Ending poverty isn’t the aim of state policy; enlarging it is

By Chris Powell

Nearly everyone on state government’s payroll, directly or indirectly, is beseeching Governor Lamont and the General Assembly to loosen the “fiscal guardrails” that have constrained spending and have allowed state pension funds to grow slightly faster than their obligations.

Stewart goes for governor with giddy superficiality

Trump and Democrats trade license for lawlessness

‘Intervention’ in Bridgeport is just cover for a bailout

Leading the clamor to spend more are social-service groups and their legislative allies. They want the state’s Medicaid program to cover diapers. They want another $9 million for community food banks, contending that more than 10% of Connecticut’s population is “food insecure.” And they advocate a $600 “refundable tax credit” for low-income households, cash for people who don’t pay income taxes.

They hold news conferences where they cheer and congratulate each other as if they don’t understand the disaster behind their proposals: the explosion of poverty in a state that purports to be doing well. 

The proposals indicate otherwise — that more people can’t support themselves and their children, even if for years now state government has not seemed to expect people to. Households headed by a single woman with little education and income and no significant job skills but with several young children to support are often cited in news reports as if their poverty is surprising. 

Such poverty is surprising only insofar as Connecticut simultaneously glories in free, round-the-clock contraception and abortion. Indeed, last week the governor grandly announced the state’s first contraceptives vending machine.

But the cause of the worsening poverty seems not to interest advocates of the new spending. Nor do they seem to wonder why poverty has worsened despite government’s longstanding programs to alleviate it.

State government’s bookkeeping is well monitored by the auditors of public accounts, but its policies and programs are seldom audited for results. Appropriating and bestowing money have become ends in themselves.

Breaking away from Trumpian Republicanism, Wall Street Journal columnist Peggy Noonan, once a top aide to President Ronald Reagan, offered some advice to Democrats last week. “Most of all,” she wrote, “make something work. You run nearly every great city in the nation. Make one work — clean it up, control crime, smash corruption, educate the kids.”

Noonan meant well but misunderstands the situation. For from the Democratic perspective, the cities they control work very well — they create and sustain the hapless underclass that is the rationale for the government class and that produces the election pluralities on which the party of the government class relies. A self-sufficient population is not the policy objective; perpetual dependence on government is.

For what else can explain the 60-year decline of cities in Connecticut and nationally and the horrifying failure of their schools? After all this time the people in charge can’t be so stupid to have missed this. They must be assumed to intend the most obvious results of their administration. Auditing the results would call those longstanding policies and programs into question and compel a change not just in policies and programs but a change in regime. 

So results must not be calculated. For prosperity isn’t political power in Connecticut anymore. Poverty is.

‘SANCTUARY’ IN NEW LONDON: Now that the federal government is starting to enforce immigration law again, some cities are declaring that they really aren’t “sanctuary” cities after all, or at least that they don’t want to be known as such, lest the Trump administration try to penalize them for obstructing enforcement. 

Among these cities is New London, where Mayor Michael Passero recently told the city’s newspaper, The Day, that while the city has a reputation as a “sanctuary” city, the City Council’s 2018 resolution on immigration doesn’t mention “sanctuary” at all and says only that the city will observe state and federal law and be a welcoming place.

In a technical sense the mayor is right. But then everyone in authority in New London seems to support Connecticut’s “Trust Act,” which forbids municipal police from most cooperation with federal immigration authorities. Since the “Trust Act” makes Connecticut a “sanctuary” state, all its municipalities are “sanctuary” cities. “Welcoming” is euphemism and no defense.

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

-END-

Stewart goes for governor with giddy superficiality

By Chris Powell

Outlining last week her potential candidacy for the Republican nomination for governor, New Britain’s Republican mayor, Erin Stewart, said that while her likely Democratic opponent, Governor Lamont, is a nice guy, “he’s not evoking excitement in anyone.”

But hadn’t Connecticut just had too much excitement from the first few days of the new administration of President Donald Trump? Who wants more?

Trump and Democrats trade license for lawlessness

‘Intervention’ in Bridgeport is just cover for a bailout

Alphabet people needn’t be so terrified in Connecticut

Asked what she would do differently than Lamont, Stewart chirped, “Everything!” — which was just evasion. 

Stewart couldn’t say much more for herself than that she had revived New Britain in her 11 years as mayor, as if the governor hadn’t been a big help with that, and that Connecticut needs a “new generation of leadership,” as if anyone cares much that she is 37 and the governor is 71. 

Any Republican who can win six elections for mayor in a city as Democratic as New Britain must have at least congeniality going for her, but as Stewart introduced her potential candidacy she was giddy and superficial. Like any Republican running for governor in a state as Democratic as Connecticut, Stewart will have to give voters better reasons to replace the entrenched regime. 

There are such reasons, but if, as expected, Lamont seeks a third term next year, his not being as exciting as Trump won’t be one of them. Those reasons will have to involve policy and arise from insightful analysis that explodes the conventional wisdom that Connecticut is in great shape and offers compelling alternatives.

Since Connecticut’s Republican Party has been reduced to a small minority in the General Assembly and lacks any statewide constitutional officers or members of Congress, maybe wishful thinking will persuade it that a bright, young personality is its best chance. After all, there is no one of much renown and ambition on the party’s bench. 

But whoever the Republican nominee is, giddy superficiality will wear thin fast, especially since news organizations won’t give any Republican the fawning treatment they give Democrats. 

SCAPEGOATING ISN’T FREE: New Haven’s firing of four police officers involved in the case of an arrested man who became paralyzed during his transport to police headquarters in 2022 was politically correct. But it has started to cost the city money.

The officer who drove the van carrying the man has been reinstated by the state Board of Mediation and Arbitration, which determined that firing him was grossly excessive for his supposed offense. The officer continued to drive the van to police headquarters instead of waiting for an ambulance after the man complained he had been badly injured, his neck broken when the van stopped short to avoid a collision and he went flying off his seat. The van’s passenger compartment had no seatbelts.

So the state board replaced the officer’s firing with a 15-day unpaid suspension, and now he will receive a year and a half of back pay.

The state board has upheld the firing of an officer who was accused of treating the injured man callously at headquarters. The appeals of the two other fired officers continue.

It was a terrible incident and the city paid the man $45 million to settle his damage lawsuit, but the proximate cause of his injury wasn’t any misconduct by officers but the city’s longstanding failure to install seatbelts in prisoner vans. City government made scapegoats of the officers to satisfy public anger.

So now New Haven will pay for city government’s negligence a second time.

PROFITABLE PUNISHMENT: An employee of the state Department of Mental Health and Addiction Services has been charged with creating fraudulent voter registration cards during a registration event in Torrington last September. She is accused of changing party affiliation entries on the cards from unaffiliated or Republican to Democratic.

Judging from recent state government employee disciplinary cases in the Public Defender Services Commission, the Administrative Services Department, and the Department of Energy and Environmental Protection, she could be in big trouble. That is, she may be facing a year or two of paid leave.      

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

-END-

Trump and Democrats trade license for lawlessness

By Chris Powell

What exactly was President Trump up to this week when he tried to impose a “temporary suspension” on federal government grant payments? His people said it was to make sure that such payments align with the policies of his new administration. 

‘Intervention’ in Bridgeport is just cover for a bailout

Alphabet people needn’t be so terrified in Connecticut

Could Lamont ask Trump for help with electricity prices?

Surely many grants are stupid political patronage. Indeed, a few decades ago — back when liberal Democrats could recognize stupidity — a liberal Democratic senator from Wisconsin, William Proxmire, became famous for the “Golden Fleece Awards” he bestowed on stupid federal spending.

But if the grants to be temporarily suspended are authorized by federal appropriations law, it is hard to square their suspension with the president’s constitutional duty to “take care that the laws be faithfully executed.”

Dozens of lawyers, including Connecticut’s attorney general, rushed into court and won an injunction to keep the money flowing. They may prevail if the case is tried. After all, why did the Trump administration have to terrify everyone by suspending everything at once instead of identifying and acting on proper targets, if any, one at a time?

Probably the president wanted to show he’s ready to extort his adversaries and make them beg him for priority clearance of their constituents’ funding. 

In any case Trump’s people had been warning that the president’s power is enormous and that it would be costly to cross the new Republican administration. 

So here we are. The courts will sort it out.

Maybe the most pathetic thing in all this that the officials denouncing Trump for acting unconstitutionally, for neglecting to see that the laws are faithfully executed, are the same ones who lately have been striving to obstruct enforcement of federal immigration law, where, remarkably, Trump is doing his duty. 

Unfortunately this hypocritical group has much representation in Democratic Connecticut, including Governor Lamont, Attorney General William Tong, and New Haven Mayor Justin Elicker. Just a few days earlier the governor had thrown himself into the ranks of the nullifiers and insurrectionists, pointedly telling all immigrants, legal and illegal, well-meaning and evil-intentioned alike, “You’re welcome here.”

That is, Connecticut doesn’t care about observing federal law — or didn’t until Trump tried to suspend the state’s federal grants. Trump’s obstruction of federal law is bad but Connecticut’s is good.

Meanwhile Tong ranted hysterically. Trump, he said, had “stolen” the grants. In fact they remained where there had been, mere digits in Treasury Department computers.

Elicker again pledged to defend all illegal immigrants and said Trump is wrong that there are only two genders. The mayor insisted that there are really many more, at least in New Haven.

Connecticut’s ever-weakening and ever-more politically slanted journalism is complicit in this. 

Would the governor have commented so blithely about illegal immigration if he thought that he might be asked a few critical questions? 

They weren’t asked. But does the governor really see no difference between legal and illegal immigration and between vetted and unvetted immigrants? Did Connecticut make preparations — in housing, education, health care, and policing — for its more than 100,000 illegal immigrants, or would preparations have called attention to the problems sure to result from the Democratic policy of open borders? Should state government appropriate the additional $250 million being sought for medical insurance for its illegals, or are there more legitimate needs?  

This isn’t “whataboutism,” the term used in a radio interview this week by Connecticut U.S. Rep. Jim Himes to dismiss defenses of Trump that cite equally grave misconduct by the president’s adversaries. 

No, this about how politics is losing all rationality and moral authority. 

Joe Biden refused to enforce immigration law and illegally forgave billions in student loans, so why shouldn’t Trump think he can disregard appropriations law? Pardoning his son and — prospectively — the rest of his crime family, Biden liberated Trump to pardon all of his crime family, the Capitol rioters. 

Disgrace on one side now quickly becomes license for the other side. Who in politics still has the right to pound his chest and feign indignation, or even just to criticize? Not many in Connecticut.  

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

-END-

‘Intervention’ in Bridgeport is just cover for a bailout

By Chris Powell

Last week Governor Lamont and his education commissioner, Charlene Russell-Tucker, went to Bridgeport to discuss what news organizations described as state government’s “intervention” in the impoverished city’s horribly performing schools. But the “intervention” was mainly for show. 

For the State Board of Education’s three-part plan for the city’s schools practically proclaims that improvement is impossible.

Alphabet people needn’t be so terrified in Connecticut

Could Lamont ask Trump for help with electricity prices?

Connecticut’s Democrats don’t understand their working-class problem

The state board will appoint a “technical assistance team” to supervise the school system’s “special education” efforts with its most disadvantaged and handicapped students. That is, the school system is incompetent with “special education.”  

The state board will provide training in proper behavior to members of the city’s Board of Education, which is notorious for incompetence and fractiousness.

And since Bridgeport has gone through five school superintendents in the last seven years and now is looking for another one, Commissioner Russell-Tucker will have power to approve or reject the city board’s next choice. That is, the board can’t be trusted with its most important hiring decision.

Pandering to the teachers in his audience, the governor said he wanted the city’s schools to spend their money on what happens in the classroom, not on administration. But his commissioner’s plan signifies that Bridgeport’s schools grossly lack administration, and most of the money they spend is already spent in classrooms — that is, on teacher compensation.

It seems that the Bridgeport school system problem that has gotten the attention of the governor and commissioner is just the system’s $32 million deficit, which had begun to prompt budget cuts when the latest superintendent put herself on leave. Spending cuts are not allowed in Connecticut schools, since that would enrage the teacher unions, a big part of the regime’s political army. 

Being so superficial, the commissioner’s plan for Bridgeport’s schools seems meant mostly to provide political cover for a financial bailout by state government. For the big false premise of education in Connecticut remains in force — that student learning correlates with spending, even though learning actually has been declining as more money is spent and correlates mainly with how much parenting students get and how financially secure their parents are.

Really, what could even the best school superintendent and the best teachers in the world do with a student population like Bridgeport’s?

Bridgeport’s schools have almost 20,000 students and 92% are classified as “high needs” — that is, they live in poverty at home or are homeless; they have only one parent, if that; they have physical, mental, or learning disabilities; and they don’t speak English well if at all. Nearly a third of all Bridgeport students are chronically absent; nearly half of high school students are. Only 20% perform at grade level in reading and only 12% in math.

Last week Commissioner Russell-Tucker said the situation with Bridgeport’s schools is urgent. Nonsense — it is routine, the same catastrophe it has been for years, like the longstanding catastrophes of the schools in Connecticut’s other cities. All Connecticut’s cities are poverty factories by design. If not for the recent administrative chaos in Bridgeport’s schools, no one in authority in state government would have noticed even now.

School systems so overwhelmed with neglected children should be broken up and their students distributed to less overwhelmed systems, and state government should figure out where all the child neglect is coming from.

A few weeks ago two Republican state senators, Stephen Harding of Brookfield and Eric Berthel of Watertown, asked Commissioner Russell-Tucker what she thought about the formal social promotion policies of many city school systems, including Hartford’s, school systems that were recently exposed as prohibiting teachers from giving failing grades to students even if they never learn anything and never show up for class. Last September a recent graduate of Hartford Public High School sensationally confessed that she is illiterate, and now she is suing for $3 million in damages.

The commissioner replied that her department has a committee studying school grading practices and it plans to report to the legislature … next January. By then another year of education will have been lost. So much for urgency.

—–

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

-END-

Alphabet people needn’t be so terrified in Connecticut

By CHRIS POWELL

Many people are terrified by Donald Trump’s return to the presidency, but perhaps none more so than members of sexual minorities, who lately have commandeered nine letters — a third of the alphabet — to construct an acronym with which to represent themselves. The other day an activist among Connecticut’s alphabet people told the Hartford Courant that the political climate “continuously demonizes and degrades us” and that Trump wants “to legislatively and socially erase our community.”

Could Lamont ask Trump for help with electricity prices?

Connecticut’s Democrats don’t understand their working-class problem

City mayors and educators seek more money for what keeps failing

Really? Is there evidence for such claims, or do they just manifest paranoia, neurosis, hysteria, and self-absorption?

For Connecticut isn’t darkest South Carolina. To the contrary, it long has been quite libertarian about sexual identity. 

In 1971 the state was among the first to repeal its ancient law criminalizing homosexuality, a law that hadn’t been enforced for many years. To get rid of it little political courage was required from legislators. 

In 1991 the state prohibited discrimination based on sexual orientation. 

In 2005 the state legalized same-sex “civil unions” and in 2008 same-sex marriage. 

While some towns decline requests to fly the “pride flag” at town hall, it’s because the flag constitutes propagandizing for causes government hasn’t endorsed and most people oppose. This is not oppression.

As for Trump, while he, like most people, is against letting men who think of themselves as women participate in women’s sports, he has not proposed anything to prevent people from presenting themselves as being of a gender that doesn’t match their anatomy. Indeed, though Trump has gotten no credit for it, as a Democratic president would have gotten, his choice for treasury secretary, investment fund manager Scott Bessent, is a gay man married to another gay man, and they have two children. 

They live in darkest South Carolina and have yet to be assassinated, and there have been no shrieks of outrage about Bessent from the MAGA crowd.

Trump will prohibit confining in women’s prisons men who think of themselves as women, since such practice facilitates rape. But this isn’t oppression either; it’s safety for women prisoners.

Presumably Trump will oppose letting men use women’s restrooms and vice versa, but this traditional policy for gender privacy doesn’t obstruct anyone’s access to a restroom. When you have to go, you have to go, and you always will be able to. 

Amid Connecticut’s political correctness, the restroom issue has gone nutty here, with the General Assembly having required all public schools to put feminine hygiene products in at least one male restroom. But even without that law, those products would be available in the school nurse’s office, and furiously busy as the new president is, it may be a while before he worries about school restrooms in Connecticut.

The alphabet people profess to be terrified that Trump will get Congress to prohibit irreversible sex-change therapy for young people who suffer gender dysphoria. Of course many other people are terrified that some states still don’t prohibit such therapy. But objection to it is not oppression but adherence to the principle that minors are not competent to make life-changing decisions. Nor should minors be pressured into such decisions by adults. 

Besides, most young people seem to outgrow their gender dysphoria and many others come to regret their irreversible sex-change therapy. Such therapy should wait until young people turn 18.

So what’s left to terrify the alphabet people? 

They often hold public rallies complaining of oppression and demanding respect, but the supposed oppressors never show up and nobody gets hurt. Nearly everyone who encounters the rallies passes by in libertarian indifference, the highest form of respect. The demonstrators are in more danger of getting hit by a drunken driver than a “homophobe,” a “transphobe,” or a hysteria-phobe.

So the alphabet people should take the chips off their shoulders and live their lives as best they can. While some people could do without their braying, fewer people wish them harm than wish harm to Trump, and the alphabet offers another 17 letters with which they can continue searching for their authentic selves.    

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

-END-

Could Lamont ask Trump for help with electricity prices?

By Chris Powell

When the General Assembly reconvened two weeks ago, Governor Lamont spoke at length about Connecticut’s outrageously high electricity prices and said that to bring electricity prices down the state needed access to more natural gas and more Canadian hydro-electric power.

Connecticut’s Democrats don’t understand their working-class problem

City mayors and educators seek more money for what keeps failing

To regrow Connecticut’s cities, first understand their decline

The country has plenty of natural gas but Connecticut can’t get it because it comes from states to our west and New York State won’t allow construction of the pipelines needed to deliver it. Similarly, opposition in Maine, New Hampshire, and Vermont is impeding construction of the transmission lines needed to bring hydro-electric power to Connecticut from Quebec.   

In his inaugural address this week President Trump stressed his aim to unleash production of oil and gas in the country so the United States can become the foremost supplier of energy to the world. Trump merrily repeated what was practically his campaign slogan: “Drill, baby, drill!”

Fortunately Lamont was present for the address, one of only two Democratic governors in the audience. While he may alarm the far-leftists in his party who want to obstruct the new administration at every turn, the governor said he was ready to put partisanship aside where he and the new administration agree and can work together. 

Does the governor see the opportunity? For federal law could override state obstruction of natural gas pipelines and electricity transmission lines. 

Would a Republican national administration help a Democratic state like Connecticut achieve energy security and lower electricity prices? 

Would a Democratic governor ask a Republican president for such help?

Why not?

In his inaugural address Trump delighted in reversing the policies of the previous administration and made a show of signing dozens of such executive orders, including orders pertaining to energy. He might be equally delighted to emphasize how Democratic energy policy in Washington and New York State has been costly to the working class of the Democratic state next door.

As for Lamont, he is contemplating seeking a third term as governor next year and electricity prices may be his biggest political liability. His partiality to natural gas and hydropower has drawn criticism from the environmental extremists on the far left of his party, but their shrieking would be drowned out by the cheers of state residents being given hope that something at last might be done about their electricity bills.

Connecticut’s congressional delegation, all far-left Democrats, might resent the governor’s asking them to work with the Devil himself, even on federal legislation to achieve something so tangible for their constituents. But the members of Congress might not want to be seen as obstructing lower electricity prices.

Indeed, criticism of Lamont for seeking the Devil’s help to reduce Connecticut’s electricity prices might work to his advantage with voters. Would even the environmental extremists in Connecticut vote for a Republican, a member of the Devil’s own party, against Lamont just because he sought the Devil’s help to bring electricity prices down? Unlikely.

In any case the governor’s approval rating is high enough that he can afford to risk some criticism in pursuit of the public interest.

It’s a little strange that the environmental extremists are so agitated about natural gas while they let nuclear power be depicted as so environmentally benign. Nearly everyone in politics in Connecticut goes along with this pose.

Yes, nuclear power doesn’t have the carbon emissions of natural gas, but it still is capable of producing far deadlier pollution: radiation from the fuel rods of nuclear reactors. 

Reactors are not immune to fuel-rod accidents, and spent fuel rods are stored in water pools and concrete casks at nuclear power stations around the country, including Connecticut’s Millstone station, because Congress has been deadlocked politically for decades over creating a secure repository for the rods, which remain dangerously radioactive for thousands of years and are tempting targets for terrorists. 

Millstone produces a third of Connecticut’s electricity and has a good record but it doesn’t deserve quite as much enthusiasm as it gets.

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

Connecticut’s Democrats don’t understand their working-class problem

By Chris Powell

With their party having lost much support from the working class in last November’s election, many Democratic state legislators in Connecticut think that a good way of making amends is to give unemployment compensation to strikers. 

City mayors and educators seek more money for what keeps failing

To regrow Connecticut’s cities, first understand their decline

Tong seeks a new euphemism for nullifying immigration law

Last year Democrats introduced such legislation and disgracefully and stupidly tried to keep it secret, to pass it without anyone outside their caucus discovering what the bill would do. The bill was exposed but passed anyway, whereupon Governor Lamont vetoed it. He still opposes the idea, since government’s subsidizing strikers would scare businesses away, but Senate Democratic leader Martin M. Looney hopes to change Lamont’s mind.

Democratic legislators also hope to enact new restrictions on residential landlords, as if that won’t discourage construction of apartments to ease the state’s housing shortage. 

The Democratic objective isn’t to strengthen Connecticut’s economy, reduce housing costs, and make the state affordable as much as to harm business and strike leftist poses.

Unemployment compensation for strikers will do little for the working class. Fewer than 7% of Connecticut’s private-sector workers are unionized and strikes are rare. They seem most frequent in the nursing home industry, whose employees indeed tend to be low-paid. But since most nursing home patients are government’s charges, increases in nursing home costs fall mainly on taxpayers.

The Democrats’ problems with the working class are much different.

First is the inflation the federal government unleashed through its spectacular spending increases of recent years, for which the virus epidemic was cited as license. Much of this spending was given as cash grants to states. But it all was financed by borrowing that was essentially money creation, and it was so extreme that it caused severe inflation worldwide.

The Democrats’ second problem with the working class is the downward pressure the federal government put on wages by admitting millions of low-skilled illegal immigrants. Meanwhile their housing and welfare expenses, underwritten by government, fueled inflation as well.

As a result most of the good things Democrats think they have done in recent years have been nullified by rising prices. The working class didn’t start defecting to Donald Trump because he is a great humanitarian but because the Democratic national administration smashed their standard of living. 

More government spending financed by deficits and borrowing are likely only to keep boosting inflation. While the new president considers himself a genius, he’ll need more than that to improve living standards while the country is already living at least 25% beyond its means.

Nevertheless Connecticut’s political left will push state legislators to induce state government to experiment with what may be the holy grail of their something-for-nothing philosophy — formally guaranteed annual incomes for the poor.

Frustration with government’s long failure to eliminate generational poverty is understandable. It is fair to wonder whether the poor might be rich today if the billions spent during the last 60 years in the name of elevating them had simply been given to them in cash.

But philanthropy-based experiments with guaranteed income have shown little success in enabling poor people to support themselves, and the danger is obvious in encouraging people to think the world owes them a living. Indeed, Connecticut’s welfare system is already a system of guaranteed income that has given tens of thousands of people the impression that they are not obliged to support their own children since the government will do it for them. So their children are often neglected and badly disadvantaged when they reach adulthood.

Guaranteed incomes, along with guaranteed jobs, job training, basic housing, and medical insurance, are necessary in one respect: for people being released after serving substantial prison terms. 

Most former convicts are employable only for menial work and are destitute upon their release and unable to support themselves. Predictably enough, half are back in prison in two or three years.

If government can’t ensure that the lives of parolees are being rebuilt decently, there’s no point in releasing them. Every prison sentence might as well be a life sentence.

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

City mayors and educators seek more money for what keeps failing

By Chris Powell

Governor Lamont welcomed the General Assembly back to work two weeks ago with a remarkable exhortation.

“We have a longer legislative session this cycle,” the governor said, “giving us an opportunity to get in the weeds, lift up the hood — not always arguing about more money but better results.”

To regrow Connecticut’s cities, first understand their decline

Tong seeks a new euphemism for nullifying immigration law

Connecticut’s prosperity depends on more housing

Five days later the mayors and school superintendents of Connecticut’s five largest cities — Hartford, Bridgeport, New Haven, Stamford, and Waterbury — gathered at the Capitol and showed that they hadn’t heard what the governor said, or, if they had, didn’t think he meant it.

For the mayors and superintendents urged state government to increase financial support to city schools by $545 million, as if spending more in the name of education, especially in the cities, isn’t what Connecticut has been doing without ever improving student performance since the Education Enhancement Act was passed in 1986.

In recent years the cities haven’t been able even to get their children to school reliably, with a quarter to half of them being chronically absent. How is another $545 million per biennium going to get them to school? Will the money hire parents and chauffeurs for the kids? No one put that question to the mayors and superintendents.

Journalism last September about the recent Hartford Public High School graduate who confessed her illiteracy and is suing her school system for damages recently prompted journalism showing that city school systems have formal policies enforcing their longstanding practice of social promotion. That is, the school systems, in writing, explicitly forbid teachers from giving failing grades to students even if they learn nothing and don’t show up for class. 

How will giving another $545 million per biennium for those school systems stop this fraud? No one put that question to the mayors and superintendents either.

Four decades of throwing more money at schools in Connecticut have proven that more spending in the name of education lacks any correlation with student performance. More “education” spending correlates only with the quality of the cars driven by teachers and administrators, the recipients of most “education” spending.

The governor and state legislators have yet to recognize — or don’t yet dare acknowledge — that social promotion policy is an admission of permanent failure, an admission that educators have given up on educating. It is also an admission that 95% of education is a matter of parenting. 

About a quarter of Connecticut’s children are growing up in a home with only one parent. In the cities most children have only one parent at home, if that many. Such children suffer much neglect, and their parents know that their children will be promoted and graduated without learning anything or even attending and that their schools rationalize and accept this neglect. 

This is a disaster and paying teachers and school administrators more hasn’t fixed it and won’t fix it.

But there is good cause for increasing state government spending on local education in one respect: “special education.” That’s the extra schooling and programming provided to the most neglected, disturbed, and handicapped children. 

Since it is a matter of social welfare, “special education” should be financed entirely by the state, but most of its expense is borne by the schools attended by “special education” students. The expense is heaviest in the impoverished cities, where most such children live. 

State government should have assumed all “special education” costs many years ago as a matter of fairness to property taxpayers in the cities, where such taxes are oppressive. But state financing for general school purposes should not be increased in the cities and anywhere else until it can be shown to make any difference apart from the cars school employees drive.

FLAMING HYPOCRISY: Last week’s award for hypocrisy in Connecticut goes to state Attorney General William Tong who, speaking in New London at a forum for immigrants, denounced the incoming national administration of Donald Trump. “They don’t care about the rule of law or precedent,” Tong said even as he promised to try to nullify federal immigration law and precedent himself.

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

To regrow Connecticut’s cities, first understand their decline

By Chris Powell

Back in the 1950s many Connecticut cities had populations about 50% larger than they are today. In his address to the General Assembly as it reconvened this month, Governor Lamont said he wants them to grow back to their old size.

He’s right that the cities are where most of any population growth in the state should go, since infrastructure is already in place there. Such growth would diminish controversy about exclusive zoning in the suburbs. 

Tong seeks a new euphemism for nullifying immigration law

Connecticut’s prosperity depends on more housing

Connecticut’s social promotion makes public education a costly fraud

Of course there will be no solving Connecticut’s housing shortage unless the Trump administration stops the flood of illegal immigration engineered by the Biden administration and assisted by the Democrats who control state government. Having supported the flood for so long, Connecticut’s Democratic regime carefully overlooks the connection between illegal immigration and the housing shortage. Without illegal immigration, the shortage might be only half as severe.

But before much can be done to regrow the cities, state government will have to understand the causes of their decline — in both population and quality of life.

To some extent the decline resulted from the increasing ownership of automobiles and then construction of the interstate highway system, which, necessary as it may have been for commerce and national defense, turned out to be used as much for increasing the distance people were willing to travel between their homes and their jobs. Cars and highways redirected housing construction away from the cities.

But in recent years technology also has redirected employment away from the cities. Many office workers now can work from home almost anywhere, and basic manufacturing has moved to countries with lower wages.  

While city life retains its old attractions — civic, cultural, educational, medical, theatrical, and sports institutions — its disadvantages are worse than ever: the poverty of most city residents and the resulting terrible performance of city schools, crime, the incompetence and inefficiency of city government, and horribly high property taxes.

Regional “magnet” schools offer some escape from city schools that are overwhelmed by disadvantaged children, but getting middle-class families to return to the cities is unlikely until their demographics improve. In recent years the cities have drawn new middle-class residents mainly from same-sex couples and “empty nesters,” not so much from couples with school-age children.

Stamford seems to be the exception among Connecticut’s cities. It has some poverty but is not swamped by it like the others, because its nearness to New York City and its commuter service from the Metro-North Railroad have driven up the city’s housing prices and rents and kept them at Fairfield County levels. That is, Stamford’s demographics are strong in large part because it does not have that much of what the rest of the state badly needs — “affordable” housing.

If Connecticut’s housing shortage gets desperate enough, new market-rate housing in the cities might draw some middle-class people back, at least for a while. But for the long term there is probably not much chance of making the cities attractive to a wide range of people without elevating or dispersing the poor, and the suburbs won’t voluntarily take many of them and even most Democratic legislators are not inclined to force them to. 

Government’s long failure to elevate the poor is Connecticut’s biggest problem and the cause of some of its other big problems. 

If substantially more housing is built in Connecticut without more illegal immigration, the state’s cost of living could be reduced, which would help the poor along with everyone else. 

But what keeps the poor down most are the state’s main policies toward them particularly — the welfare policies whose perverse incentives encourage childbearing outside marriage, perpetuate generational poverty, and lead to child neglect, and the educational policies that have destroyed academic standards in the schools poor children attend, schools that send many of them into the world prepared only for menial work.

Until the damage done by these policies is acknowledged officially, cities will find it hard to restore themselves.

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

Tong seeks a new euphemism for nullifying immigration law

By Chris Powell

Describing Connecticut as a “sanctuary” state and its cities as “sanctuary” cities isn’t helping illegal immigrants anymore, Attorney General William Tong told a forum at the University of Bridgeport last week. “Sanctuary” has no particular meaning in law, the attorney general said, and has started to “inflame” the public. He would prefer some other term, something meaning that “we’re going to look out for each other.”

Connecticut’s prosperity depends on more housing

Connecticut’s social promotion makes public education a costly fraud

Hartford schools obstruct investigation of graduate’s illiteracy

But while it may not be a legal term, “sanctuary” is a simple word plainly understood. It means a place of safety or refuge, so its connotation is favorable, which is why advocates of disregarding federal immigration law long have used it to identify jurisdictions they control.

The problem is that most people at last seem to have realized that in regard to immigration “sanctuary” is a euphemism, a word that disguises and misleads, and that “sanctuary” states like Connecticut and “sanctuary” cities like New Haven are actually engaged in subversion of federal law and national security. They forbid their police from assisting federal immigration officers and even issue driver’s licenses and other identification documents to illegal immigrants to facilitate their lawbreaking.

More accurate terms would be “nullification” or “insurrectionary” states and cities, though the attorney general’s remarks in Bridgeport suggested that he would prefer still another euphemism: “welcoming.” This euphemism would try to disguise the same subversion, by “welcoming” everyone — not just harmless, unoffending people but also criminals, terrorists, and spies — without any inquiry into their background, intentions, ability to support themselves, and desire to contribute to the country and maintain it as a secular democracy.

Tong contends that such “welcoming” is OK because federal law does not require state and municipal police to help enforce immigration law. Even so, Connecticut’s “TRUST Act,” driver’s licenses and identification cards for illegal immigrants, and Tong’s euphemizing still subvert immigration law and national security and, as the nullifying Southern segregationist governors did in the last century, they devalue citizenship.

Of course the attorney general isn’t the only one engaged in strategic euphemizing. Many other government officials do it as well, and most news organizations join them with their own propaganda. 

It began a half century ago when stinky racial preferences in hiring and college admissions were perfumed as “affirmative action.” It continues today as “illegal” immigrants are whitewashed as “undocumented,” as if they merely misplaced their visas, and as “sex-change therapy” is hailed as “gender-affirming care.” 

“Shills” have become “influencers.” And now that the federal government is insolvent and state government isn’t far behind, what used to be “spending” is called “investment,” though the actual gains and losses from “investment” are seldom calculated. 

Indeed, as shown by the recent investigative reporting of the Connecticut Mirror and the Yankee Institute’s Connecticut Inside Investigator, education itself now is pretty much a euphemism, since nearly all public school students in the state are promoted from grade to grade and given high school diplomas without ever having to show that they have learned anything or even attended school much. 

If state legislators weren’t already dedicated “influencers” for the teacher unions, they could have a little fun in debate on the next budget by demanding more “investment” in social promotion.

ANOTHER EXCESSIVE PAID LEAVE: State government lately has seemed full of exceedingly long paid leaves, and another was disclosed last week.

The director of diversity, equity, and inclusion for the state Public Defender Services Commission, Daryl McGraw, was demoted on account of a vulgar and misogynistic posting he made on social media in 2023 — after more than a year of paid leave with salary and benefits totaling more than $180,000.

The commission itself was already a laughingstock last June upon the firing of the chief public defender after insubordination played out in public for months. Not surprisingly in light of his title, McGraw doesn’t seem to have been missed during his leave, but it would be nice if someone in authority in state government noticed all the money he was paid for not working.

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