Psych board did its job but insanity law is crazy

By Chris Powell

Having recently shrugged off his inability to get state government employees to return to their normal workplaces, Governor Lamont may have been lucky to be traveling in India the other day when the state Psychiatric Security Review Board announced it had conditionally released a murderous cannibal back into society, proclaiming him cured of his taste for human flesh.

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Members of the Republican minority in the General Assembly exploded with exasperated questions. 

Of course the Democratic majority let the event pass without comment. But at least the Democrats’ indifference wasn’t caused by what might have been expected — the political influence of something like the Connecticut Anthropophagist Association. Such a special interest would have to work hard to become as predatory as the primary constituencies of the Democrats, the state employee and teacher unions. No, Democratic legislators ignore everything questionable in state government when their party controls the administration, which is almost always.

The Republican questions were fair: Where is the cannibal living? Does he have roommates? If so, are they aware of his past? If he is in a group home, is the staff aware? Do his neighbors know he is nearby? Who makes sure he takes his medication? How often he is to take it? What are the supervision and mental health regimens imposed on him? What safety protocols surround him?

The Psychiatric Security Review Board’s executive director, Vanessa M. Cardella, answered some of the questions. The parolee’s medicine will be administered by a visiting nurse. (He or she better be tall, muscular, and heavily armed, or accompanied by several such guards.) The state probation office will supervise him. He will wear an electronic monitoring device, be tested regularly for drug and alcohol use, and keep receiving mental health treatment. If he fails to comply, the board can send him back to Whiting Forensic Institute, Connecticut’s euphemistically named prison for the criminally insane.

Cardella said, “There is a 0% recidivism rate for violent crime for acquittees on conditional release status.”

Yes, so far, so good — or so it may seem. But many ordinary parolees violate their probation, not all crimes are violent, and psychiatric parolees may offend again short of violence and may already have done so. 

Now who wants to volunteer to be neighbor to someone acquitted by reason of insanity for murder with a side of cannibalism? 

For that matter, where do the governor and legislature find volunteers to serve on the Psychiatric Security Review Board? Those jobs may be as thankless as those of the state auditors, who at least get paid.

But there are fair questions here for legislators too.

The law distinguishes the ordinary criminal from the insane one on the presumption that the latter did not understand the wrongfulness of his actions and so shouldn’t be held responsible for them — shouldn’t be punished but just confined, comfortably enough, for the safety of society — and that he may be restored to sanity and good behavior.

While this may seem sensible and just in principle, it is not persuasive in practice when the crime is murder. For then the law’s presumption carries much greater risk. The law assigns the Psychiatric Security Review Board to measure that risk and make a judgment.

That is, state law, not the board itself, already has decided that release should be available to insane murderers judged cured. The board’s judgment on the cannibal may be mistaken but appears to have been conscientiously reached. 

The problem is that the law itself is crazy.

The best solution here may be to forbid any release of murderers acquitted by reason of insanity, allowing release only for insane people acquitted of lesser crimes, if there are any such offenders. 

The cannibal’s case provides a strong financial reason for this change in policy. For enforcing all the complicated conditions imposed on his release to protect the public probably will be far more expensive and far less reliable than keeping him at Whiting and continuing to treat him there.

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

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Cheng is still pleading poverty; and what do illegals cost?

By Chris Powell

What a silly spectacle was last week’s hearing of the General Assembly’s Appropriations Committee on the budget of the state colleges and universities system. Chancellor Terrence Cheng, whose annual salary and benefits exceed $450,000, not counting whatever he can sneak onto his expense account, again pleaded poverty on behalf of his empire.

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Sitting near him were assistants whose annual compensation far exceeds $200,000.

With federal government epidemic emergency money evaporating and Governor Lamont insisting that higher education save money, Cheng insisted, “There is not much more we can cut without cutting into bone.”

Legislators from the Republican minority snorted at that, and even a big-spending Democrat, New Haven Sen. Gary Winfield, rebuked the college administrators: “The biggest, shiniest thing that you can cut is you.” 

That is: Cut the boneheads, not the bone.

Cheng says the college system aims to eliminate management positions. But this may reduce management, of which there already is little in state government’s overly unionized environment. What needs to be reduced is payroll generally. Could the colleges and universities system not find adequate managers at, say, $150,000 a year? 

So what if course offerings had to be reduced and professors laid off? In his state budget address three weeks ago Governor Lamont noted that most students in the colleges and universities system don’t graduate, a statistic implying that half the system is unnecessary, except for the people it employs.

In any case Connecticut’s educational problem is not higher education but lower education, where nearly all students now graduate from high school even though most never master basic skills, standards having been abolished. State government doesn’t dare impose a proficiency test for graduation or promotion from grade to grade lest people discover that their Lake Wobegon impression of education in Connecticut — that everyone is above average — is actually a joke.

What if state legislators ever thought seriously about a system of higher education from which most students drop out even while its chief executive is paid close to a half-million dollars a year? What if some embarrassment ever sunk in?

Would legislators lose their reluctance to shrink the system? Or would they arrange to extend lower education’s fraudulent practices to higher education and award diplomas to everyone regardless of academic performance and even attendance? Indeed, why not just distribute high school and college diplomas with birth certificates? Connecticut wouldn’t need too many more chancellors for that.

*

How much is illegal immigration costing Connecticut?

In a television interview last week the president of the Yankee Institute, Carol Platt Liebau, charged that state government is spending more than a billion dollars annually on education, medical care, general welfare expenses, and incarceration for the state’s estimated more than 120,000 immigration law violators. The cost estimate came from an advocacy group, the Federation for American Immigration Reform.

Of course some illegal immigrants pay sales and other taxes, but because of their poverty the taxes they pay are almost certainly not coming close to offsetting their expense to the state.

Governor Lamont dismissed the billion-dollar figure as “totally fanciful” but admitted he didn’t know the cost and invited journalists to seek answers from his administration. Risking politically incorrect journalism, Mike Cerulli of WTHN-TV8 in New Haven queried the governor’s budget office and the state Education Department and predictably enough got nowhere. The budget office said it doesn’t know what illegal immigrants cost the state and just calculating the cost would be too expensive.

The annual cost must be at least several hundred millions of dollars, for that is state government’s estimate just for extending Medicaid to illegal immigrant children 16 and older. (Younger illegal immigrant children are already covered.) Because of their inability to speak English and their lack of previous education, the cost of educating such children is far higher than it is for ordinary students.

But the most important point here is that the governor and Democratic legislators simply don’t want to know, and don’t want the public to know, the cost of their policy of making Connecticut a “sanctuary state.”

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

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Open government at 50: Principle isn’t practice

By Chris Powell

Connecticut’s Freedom of Information Act, enacted in 1975, turns 50 this year, the legacy of Gov. Ella T. Grasso, who vigorously advocated it, and the Watergate scandal of the previous two years, which proclaimed the danger of secret power.

The FOI law made Connecticut a leader in accountability in government. The law created a commission to enforce it and enabled ordinary citizens to argue their own complaints at hearings without having to hire a lawyer, a triumph of democracy. Most commissioners, chosen by the governor and the General Assembly, believed in open government.

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But Grasso was probably both the state’s first and last governor to believe in open government. Indeed, the history of the FOI law since Grasso’s time has been one of gradual erosion as elected officials and special interests found that openness and accountability can get in their way and sought exemptions from the law.

The future was foretold just a few years after the law was enacted when the state legislator who presented the legislation to the House of Representatives and so was nicknamed “Mister Sunshine” was appointed town attorney for Vernon. “Mister Sunshine” refused the Journal Inquirer’s request to inspect his invoices to the town. The mayor supported his refusal, they lost at the FOI Commission, they were compelled to disclose the invoices, and their party was defeated at the next town election because of the issue.

Nine years after the law’s enactment Connecticut’s retreat from open government accelerated. In a case from Somers the Journal Inquirer had won a ruling from the FOI Commission that teacher job performance evaluations were public records that had to be disclosed like all other government employee evaluations. Within mere weeks the teacher unions induced the General Assembly to enact an exemption from the law just for them. The exemption was approved by the House of Representatives 145-3 and unanimously by the Senate. Grasso had died in office four years earlier and her lieutenant governor, having succeeded her, signed the bill reflexively.

Teachers remain the only government employees in Connecticut whose performance evaluations are exempt from disclosure. It’s not for any good reason. Most parents would like to be able to see the evaluations of their children’s teachers. The teachers got the exemption because they don’t want to be accountable for their work and are numerous and politically active, and because few legislators dare to articulate the public interest against them. That is, teachers are special — as in special interest — and while freedom of information is great in principle, practice is often something else.

So much for “public” education.

These days state government and municipal governments often defeat requests for information just by stalling them and appealing FOI commission decisions in court. Long delay can make information worthless. The commission lacks the nerve to fine lawbreakers. 

For several years now the big push for another exemption to the FOI law has come from state employee groups that don’t want addresses of government employees to be public. Even the lowliest clerk in the Agriculture Department is supposed to be in danger because his address is public. The legislature has granted address exemptions for some state employees whose work can be controversial, but the unions want everyone exempted. 

It doesn’t matter that the internet has obliterated privacy for residential addresses and that the blanket exemption the unions want will provide no practical protection. State employees want formal acknowledgment that they are special — as in special interest.

Yet the compelling reason for keeping addresses of government employees public — that accountability is possible only if an address is available to confirm the identity of an employee — is on flaming display in a current controversy.

A few weeks ago the state auditors reported that the chancellor of the Connecticut State Colleges and Universities system, Terrence Cheng, whose annual compensation is almost $500,000, was given a housing allowance of $21,000 on the understanding he would move to Connecticut. He took the money but kept living in New York. If his home address had been secret Cheng’s fraud would never have been exposed.

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

-END-

Connecticut’s sanctimony cities show we could use Elon Musk

By Chris Powell

Hysteria and sanctimony broke out in Connecticut and the country last Monday. Opponents of President Trump had dubbed it “Not My President’s Day” to protest everything his administration is doing or imagined to be doing. In Connecticut the protests were largest in three of the state’s sanctimony cities — about a thousand people in Hartford, 400 in New Haven, and 150 in New London. 

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The protesters were appalled that the president is laying off thousands of federal government employees and has deputized his pal, the billionaire Elon Musk, to examine executive agency financial records in pursuit of waste, fraud, and accountability, as if the president, as head of the executive department, shouldn’t have access to such records. Trump and Musk, the protesters shrieked, were staging a coup and planning to abolish the civil rights of Blacks, homosexuals, and transgender people. The protesters seemed to think that any disagreement with them is criminal.

The supposed persecution by Trump may come as a surprise to the most powerful member of his cabinet, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent, a gay man married to another gay man with whom he has two children. But the hysterics may not know about Bessent, since news organizations have reported far less about his personal life than they did about the gay member of President Joe Biden’s cabinet, Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg, whom journalism celebrated for his sexual orientation, not for his job performance.

Yes, Trump’s first few weeks back in the White House have been filled with nuttiness — like buying Greenland and Gaza, seizing the Panama Canal, and renaming the Gulf of Mexico. Yet these issues are trivial sideshows. They oppress no one.

But many people are being oppressed in the sanctimony cities, right under the noses of last Monday’s protesters, whose grievances included Trump’s replacing federal “diversity, equity, and inclusion” programs with a simple merit system for hiring.

A year ago Governor Lamont jumped aboard the DEI bandwagon by creating an Office of Equity and Inclusion within his office and appointing a director who is being paid $175,000 per year to see that state agencies do more of the hiring “outreach” that state law already required them to do. The appointment was just politically correct posturing and patronage to placate the sanctimonious left flank of the governor’s political party, and it was as ironic as last Monday’s protests.

For infinitely more could be done for diversity, equity, and inclusion, and for fairness and prosperity generally, if Connecticut could ever alleviate the longstanding racial performance gap in its schools, a gap that is worst in the sanctimony cities, where most students are from minority groups and live neglected in single-parent homes, with fewer than a quarter of them performing at grade level in reading and math and most being advanced from grade to grade anyway and graduated from high school qualified only for menial work, destined for life in the underclass.

Last September a recent graduate of Hartford Public High School sensationally confessed to the Connecticut Mirror that she remains illiterate after 12 years of education in the city. But there have been no protests about this. The sanctimony cities take it for granted that most of their students long have been and always will be sent into the world poorly educated. The governor, the General Assembly, and the political left take it for granted too. 

The state education commissioner and the Hartford school superintendent promised investigations to discover how the girl could have graduated illiterate, but there have been none.

Meanwhile New Haven’s schools have the worst chronic absenteeism rates in the state, approaching 50% of students. But no one in that sanctimony city protests that either. In the sanctimony cities, the outrage is Trump, not what Connecticut has done to itself.

DEI initiatives and protests against Trump serve only to distract from the catastrophes of policy that Connecticut won’t confront because doing so would require asking painful questions about failure. If only the state had its own Elon Musk.

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

Connecticut doesn’t need more meat; and why unionize government?

By Chris Powell

Environmentalists think that raising cattle for meat and milk harms the environment. Animal rights advocates and vegetarians think that eating living creatures is immoral. They have a point but the political struggle has not been going their way, especially since the world always confronts hunger and famine somewhere. 

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So eventually the General Assembly may pass and the governor may sign legislation to allow the farmers in the state to raise and butcher rabbits and sell their meat for food. The argument is that some people would like locally butchered rabbit meat, rabbit meat is a staple in some cultures, and raising rabbits for meat might help sustain some farms as agriculture is declining.

It’s a weak argument.

Rabbits are said to be the third most popular companionate animals after dogs and cats. Rabbits have greater intelligence than many animals, they have a social nature, they can be trained to some extent, and they show loyalty to their owners. While some cultures eat rabbits, some also eat dogs and cats, and federal law prohibits the commercial slaughter and sale of dogs and cats for meat, presumably because of their suitability as pets.

So why shouldn’t rabbits be protected against raising and slaughter for food as dogs and cats are?

It’s not as if the country doesn’t have enough meat. Huge amounts of beef, pork, poultry, and fish are produced commercially. Nor does the country lack for the killing of sentient creatures and its coarsening of the culture. State government doesn’t need the expense it would incur with the commercial farming of rabbits for meat — inspection by the Agriculture Department of the farms and slaughtering facilities.

People in Connecticut hungry for rabbit meat can buy it from out of state via the internet or hunt the creatures themselves in the countryside, as they can hunt and butcher deer. But when there is plenty to eat and no overpopulation of annoying or dangerous wild animals, killing without necessity should be opposed.

*

Having just shrugged off his inability to compel state government employees to return to their normal workplaces, a consequence of the collective bargaining that hobbles state and municipal government in Connecticut and increases its costs, Governor Lamont should note the remarkable reform just enacted in Utah.  

The Beehive State has prohibited collective bargaining for government employees.

This doesn’t mean that state and municipal employees in Utah can’t organize and agitate about their compensation and working conditions. It doesn’t mean that government in Utah won’t pay attention to the desires and grievances of its employees. It means only that the agitation by Utah’s state and municipal employees won’t have the support of collective bargaining law — that state and municipal government won’t have to recognize and negotiate with unions formed by their employees.

That is, government in Utah will be free to put the public interest first in public administration and not be like Connecticut, where the public works for the government instead of the other way around — where the governor lacks the authority to order state employees to return to their workplaces.

Of course since Connecticut’s government employee unions control the majority political party, no serious reforms for government efficiency are likely here. But Utah’s example should prompt a few brave legislators in Connecticut to ask some critical questions.

How exactly is the public interest in Connecticut served by collective bargaining for government employees and the state’s binding arbitration law, which makes the union interest equal to the public interest when government employee compensation and working conditions are determined? 

How does the public benefit from collective bargaining’s constant evisceration of workplace discipline? 

How does the public benefit from the political machine that state law establishes and subsidizes with government employees to work against the public interest, as when union officials who are nominally state employees are paid by the state to do union work and politicking instead?  

Or is the main purpose of collective bargaining for government employees in Connecticut just to keep their political party in power? 

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

-END-

Tong’s bluster on inflation scapegoats supermarkets

By Chris Powell

Democratic politicians keep trying to blame inflation on manufacturers, landlords, insurance companies, and nearly everyone else in business. Most fervent in his scapegoating is Connecticut Attorney General William Tong.

Last week Tong, a Democrat, proposed legislation requiring food producers and supermarkets to put special labels on products whose packaging shrinks without an equivalent reduction in price — that is, products afflicted by “shrinkflation.” Tong calls “shrinkflation” a deceptive practice.

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He underestimates the public’s intelligence. Few people may understand where inflation comes from, but most keenly notice its effects at supermarkets and in many other financial transactions. Inflation was a major issue in last November’s election. Smaller packaging isn’t fooling many people.

Maybe some food producers intend “shrinkflation” as deception, but it’s mostly something else — realism in marketing. Producers may have realized that their customers can’t afford as much as they used to buy and so may not always buy if the old, larger packaging carries a higher price. People don’t have to look too closely to see “shrinkflation” in many other places where they also get less for their money. With government, they often have paid more in taxes without getting more in services — another form of “shrinkflation.”

Since they have to do their own purchasing of raw materials and labor, producers are victims of inflation too.

At the producer level the U.S. economy isn’t as competitive as it should be. There has been too much consolidation and too little enforcement of antitrust law, and this has pushed up prices. But the big cause of inflation is the explosion in the money supply following the worldwide virus epidemic, particularly the explosion of the supply of U.S. dollars that has been caused by unprecedented borrowing by the federal government. 

Growth in the money supply and government spending has far outpaced production of goods and services. Today the federal government bestows all sorts of goodies on people without a thought as to how they should be financed. It is just assumed that everything new can be financed by borrowing, which is money creation since the bonds are purchased by the Federal Reserve and foreign governments.          

It’s not quite as bad on the state level, but bad enough, since so much state government spending is financed not by state taxes but by federal inflation money. 

Debt and inflation have soared during both Democratic and Republican national administrations. President Trump is making a spectacle of trying to reduce federal spending, but while the federal government is indeed full of patronage, graft, and waste, Trump’s own budget will keep federal debt soaring. Despite their party’s old reputation for financial responsibility, Republicans are now as addicted to inflation financing as Democrats long have been.

But last week with his choice of scapegoats — food producers and supermarkets — Attorney General Tong seemed to have forgotten that Republicans now are in control of the federal government and thus more responsible for inflation than Democrats. Additionally, last week inflation was reported to be rising substantially again.

So as a political matter Tong is now free to put the blame for inflation where it belongs — on the federal government and the other political party. Or is Tong worried that, if he stops scapegoating and tells the truth about inflation, some people might remember when the Democrats are back in power?

The attorney general could do much more to reduce consumer prices in Connecticut if he examined the state’s liquor industry.

The industry enjoys a huge “barrier to entry” — limits on retailing licenses, which defeat competition. Supermarkets are allowed to sell beer but not wine and liquor, though most people would like the convenience of one-stop shopping.

The liquor industry also enjoys state-mandated minimum prices on alcoholic beverages, defeating competition again.

Opposing the desire of supermarkets to sell wine, a lobbyist for the liquor stores says, “We just want to be left alone.” Nonsense — the liquor stores desperately want state government to keep enforcing their exemptions from competition. These exemptions would be fat targets for a populist politician. Tong’s bluster doesn’t make him one.

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

 

Is anyone really governor? And the solution is parents

By Chris Powell

Interviewed this week by WTIC-AM1080 morning host Brian Shactman, Governor Lamont remarked that state government is in good condition. But as the conversation turned to the loss of vibrancy in the cities, with so many former office workers now working from home, the governor noted that he wanted office workers, including state government employees, to return to their workplaces. In regard to the state employees, he added, “I lost in arbitration.”

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So how good can the condition of state government be when its chief executive lacks the authority even to get its employees to return to their workplaces?

While the governor seemed to shrug off the situation, his expression of haplessness should have mortified people in the radio audience who want their government to work for the public and not the public to work for their government.

The leader of the Republican minority in the state House of Representatives, Rep. Vincent J. Candelora of North Branford, has proposed legislation to empower state government agencies to require their employees to work in state government offices. But Democrats overwhelmingly control the General Assembly and its Labor Committee, to which Candelora’s bill has been referred, and the state employee unions overwhelmingly control Democratic legislators generally and those on the Labor Committee particularly.

So does the governor want really want state employees back in their workplaces, to improve both state government’s efficiency and the environment of the cities? Or was he just striking a pose? Does the governor really want, instead, the continued support of the state employee unions during his prospective campaign for re-election next year? 

He will answer the questions by insisting on passage of Candelora’s bill — or by winking as it is discarded.

* * *

Years ago many people who worried about social conditions, including Connecticut U.S. Sen. Joseph I. Lieberman, complained that television programs and movies had gotten too violent and sexually explicit, that children were spending too much time watching them, and that such entertainment was coarsening the culture and inspiring bad and even criminal behavior.

The Oklahoma newspaper publisher and columnist Jenkin Lloyd Jones may have lamented it best. “We are drowning our youngsters in violence, cynicism, and sadism, piped into the living room and even the nursery,” Jones wrote. “The grandchildren of the kids who used to weep because the Little Match Girl froze to death now feel cheated if she isn’t slugged, raped, and thrown into a Bessemer converter.”

Jones and Lieberman were right but little came of it, since sex and violence sell, money is hard to resist, and having government fix the problem might have involved unconstitutional censorship. The problem really was for parents to solve, but many parents preferred to use television as a babysitter, whether the kids were watching “Sesame Street” or “The Texas Chainsaw Massacre.”

These days social media are said to be bigger causes of psychological disturbance in children than television. So Connecticut Attorney General William Tong and some state legislators want state government to regulate social media to reduce their appeal to children.

There will be constitutional problems with this too, as well as practical problems, since social media technology is so much more advanced . Young people probably will figure out how to evade any regulation, creating an endless cycle of regulation and evasion even as state government already has more than enough to do. 

As with television years ago, the real problem with social media is a lack of parenting. Children have cell phones, computers, and internet service only if their parents provide them. Educators are discovering that the distractions and conflicts caused by social media can be eliminated just by banning cell phones in school.

But the attorney general and the legislators proposing to regulate social media excuse parents from responsibility. While many children these days have only one parent, if that many, regulation of social media by parents would be far more effective and fairer than regulation by government. Parents should not be excused. 

But then it’s much easier for politicians to scold businesses than their own constituents.

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

-END-

Connecticut tells students they needn’t go to school

By CHRIS POWELL

According to the recent results of the National Assessment of Educational Progress, a test given to students in fourth and eighth grades throughout the country and styled “The Nation’s Report Card,” Connecticut’s students are performing worse in reading and math than in 2019, before the national virus epidemic, which disastrously interrupted schooling nearly everywhere.

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Connecticut’s scores remain slightly above the national average, but the scores of many states now are higher than Connecticut’s. The Yankee Institute’s Andrew Fowler reports that Connecticut’s fourth-graders rank 18th in math and eighth in reading, while the state’s eighth-graders rank 17th in math and fifth in reading.

Only 42% of the state’s fourth-graders are “proficient” in math and only 36% in reading. Among eighth-graders, only 36% are “proficient” in math and only 35% in reading.

It seems unlikely that Connecticut’s students will ever catch up. So why can’t the state improve?

Maybe it’s because the most damaging aspect of the epidemic wasn’t the interruption to schooling caused by the closings that were demanded by teacher unions and conceded by feckless municipal officials. Maybe the most damaging aspect of the epidemic was the advertising it did for Connecticut’s only consistent policy of public education: social promotion. 

That is, nearly every student who lost a year of education found himself advanced to the next grade or graduated anyway. This was a proclamation to unmotivated students and neglectful parents that there is no need to learn. 

Of course long before the epidemic students got hints of social promotion if they noticed that their most ignorant and disruptive peers were being advanced along with them. But the mass advancement of the uneducated emphasized that academic and behavioral standards had been abandoned.

Neglectful parents surely noticed this before conscientious parents did, since schools had relieved them of responsibility for their children. This explains the sharp increase in the chronic absenteeism of students, especially in impoverished cities. For why go to school when education doesn’t count even in school itself, when school is used mainly for babysitting? So chronic absenteeism is worst among older students, who can fend for themselves outside school.

But by now even many conscientious parents may have noticed the phoniness of public education in Connecticut, what with the scandal of the Hartford Public High School graduate who last September confessed to the Connecticut Mirror that she is illiterate. Now she is suing for $3 million in damages.

Originally Hartford School Superintendent Leslie Torres-Rodriguez said she would investigate and report about the illiterate graduate’s case, but she has decided to retire instead. The most recent word about the case from the commissioner of the state Education Department, Charlene M. Russell-Tucker, was that the Hartford school system was obstructing her own investigation. 

The Education Department has expressed no great concern about the long decline in student performance. The department and most state legislators seem more concerned about keeping illegal immigrant children in school.

Even impoverished Louisiana is trying harder than Connecticut. In recent years Louisiana has risen in national education rankings and now is endeavoring to stop social promotion at third grade with intensive tutoring. Most educators in Connecticut don’t even think social promotion is a problem.

Student underperformance and chronic absenteeism are, with poverty, most severe among minority groups in cities. Yet, astoundingly, three state representatives from impoverished and heavily minority cities propose to make underperformance and chronic absenteeism even worse.

The legislators — Reps. Juan Candelaria, D-New Haven; Christopher Rosario, D-Bridgeport; and Geraldo Reyes, D-Waterbury — have introduced a bill to give all Connecticut students a holiday on Three Kings Day, a festival popular with Puerto Ricans.

Some Connecticut school systems already take a holiday on Three Kings Day, including those in Hartford, Bridgeport, New Haven, Waterbury, East Hartford, Manchester, and Windham — municipalities where chronic absenteeism is already high, student performance is low, and much more schooling, not less, is badly needed. 

A serious education system might link school holidays to student performance, granting them only when earned by proof of learning, not distributing them as ethnic patronage.

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

-END-

State employees win again, electricity customers lose

By Chris Powell

Since it would widen state government’s “fiscal guardrails” enough to increase spending by 3.8% in its first year and 4.6% in its second, Governor Lamont’s budget proposal for 2025-26 has plenty of room for winners. Who are they?

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First, of course, are state employees. While the governor didn’t mention them in his budget address to the General Assembly last week and news reports don’t seem to have mentioned them either, the Yankee Institute’s Meghan Portfolio reports that his budget provides more than $370 million for raises for state employees even though their pay already has increased 33% since Lamont took office in 2019.

It’s not that Connecticut needs to keep paying big raises or any raises to maintain an adequate state government workforce. The raises are just the price of keeping the 45,000 unionized state employees and their thousands of spouses and dependents voting Democratic in next year’s state election.

State education aid to municipalities would rise and the state property tax credit to homeowners would go up $50 from $300, though as always the tax credit may just facilitate raising municipal government spending and taxes. The tax credit isn’t the fabled property tax “reform.” Indeed, there never will be any. Property tax “reform” is just the euphemism for raising other taxes.

The budget proposes more money for “special education” for disadvantaged students but not the state takeover that fairness demands for the cities, where those students are concentrated. 

State government would arrange supportive housing and therapy for 500 more homeless or addicted people.

Tradespeople would enjoy the elimination of their state licensing fees.

The budget would cover free breakfasts for all public school students, a boon especially for poor and neglectful households.

Strangely, the governor proposes to activate an endowment fund from which free pre-school would be financed for as many as 20,000 poor children in seven years. If pre-school is necessary, it should be built into school systems now and financed ordinarily with the rest of schooling.

As for the losers, large corporations would be taxed more and the 10% surcharge on the regular corporation tax would be extended again though it was supposed to be repealed years ago. Encouraging business does not rank high in this budget. 

The governor proposes far less money for higher education than the public colleges and universities wanted, but they are bloated and arrogant, as shown by the recent scandal involving the expense accounts of administrators in the State Colleges and Universities System. The governor took a well-deserved shot at them. 

The University of Connecticut and the State Colleges and Universities System “have excellent faculty,” the governor said, “but our colleges must focus on the students first, and the importance of higher education does not exempt our universities from making sure that taxpayers and students are getting the best value. They should not be immune to reform, and Connecticut State in particular must reimagine how we train our workforce for 21st-century jobs. Their student population is down 30%, most students don’t graduate, and costs keep escalating.”

While the governor’s budget proposes some overdue increases in Medicaid reimbursements for doctors treating the indigent, the state’s hospitals see disaster in the spending he proposes for them. Legislators may give the governor trouble here.

Riders of public transit buses and the Metro-North commuter rail line would face rate increases, but then it has been years since fares were raised.

Nonprofit social-service agencies doing what is essentially state government work would get an increase but not much even as state employees would get big raises again. The nonprofits just don’t do enough work for the Democratic Party.

Perhaps most disappointing to state residents who don’t make a habit of besieging the state Capitol with their hands out and instead just sullenly pay their taxes, the governor had nothing to say about the state’s high electricity rates, which are so high in large part because of dishonest state policy that hides taxes in electric bills. 

Legislators should push this issue into the budget as they rewrite it.

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

-END-

A ‘moral budget’ needs more than pious poses

By Chris Powell

Members of the clergy held a press conference at the state Capitol this week to protest restraint in state government spending, the infamous “fiscal guardrails.” They called for a “moral budget” — that is, a lot more spending on social services, schools, and housing.

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A Unitarian minister from Manchester charged that restraint with the state budget is “impoverishing the people.” He complained that state government is trying too hard to reduce the vast unfunded liabilities of its pension system.

A Baptist minister from Hartford agreed, screeching that state government “is trying to inflict a crisis on the welfare of the people.”

While the clergy members implied that state government should let the unfunded pension liabilities rise, they didn’t specify where the extra social-services money should come from. Of course if pressed they probably would call for raising taxes on “the rich,” but “the rich” and the comfortable already pay nearly all state income taxes.

Setting tax rates is serious business. They should be set according to a calculation of what is fair and effective and doesn’t scare taxpayers away, not according to how much more money is needed to satisfy any interest group at the moment.  

But if state government’s commitment to pension solvency is obstructing a “moral budget,” the clergy members should examine the pension fund problem closely in search of a balanced solution.

After all, the less that pensions are properly funded, the longer that pension payments will have to be drawn from taxes into the future, thereby diverting state tax revenue from other purposes. Conversely, the sooner pensions are properly funded, the sooner more state tax revenue will be available.  

Additionally, state government’s pension fund is a function of state employee salaries, which have increased by a rather extravagant 33% since Governor Lamont took office seven years ago. State employee insurance coverage and fringe benefits remain high as well. 

If the compensation of state employees wasn’t so high, the burden of properly funding their pensions wouldn’t be as high either and more money would be available elsewhere in government. 

So would the clergy members favor economizing with state employees for a while with a salary freeze, as Republican state legislators propose? Would the clergy members favor economizing anywhere in state government so the budget could be made more “moral”?

Indeed, why provide state government employees with defined-benefit pensions at all? Why not have state government just make limited contributions to the individual retirement accounts of state employees, the retirement plans that are presumed good enough for most people in the private sector? This would save billions. Why should state government employees be treated so much more generously than taxpayers?

Such are the questions governors and legislators must ask themselves whenever they devise a budget. Of course they seldom think very critically; usually they just yield to special-interest pressure. But even when they decide which special interests to please and which to disappoint, they realize that, as the old saying goes, “to govern is to choose,” and that Charles de Gaulle was right with his elaboration: “To govern is always to choose among disadvantages.”

In contrast, it often seems that belonging to the clergy in Connecticut does not involve choosing at all but just striking pious poses, as if God is fooled as easily as their congregations.

PUT THE CROSS AWAY: A teacher in a public school in New Britain is striking a pious pose too. She has been suspended for refusing the superintendent’s directive to remove a large crucifix she displayed beside her classroom desk, and now is suing to get her job back, claiming First Amendment freedom of religion.

But freedom of religion isn’t the freedom to promote religion on the job in a public school, an environment that, under the same amendment, must be religiously neutral. If, as the teacher says, she wants to look at a cross occasionally for strength and comfort, she can keep one in a desk drawer out of everyone’s sight but her own.    

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