Cheng scandal provides a scolding for higher education

By Chris Powell

While the Board of Regents of the Connecticut State Colleges and Universities System wants to be rid of its chancellor, Terrence Cheng, his contract extends for another 14 months and apparently the board feels that it can’t fire him outright — either because he doesn’t deserve to be kicked out that hard or because his contract might get in the way. 

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So the board announced this week that Cheng will leave the chancellorship on June 30 and for the remaining year of his contract will become the board’s “strategic adviser” at his current spectacular compensation package, which approaches $500,000 a year. When his contract expires next summer, he’ll be entitled to a tenured faculty position, at a reduced salary, at Western Connecticut State University in Danbury, not far from his home in New York, from which he was supposed to relocate to Connecticut in exchange for thousands of dollars in moving expenses that he collected without ever moving. 

What exactly will the new “strategic adviser” do? The board didn’t say, but the board is a part-time and unpaid operation that meets only occasionally, so Cheng’s presence may be less required than it is now even as he gets paid just as much. The “strategic adviser” title just dresses up spectacular severance pay.

How exactly will the board fill the chancellor position — by hiring another spectacularly paid executive or by sliding a current executive into the job and combining responsibilities? While the board didn’t say, taxpayers may hope that the latter course is chosen. 

Cheng lost public confidence and the confidence of some state legislators when, last October, Connecticut’s Hearst newspapers caught him and other college system executives abusing their expense accounts after constantly pleading poverty on behalf of students and faculty. Then Cheng called the expense account scandal a learning experience for him, as if anyone with a shred of integrity might have perceived the irony of pleading poverty while living luxuriously.

Last year Governor Lamont rather surprisingly dismissed the Cheng scandal as “small ball.” But state government’s finances are growing shaky amid fears of sharp reductions in federal aid and the desire of most members of the Democratic majority in the legislature to repeal or evade state government’s “fiscal guardrails.” Additionally the governor, a Democrat, has set a tentative deadline of this summer for deciding on whether to seek a third term next year. The governor could hardly want Cheng continuing to run the college system during his re-election campaign and thereby offering the Republicans such a good issue. 

Maybe the governor doesn’t think the scandal is such “small ball” anymore.

This week the governor acknowledged that he recently had been talking with the board about what to do about Cheng, but his explanation didn’t bear scrutiny. It was that he and the board thought Cheng had done great work, so they decided it was time to make a change.

The governor said the board has identified a temporary replacement for Cheng and will make the announcement next month. But pressed, the governor said he couldn’t remember who the replacement is.

With luck the governor’s memory will be restored soon and he will inquire into the replacement independently and not leave the choice to the board. If he hasn’t already he should scold the board for being the primary cause of all the embarrassment here. 

First the board selected Cheng, who didn’t know it was wrong to exploit an expense account. Then the board failed to check, or have someone check, on his expense account and those of his colleagues. And then the board left investigation of the misconduct to journalism, the state comptroller, and the state auditors.   

Even now, with Cheng retaining his spectacular salary for a new position whose job responsibilities are undetermined, the college system’s financial controls invite skepticism generally. 

If higher education in Connecticut continues with such pretention, self-dealing, and obliviousness, eventually it may lose its ability to flummox and intimidate the public and legislators. Maybe the Cheng scandal will hasten that day.  

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 overlook its enormous costs

By Chris Powell

Last week two groups supporting illegal immigration, Connecticut Voices for Children and the Immigration Research Initiative, issued a report warning that mass deportation of the state’s illegal immigrant population — estimated at as many as 150,000 people — would be disastrous for the state’s economy and state government. The report claimed that illegal immigrants pay more than $400 million in state taxes each year.

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This was at best a dodgy estimate. Many illegal immigrants are children and are not employed. The adults among them cannot work legally and so most of their earnings cannot be tracked. While anyone who spends money in Connecticut is likely to pay sales taxes, the report acknowledges that nearly all illegal immigrants who work in Connecticut hold low-wage jobs. So what they buy is mainly for subsistence, like food, which is exempt from sales tax.

But the bigger flaw in the report is that it omits anything about the costs of illegal immigration in Connecticut, which are huge and increasing, particularly on account of the state government medical insurance being extended to them and the education of their children, most of whom don’t speak English and enter the state’s schools without providing any record of their education elsewhere and so need to be laboriously evaluated for placement. These students have exploded expenses in the schools of Connecticut’s “sanctuary cities,” which in turn seek much more financial support from state government.

In February the Yankee Institute, drawing on estimates from the Federation for American Immigration Reform, contended that illegal immigration costs Connecticut more than a billion dollars a year.

Whatever the true cost, that it likely weighs heavily against illegal immigration became clear when Governor Lamont, a supporter of the state’s “sanctuary” policies, disputed the Yankee Institute estimate even as he conceded to a journalist that he had no idea what illegal immigrants cost state government. The governor referred the journalist to the state budget office, which said it had no idea of the cost either and wasn’t going to find out. 

That is, advocates and apologists for illegal immigration in Connecticut don’t want to know its costs, and, worse, don’t want the public to know either.

The report from Connecticut Voices for Children and the Immigration Research Initiative is defective in other ways. It claims that if Connecticut lacked illegal immigrants it would experience a severe shortage of workers for the low-wage jobs they hold — especially in construction, restaurants, agriculture, janitorial work, and beauty shops. 

This is the cliche that illegal immigrants do jobs citizens won’t do, and it is nonsense.

Citizens will do almost any job if wages are high enough and can compete with the welfare benefits available to them. Indeed, the jobs held by illegal immigrants are so poorly paid in large part precisely because illegal immigrants are available to do them without the wage, benefit, and labor protections required for citizens. Raise agricultural salaries enough and even some teachers, charity organization workers, and journalists in Connecticut may be tempted to return to picking shade tobacco as many did as teen-agers.

Connecticut is full of low-skilled citizen labor. With its social promotion policy, public education makes sure of that. 

For years the state’s manufacturers have lamented that they can’t find skilled workers for tens of thousands of openings. Meanwhile middle-aged single mothers are not working at fast-food drive-through windows because they are so highly skilled. But jobs requiring lesser skills are where young people are supposed to start, not remain as adults. 

So Connecticut doesn’t need to import more low-skilled workers, especially since the state has failed so badly with its housing supply. The state needs to find ways of raising skills and wages and reducing the cost of living, especially the cost of housing, for its legal residents. 

But the report from the apologists for illegal immigration sees the path to prosperity as a matter of legalizing all illegal immigrants, in effect reopening the borders. It didn’t work the first time.

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

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Democrats are frantic to spend more as economizing is forbidden

By Chris Powell

What’s most remarkable about the state budget being devised by the Democratic majority in the General Assembly isn’t the scrambling to dismantle or evade the constitutional spending cap — the “fiscal guardrails” that have kept state government more or less solvent in recent years — though there is plenty of desperation about the scramble.

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According to the Connecticut Mirror’s Keith Phaneuf, while Governor Lamont anticipates spending about $470 million in another two-year round of generous raises for unionized state employees, Democratic legislators want to delay payment of the raises by a year and then pay them retroactively. No money would be saved but the Democratic legislators could pretend not to be violating the spending cap as much.

The Democratic legislators would divert to the General Fund $300 million that was to be deposited in state pension funds. Since the pension funds remain sorely underfunded despite Democratic claims of having bolstered them dramatically, as a practical matter all state budgeting is still based on diverting pension fund money and pushing deeper into the future the full payment of the retirement promises made to state employees many years ago, costs that will fall on taxpayers who never got any benefit from the work of the pensioners.

The Democratic legislators and the governor concur on establishing an endowment fund of hundreds of millions of dollars for free day care for young children and putting the fund outside the budget so they can pretend that this too is not really an expense.

They also are said to agree on underfunding by $230 million the medical benefits guaranteed for retired state employees, the money presumably to be located some other time.

All this stuff is dishonest accounting, which got Connecticut into deep financial trouble under previous administrations. But the Democrats rationalize it amid their fear that the Trump administration will slash federal aid to the state to bolster the federal government’s own disintegrating financial position, which is sinking the value of the dollar on international exchanges and risking the return of high inflation.     

What is most remarkable about the Democrats’ budgeting is what they are not doing: trying to identify and eliminate inessential spending. The presumption is that all current state government spending — and municipal spending, much of it funded by the state — is essential and more important even than increasing rate reimbursements to the practitioners who care for the poor through the state’s Medicaid program, HUSKY.

The Mirror reports: “The last broad-based rate adjustment plan took effect in early 2008, and critics say many children and adults enrolled in Connecticut’s HUSKY program effectively are uninsured, unable to find doctors willing to accept more Medicaid patients” because payment is too low.

But who really cares if hospital emergency rooms are overwhelmed as long as state employees get nice raises again?

The governor and Democratic and Republican legislators alike are agreed on a special $40 million appropriation for municipal school systems to improve “special education,” education for students with learning and other disabilities. State government should have assumed all “special education” costs many years ago, as they fall most heavily on cities, where the poorest people live. But still no one in authority asks what is causing the increase in profoundly disadvantaged children and the expense of educating them, or pretending to.

Meanwhile practically every week the governor and legislators cheerfully announce state grants to municipalities and other organizations, grants that no one besides the recipients themselves would describe as essential. But since nearly every legislative district gets some of these goodies, no one questions them in favor of the more compelling statewide interests.

Of course while members of the Republican minority in the legislature and a few Democratic legislators warn that lifting the spending cap will ensure tax increases eventually, even those legislators seldom specify any spending that Connecticut could do without. The clamor of people seeking more money from state government seems irresistible, especially since they are usually the only people who show up.

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

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Trump isn’t what’s wrong with education in Connecticut

By Chris Powell

Governor Lamont and state Education Commissioner Charlene Russell-Tucker are being cheered for refusing to certify to the U.S. Education Department that state government is in compliance with the Trump administration’s view of civil rights law. The administration’s view is that “diversity, equity, and inclusion,” the slogan of leftist education, is unconstitutional because it means government is enforcing racial preferences in schools.

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Exactly what racial preferences are Connecticut’s schools enforcing? The Trump administration’s letter to the state Education Department didn’t say. The Education Department’s reply said the state, with its “diversity, equity, and inclusion,” is following federal law. So now, for not nodding politely at the Trump administration, Connecticut is at risk of losing millions of dollars in federal education grants, and millions may be spent in litigation to determine what, if anything, it all means.

The governor and education commissioner should have provided the certification the Trump administration sought and left it to the administration to cite specific reasons for canceling grants to the state. But no — the governor, the commissioner, and Democratic state legislators want to be seen fighting Trump and to look like they’re standing up for education.

The governor grandly proclaimed: “In Connecticut we’re proud to support the incredible diversity of our schools and work tirelessly to ensure that every child, regardless of background, has access to a quality education and the best opportunity at the starting line in life. From our educators, who are mentoring and inspiring the next generation of young people, to our curriculum, our commitment to education is what has made our schools nationally recognized, and we plan to continue doing what makes our students, teachers, and schools successful.”

Oh, really? 

It’s not because of Trump that, despite all that “diversity, equity, and inclusion,” Connecticut’s schools are still heavily segregated racially.

It’s not because of Trump that Connecticut’s schools long have had a mortifying racial performance gap.

It’s not because of Trump that, according to the little standardized testing state government dares to permit, student proficiency has been declining for decades even as per-pupil spending has risen sharply. 

It’s not because of Trump that Connecticut legislators and educators have decided opportunistically to pretend that more spending equals more education even as decades of test results contradict them. 

It’s not because of Trump that Hartford’s and Bridgeport’s school systems are dysfunctional educationally, administratively, and financially and are undergoing audits by the state Education Department even as state government refuses to accept responsibility for their longstanding catastrophic failure and take control of both.

Nor is Trump to blame for the Hartford school system’s graduating an illiterate student last year, and presumably many others, nor for the refusal of the city’s school superintendent and the state education commissioner to investigate and report about the case.

Trump isn’t why the foremost policy of public education in Connecticut is social promotion, which crushes the incentive of students to learn, especially when they lack parenting, as many do. 

Racial preferences in government are unconstitutional and unjust, though the country got used to them for many years when they were euphemized as “affirmative action.” As a practical matter “diversity, equity, and inclusion” is just a righteous slogan available to euphemize more racial preferences and to distract from the continuing failure of so much of public education.

But if “diversity, equity, and inclusion” ever meant what they should mean — integration and more equal opportunity — they might be worth something. The country never will be prosperous, healthy, harmonious, and safe while it keeps creating and sustaining an impoverished and uneducated underclass.

Schools and teachers play the hands they are dealt — the demographics of their communities. Some schools and teachers are extraordinary but in the end, all together, they will be only average, and, on average, demographics will rule.

So the education problem is far bigger than education itself. It’s more a matter of how Connecticut can get more of its children ready and eager to learn in school. It won’t be with empty slogans and political posturing.  

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

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Provide free school lunches but not with a dedicated tax

By CHRIS POWELL

For the sake of argument, concede the premise of much of Connecticut state government policy — that people no longer need to be prepared financially to support their own children and that there is never any shame in thrusting that responsibility on the state.

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But even then there would be two big problems with the legislation being advanced in the General Assembly to make school lunch free for all students in all public schools and to finance it by putting a special tax of 2 cents per ounce on the sugary soda and juice drinks that kids love and that parents too often provide them.

First is the general problem with dedicated taxes. They permanently exempt the programs they finance from having to compete for funding with all other undertakings in a budget. Exemption from competition in the budget process is exemption from regular evaluation, and state government already exempts from evaluation nearly everything it does. One dedicated tax will increase demand for more.

Second is the deception with this soda and juice tax proposal particularly. It would be a wholesale sales tax, built into the price of the products before they reach retailers. Insofar as consumers noticed the tax, it would look like a price increase imposed by retailers when it was really government policy. It would resemble state government’s “public benefits” charges on electricity bills, which are hidden taxes for which people are expected to blame the electric companies, and the wholesale tax state government imposes on gasoline, which makes higher gas prices look like the responsibility of oil companies and gas stations.

Free school lunch for all students is a good idea. When some kids pay cash for their lunch and others are seen not having to pay, the poor kids may be embarrassed. Connecticut arranged free school lunches after the recent virus epidemic but they were financed by a federal government grant — free money and thus inflation money — and stopped when the grant expired.

State government could restore free school lunches any time it wanted to find the money — as by taking some out of the hundreds of millions of dollars Governor Lamont proposes to reserve for raises for unionized state employees, whose job satisfaction state government continues to consider more compelling than easing the hunger of poor children.

If the governor and the legislature want to decide that sugary soda and juice are a serious public health problem, just like tobacco, they can put a special tax on them, like the tobacco tax, let everyone know that it’s there, place the revenue in the General Fund, and budget the money normally every year rather than lock it into one particular purpose forever.

LEGISLATOR MOCKS ‘MY PEOPLE’: Maybe state Rep. Ann Hughes perfectly represents her constituents – people in Easton, Weston, and Redding. She is a Democrat serving her third term in district that, while wealthy, lately has been trending against Republicans out of disdain for Donald Trump, who simultaneously has been gaining support among working-class voters, formerly the base of the Democratic Party.

But on April 15 — Tax Day — Hughes displayed a bit of Trumpian arrogance and recklessness at the state Capitol. She was part of a press conference held by the General Assembly’s Tax Equity Caucus to urge support for increasing state spending and raising taxes.

The press conference was broadcast on the Connecticut Network and the Yankee Institute’s investigative reporter Meghan Portfolio saw Hughes joking with fellow legislators: “I always tell the governor to tax my people. They won’t even notice.”

Hughes thought it was funny but seems not to have shared the humor with her constituents in her re-election campaign last year. Even if they concur with Hughes that they are rich and oblivious, her enthusiasm for raising taxes reduces the incentive for her colleagues in the legislature to try to make state government more efficient and accountable and avoid raising taxes, and a few people in other districts might notice that and resent it.

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

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Patronage for higher education is one-sided campaign financing

By Chris Powell

Even people skeptical of the bloat of the federal government may not have fully appreciated its discretionary political patronage until, upon his return to the presidency in January, Donald Trump began to reduce it.

Who outside the universities themselves knew that Columbia University has been getting more than a billion dollars a year in grants and contracts from the federal government, Yale University almost $900 million, and Harvard University almost $700 million, or that the University of Connecticut has been getting more than $400 million and the Connecticut State Colleges and Universities System about $150 million?

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Now some of that money is in jeopardy as the Trump administration scrutinizes universities for the renewal of their traditional hostility to Jews and for their unconstitutional racial preferences dressed up as “diversity, equity, and inclusion.”

Of course federal student loans also extravagantly subsidize higher education, with $1.7 trillion in loans outstanding.

Higher education has reciprocated by providing almost unanimous support for the party of bigger government, the Democrats. Higher education infiltrates government with what it supposes to be its expertise but what increasingly is merely political correctness.  

Having recently been caught discriminating against applicants of Asian descent, Harvard has just announced that it will offer remedial math courses to students, supposedly to help them recover from learning deficits suffered during the recent virus epidemic. Such deficits might have been easily discovered by Harvard prior to any student’s admission if the university had not abandoned standardized testing for applicants because it was getting in the way of racial preferences in admissions.

This doesn’t mean that research financed by the federal government in higher education has not had beneficial results. It means that those beneficial results help camouflage the vast political patronage, higher education’s reciprocation of it, and leftist political indoctrination of students. Indeed, with new programs and subsidies every year, government now finances not only the government class but that class’ political party. To a great extent federal aid to higher education has become a one-sided form of government financing of political campaigns.

The indoctrination involved was exposed in Connecticut the other day when a conservative civil liberties group, the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE), reported that four years ago the University of Connecticut Medical School rewrote the Hippocratic Oath it administers to students to make them pledge “to promote health equity,” “support policies that promote social justice,” and “work to dismantle policies that perpetuate inequities, exclusion, discrimination, and racism.”

Exactly what do the new elements of the oath mean? What exactly are the inequities, exclusion, discrimination, and racism in medicine in Connecticut?

The rewritten oath doesn’t explain, but its new elements are the jargon of political correctness. 

Rather than explain the new elements when FIRE challenged them, UConn announced that taking the oath would no longer be mandatory for students. Thus the university devalued the basics of medical ethics as laid out by Hippocrates in ancient times.

In the General Assembly similar forces are operating on medicine, where more legislation is advancing to reduce parental responsibility for children.

The bill would authorize doctors to provide contraceptives and pregnancy-related treatment to minors without the consent of their parents. Connecticut law already allows minors to obtain abortions without parental consent, thereby protecting rapists from exposure and prosecution and worsening the alienation of children from their parents.

But political correctness in Connecticut considers abortion to be the highest social good, far more compelling than deterring child rape. 

Connecticut law still upholds parental responsibility in one respect. A parent’s approval is required for children to get tattoos, since state government thinks that the superficial appearance of children is more important to parents than their children’s health and morals. 

This is the kind of stuff that sustains Donald Trump with millions of people despite his awfulness. That is, to many people Trump’s adversaries are often even more objectionable than he is, and as was said a century and a half ago about Grover Cleveland, Trump’s supporters “love him most of all for the enemies he has made.” 

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

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Plenty of money for political patronage despite danger to state budget

By Chris Powell

Is state government in Connecticut in a financial emergency because of its likely loss of hundreds of millions of dollars in federal assistance under the Trump administration?

Most Democratic state legislators think so. Led by House Speaker Matt Ritter, they want to remove the “fiscal guardrails” that have restrained state government spending and helped to amass a large surplus, though that surplus only reflects the continuing underfunding of state pension funds.

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Republican legislators acknowledge the possibility that reductions in federal aid might rip big holes in the state budget but don’t want to alter the “guardrails.” The Republican stance may be as close as anyone in elective office comes to hinting that state spending should be cut.

Governor Lamont seems to feel strongly both ways. He’s worried about federal aid reductions but he is against weakening the “guardrails” even as he’s still supporting state government’s award of grants for politically connected organizations and inessential local projects.

The Yankee Institute notes that the General Assembly’s recent $3 million “emergency” appropriation, passed without public hearings and approved by the governor, was bestowed mainly on leftists, including sexual minorities, illegal immigrants, and Planned Parenthood.

The other day the governor, Speaker Ritter, and Senate President Pro Tem Martin Looney announced $77 million worth of state bonding for 35 “community development” projects in 21 municipalities. Among them: 

— $5 million for Danbury for rearranging the city’s downtown.

— $2 million to renovate the Barnum Museum in Bridgeport.

— $250,000 for the Connecticut Humanities Council to assess the needs of hundreds of “cultural organizations,” as if their primary needs aren’t all the same: more money.  

— $1.5 million for the Hartford Region YWCA to renovate its headquarters to house what will be called the Center for Racial Justice and Gender Equity but what might as well be the Center for Political Correctness.

— Another $2 million for Planned Parenthood, this time to renovate its office in New London.

Those projects were hardly necessities. Other projects on the bonding list were more compelling, like homeless shelters. But most projects were mainly matters of local Democratic political patronage, not necessary like raising reimbursements for Medicaid providers, renovating old schools in Bridgeport, Hartford, and New Haven, and saving money to protect against losing federal aid. 

In a way it’s funny. While state government has just found $250,000 to spend to discover that “cultural organizations” need more money, it has found no money for auditing the effectiveness of the main drivers of state spending — like primary education, state and municipal government employee union contracts, and welfare. 

Is primary education raising or lowering student achievement? Does collective bargaining for government employees improve their performance and public administration or just increase costs and destroy accountability? Is welfare policy increasing self-sufficiency or worsening dependence?

Would even Trumpian chainsawing of federal aid prompt state government to try to answer those questions? Or, down to its last several hundred million dollars, would state government just pay raises to its employees and forget about everything else?

BANKRUPT HOSPITALS: Connecticut has a major problem with three formerly nonprofit hospitals. A private equity company, Prospect Medical Holdings, the owner of Waterbury Hospital, Manchester Memorial Hospital, and Rockville General Hospital, has filed for bankruptcy after essentially looting the hospitals and forwarding the proceeds to its shareholders. Other private equity companies have done the same to hospitals elsewhere in the country.

Getting the hospitals out of bankruptcy with a new owner is proving difficult. Yale New Haven Health has withdrawn its bid. State government, which can hardly manage itself, may have to take over the hospitals for a while. 

Legislation proposed in the General Assembly would require hospital executives to obtain a state license and hold a college degree in hospital administration. This won’t fix the problem and could worsen it. For the problem is not unqualified local managers but ill-intended ownership. 

Connecticut never should have let nonprofit hospitals be acquired by profit-making entities — and despite the scandal, the state still hasn’t outlawed that. That’s the first legislation needed here.

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

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Welfare continues to hide in Connecticut’s electricity bills

By Chris Powell

Why should Connecticut’s electricity grid be incorporated into the state’s welfare system? Why are electricity users in the state who pay their own electric bills being charged extra to subsidize discounts for electricity used by poor people who don’t pay? Why aren’t those subsidies financed by general taxation?

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Those questions were prompted by a recent report from Connecticut Inside Investigator’s Marc E. Fitch, who discovered that the Low-Income Discount Rate Program of the state Public Utilities Regulatory Authority is giving $137 million in electricity discounts ranging from 10 to 50% to low-income electricity users. They are automatically enrolled for the discounts through the authority’s data-sharing arrangement with the state Social Services Department.

Everyone classified by the welfare department as being poor in one respect or another is identified to the state’s major electricity distributors, Eversource and United Illuminating, and then the companies are required to reduce bills accordingly. 

The discounts are recovered through higher rates to everyone else.

This exploitation of electricity customers has been going on in Connecticut in various forms for a long time. The Low-Income Discount Rate Program, begun last year, is just the most extreme form, since, predictably enough, it has turned out to cost many millions more than estimated. The program is one reason why the “public benefits” surcharges on electric bills are so high.

Republican state legislators argue that welfare expenses should be transferred out of electricity bills and into the state budget. Democratic legislators, who hold a large majority in the General Assembly, oppose such transparency but have never clearly explained why. 

That’s why the questions reiterated above remain compelling even though their answers can be inferred. Democratic legislators like hiding taxes in electricity bills, for then the public blames the electric companies for high electricity prices instead of the mistaken and deceptive government policies that actually have driven them up.

TOILETS ON THE GREEN: Homeless people and their political advocates gathered at a school in New Haven the other day to berate Mayor Justin Elicker for not yet having turned the city’s downtown green into a homeless encampment complete with plenty of sparkling-clean portable toilets.

The mayor was at the school to discuss his city budget proposal but dutifully explained that the portable toilets already installed on the green are hard to maintain because people sometimes use them for prostitution, drug injections, and disposal of hypodermic needles and other trash. Elicker noted that toilets in city libraries are free for the homeless to use. But maybe those toilets are not as suitable for everyone because libraries expect decent conduct. 

Nevertheless, the homeless people and their advocates urged the mayor to add $500,000 to his budget for more portable toilets on the green.

Homelessness is a worsening problem in Connecticut. Part of it is the state’s shortage of housing, the result of long-negligent state government policy, and part of it is the mental illness of the homeless themselves.

But Mayor Elicker isn’t responsible for the problem. To the contrary, his administration is greatly facilitating housing construction in the city. Meanwhile Governor Lamont’s administration plans a substantial increase in “supportive housing” for people recovering from addiction.

One of the homeless advocates berating the mayor the other day asked why the city doesn’t get more money to spend by taxing Yale University, which owns much tax-exempt property in New Haven. The mayor said he’d like to tax Yale but the city doesn’t have that authority. He might have added that state government, controlled by members of his party, has the power to tax Yale but has left the university as one of the few things in Connecticut that isn’t taxed, and that the homeless might go to the state Capitol and ask about that.

Better still, the mayor also might have asked the homeless what they plan to do to help themselves and the city. They didn’t volunteer to keep the portable toilets clean and as usual seemed to think that the world, or at least the city, owes them a living. 

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

Connecticut Democrats insist on open borders or secession

By Chris Powell

Rage and indignation again are sweeping the state Capitol and the People’s Republic of New Haven, this time because the city’s “hometown airline,” Avelo, which has revived Tweed New Haven Airport, has contracted with the U.S. Department of Homeland Security to fly illegal immigrants out of the country from Arizona.

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Mayor Justin Elicker calls this “antithetical to New Haven’s values.”

State Attorney General William Tong bellows that Avelo will “profit from and facilitate President Trump’s inhumane and unlawful atrocities.” 

Leading Democratic state legislators are proposing legislation to prohibit state support for Avelo if it assists federal immigration authorities.

What exactly are New Haven’s values and state government’s values here? 

Only nullification, insurrection, and secession. 

Since 2007 New Haven has been issuing city identification cards to illegal immigrants to facilitate their lawbreaking. First the city and then state government forbade police officers from assisting federal immigration agents in most respects.

As for the “atrocities” Tong attributes to Trump, while some deportations are flawed, the federal government always has been empowered to deport people whose presence in the country is illegal. Few deportations are atrocities, unless one believes that open borders are a moral imperative.

That’s what Mayor Elicker, Attorney General Tong, Governor Lamont — all Democrats — and Democratic legislative leaders are saying. They maintain that anyone who enters the country illegally and makes his way to Connecticut should be exempt from immigration law, and if the country doesn’t revert to open borders, Connecticut will no longer be part of the United States.

If, as the Democrats maintain, the federal government is now so contaminated by its renewed enforcement of immigration law, will state government and city government in New Haven start refusing the many millions of dollars of federal financial aid they still receive?

Do the Democrats really think the state has the right to decide which federal laws it will obey and the right to determine the terms on which the state remains in the United States? Or were those issues settled to the contrary at Appomattox in 1865 and again at Little Rock in 1957?

The concern of Connecticut’s nullifiers for people whose presence in the country is illegal distracts from the state’s longstanding neglect of its own residents and especially the children in its cities. Most are fatherless, a third or more are chronically absent from school, their academic performance is horrible, and few of those who graduate from high school have more than a middle-school education.

The Democrats blame these failures on state government for not spending enough money, as if money equals education, even as they clamor for government to spend more money to support people living in the state illegally.

The ironies and hypocrisies are manifest but Connecticut’s news organizations don’t publicize them lest political correctness be disturbed and state residents get the idea that they should rejoin the United States.

BLAME, SHAME, AND QUESTIONS: Newborns have been abandoned since the time of Moses and probably before, but 25 years ago this month Connecticut undertook to minimize the damage. The state enacted its “safe havens” law, requiring hospitals with emergency rooms to receive newborns from mothers unconditionally and without interrogation. 

Last week the law was celebrated at the state Capitol by the state Department of Children and Families and current and former legislators. The department said the law has been used 57 times, twice last year, so it probably has saved many babies and the department wants to keep publicizing it. The department said the law allows troubled new mothers to seek help “without any stigma attached — no blame, no shame, and no questions asked.”

Of course such a stance is necessary to protect newborns at risk of being abandoned, but social disintegration is exploding — neglectful parenting, much of it encouraged by government policy; stupid life decisions by young women; and men betraying and abandoning the women they have exploited and impregnated. There are actually plenty of blame and shame, and many questions to be asked, but no one in authority asks them.      

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

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Rule of law and democracy are abused by Trump’s foes in Connecticut too

By Chris Powell

While Donald Trump is reckless, a bully, and sometimes worse, his return to the presidency was caused in part by the sort of hypocrisy shown by the thousands of people who last week protested him in Connecticut and across the country.

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First more than 20 leftist organizations in the state issued a statement denouncing the president and his administration for disregarding the rule of law — particularly for criticizing federal judges who have issued injunctions against administration policies, for dismantling the U.S. Agency for International Development, and for firing or laying off thousands of federal employees.

Of course none of those organizations could be found five years ago when Senate Democratic Majority Leader Charles Schumer, enraged by the Supreme Court’s prospective reversal of pro-abortion precedent, endangered the rule of law by threatening two of the justices by name. Schumer raged: “I want to tell you, Gorsuch — I want to tell you, Kavanaugh — you have released the whirlwind and you will pay the price. You won’t know what hit you if you go forward with these awful decisions.” 

By contrast, Trump has suggested only that some judges who have ruled against him should be impeached, a fully constitutional procedure. Schumer seemed to threaten the judges physically, a criminal offense. But that was OK with most leftists in Connecticut and probably still is.

Then over last weekend more leftists gathered in Hartford, New Haven, and elsewhere at rallies aiming to “save democracy” from Trump. Some protesters were the same people who last year insisted that President Biden was sharp as a tack; that his son Hunter’s laptop computer, packed with proof of the Biden family’s influence peddling, was a Russian forgery; and that the 10 million or more illegal immigrants who entered the country during the Biden administration were nothing to worry about — that democracy was perfectly safe with Biden and his grifters in the White House and the country’s borders wide open.

If the leftists who protested last week see any threat to democracy in the political violence and oppression being perpetrated by their fellows — the people vandalizing Teslas, the colleges shutting down Republican or conservative events or failing to protect them from crazed professors and anarchists — they didn’t mention it. Mainly they seemed afraid of losing government jobs and subsidies.

Some of Trump’s budget recissions are indeed questionable, but they are being litigated, and many recissions can be justified. The Agency for International Development has been full of bloat and nonsense while providing camouflage for U.S. espionage, and the growth of the federal Education Department has correlated mainly with the collapse of public education. More spending isn’t more education; mainly it is more government employment.

But democracy remains in position to work these things out. Indeed, the political margins in Congress are so narrow that getting much done still may require courtesy and compromise.

In any case, the federal government is in debt by the almost incomprehensible amount of $36 trillion, which lately has required spending 13% of federal revenue on interest, more than is spent on the military and medical care for the poor. The debt has gotten so large that other countries already were reducing purchases of U.S. government bonds even before the turmoil caused by Trump’s gambit with tariffs.

It has been many years since the federal government felt obliged to finance itself with taxes rather than borrowing and inflation, so now most Americans have come to think that everything they get from government is and should be free — from subsidies to a mad proliferation of programs to stupid imperial wars. It’s not free; its costs are high interest payments and inflation, a tax that is heaviest on the poor. 

The sooner the country starts auditing government’s effectiveness and substantially reducing spending, the better. Of course Trump’s choices are not always careful; they may be mainly malicious. But his adversaries, including last week’s protesters, are obliged to specify alternative ways to economize. They offer nothing. They just demand more.

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

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