiring to be a king would aim to shrink the government he controlled, and the people protesting last weekend don’t want to shrink the government either. They like it big. They’re not against kings as much as they just want a different one.

JOURNALISM QUICKLY FORGETS: Last year’s most important investigative journalism in Connecticut was done by the Connecticut Mirror’s Jessika Harkay, who wrote about a recent graduate of Hartford Public High School who was illiterate, an example of the social promotion that is destroying public education.

Last week the Mirror happily noted that Harkay had won a national journalism award for her report and was leaving for a job with an internet site covering education nationally.

But the Mirror and all other news organizations in Connecticut had forgotten Harkay’s prize-winning story. For while the illiterate graduate is suing Hartford’s school system, no one in journalism has followed up. 

When the scandal broke, Hartford’s school superintendent and the state education commissioner promised investigations to fix responsibility and address the problem, but they have produced nothing. Rather than fix responsibility, Hartford’s superintendent will retire in a few weeks. Months ago the education commissioner told Republican state senators that she might have something to report about the case … next year.

Governor Lamont seems to have said nothing about the case, nor to have been asked.

Questions abound here. Harkay’s award is a reminder that no one in journalism is asking them.

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

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Illegal immigration’s backers in Connecticut never get critical questions

By Chris Powell

Immigration law enforcement agents must be compelled, by congressional action or court order, to identify themselves conspicuously during arrests, to display their badges, and to make prompt public reports identifying the people they have detained, why they have been detained, and where they are being held. A free country cannot allow secret arrests. The necessity of such accountability in government goes back centuries to the Magna Carta.

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Democrats in Congress should press this issue instead of simply decrying all immigration law enforcement. Most of the country will agree, and Republicans in Congress who disagree will risk being exposed as totalitarians.

Police in Connecticut already are obliged by law to follow similar procedure, though they sometimes neglect to report arrests promptly and news organizations fail to notice.

But the greater failure of Connecticut journalism lately involves its reporting of complaints against immigration law enforcement. Reporters can’t be blamed when they can’t reach or get responses from immigration law enforcers, but they can be blamed when they quote officials, activists, and others in the immigration controversy without posing critical questions.

Last week’s arrest by immigration agents of a woman as she was driving her children to school in New Haven provoked outrage. Some of it verged on hysteria, like the statement issued by Mayor Justin Elicker.

“To arrest a mother in front of her two young children while taking them to school is simply unconscionable,” the mayor said.

So what is the appropriate time to arrest and detain someone with children who is suspected of being in the country illegally? Will such a suspect necessarily cooperate in scheduling her arrest and detention, or might she flee instead? Do New Haven’s own police always give notice to the targets of their arrest warrants?

Mayor Elicker wasn’t asked.

He continued: “We condemn this deplorable act of family separation and call upon the Trump administration to stop its inhumane approach and cruel tactics.”

But don’t arrests in New Haven and elsewhere routinely separate people from their children, or are children brought to jail with their parents? 

The mayor wasn’t asked.

“New Haven,” the mayor said, “is a welcoming city for all, and our immigrant neighbors are a part of our New Haven family.”

Does New Haven really welcome legal and illegal immigrants, the well-intentioned and the ill-intentioned, and the self-supporting and the dependent alike? Does New Haven distinguish among them, or is that properly the work of immigration authorities? Or should no one do that work and should the nation’s borders be opened again?   

Mayor Elicker concluded: “New Haven will continue to stand up for our residents and our values, and we will continue to fight back with every resource available to us against the Trump administration’s reckless immigration policies.”

What exactly does “every resource available” mean? Even as the mayor was so upset about that immigration arrest, New Haven’s school system was facing a deficit of $16.5 million and was preparing to lay off scores of employees, and the chronic absenteeism rate of its high school students stood at 50%. Since New Haven can hardly take care of itself, how can it afford to be a “sanctuary city,” accepting, housing, concealing, and trying to educate unlimited numbers of illegal immigrants? And since state government covers so much of New Haven’s expenses, how can Connecticut afford to let the city assume unlimited liabilities like these?

Nor were compelling questions posed last week amid outrage in Meriden about the immigration arrest and detention of a city high school student and his father a few days before the boy’s graduation. 

The two were reported to have been arrested at a scheduled meeting with immigration authorities, so presumably they knew there was something wrong about their presence in the country.

Protesters in Meriden chanted that they want immigration authorities to get out of Connecticut. But wouldn’t that leave the borders open again? Is that what the protesters want?

Though they were surrounded by journalists, the protesters were never asked.

——

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

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