Senator Murphy, safely re-elected, attacks medical insurers

By Chris Powell

The assassination of United Healthcare CEO Brian Thompson in Manhattan on Dec. 4 has sparked political hysteria, most of all from Connecticut U.S. Sen. Chris Murphy.

In a video he posted on social media two weeks later, citing the assassination, Murphy, a Democrat re-elected in November, turned vulgar, asserting that the medical insurance industry “mostly doesn’t give a —-” about sick people and that people are angry about their coverage.

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Supporting illegal immigration, Connecticut’s left cuts wages

Rell’s capital went unspent; and choices take courage

The senator added: “The business model of the health care industry is to deny care to people who need it and force them into bankruptcy, or, worse, let them die in order to grow profit.”

Is Thompson’s assassination really evidence for these accusations?

The country and the senator have just come through a heated political campaign in which medical insurance was hardly mentioned. Opinion polls about the issues most on people’s minds cited inflation, illegal immigration, and government’s strange enthusiasm for transgenderism. Medical insurance didn’t even make the list. Flawed as the medical insurance system may be, most people seem satisfied with what they have, especially government employees like the senator, whose policies are gold-plated.

Of course insurers make money by economizing with claims, not by overpaying, and some claims always will be matters of judgment and some judgments may be cruel and corrupt. (Meanwhile government’s business model often seems to be to waste as much money as possible, knowing that, no matter how inefficient, government is forever.)

Their burgeoning welfare state is conditioning Americans to think that someone else should pay for everything they want, but until people are angels, insurance will remain a racket in which providers, policyholders, and their lawyers scheme to beat each other out of every cent possible.     

In any case Connecticut remains home to a large medical insurance industry, and United Healthcare has offices in a skyscraper in Hartford emblazoned with the company’s name. Yet as he sought re-election Murphy led no protest march there.

If United Healthcare and other medical insurers in Connecticut have really been cheating their customers to death, during his campaign Murphy did not lecture them and their thousands of employees about how despicable they are. Indeed, he probably got most of their votes. Now they’re the big problem.

Any such lecture from the senator might have caused him to be questioned about how exactly medical insurance should be changed.

In the past Murphy has spoken favorably about expanding Medicare, the government medical insurance for the elderly, to all people who might want it in place of ever-more-expensive employer-provided group insurance or individual insurance. But in his social media hysteria the other day the senator offered no alternative.

Medicare is popular with its recipients because it is not just a cost-shifting system, as most insurance is, but a system of generational cost shifting from the old and mostly retired to the young and mostly employed. Since nearly everyone will go through those stages of life, this cost shifting seems fair to most people. 

But Medicare shifts costs in another big way. It underpays medical providers and expects them to recover the underpayments by overcharging other patients, insured or uninsured. Underpayments by Medicaid, government’s insurance for the indigent and those nearly indigent, are even worse, and it is often hard for Medicaid recipients to find doctors willing to treat them.   

So to whom would costs be shifted under “Medicare for all,” if not to the inflation under which everyone is already chafing and to the foreigners who are already buying fewer U.S. government bonds so as not to pay as much for the goodies Americans claim and then presume to charge to the world?

Murphy’s social media hysteria was ironic in another respect. He said, “People in America today feel ignored, they feel scared, they feel alone, feel that the system intentionally grinds them down.”

Just a few weeks earlier he was urging people to give another presidential term to his party, which was telling them they never had it so good even as they were being ground down all along. 

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

If new oversight committee is serious, where should it begin?

By Chris Powell

Because of the state government scandals uncovered recently by the state auditors, and maybe because of the ones uncovered recently by the Hearst Connecticut newspapers, the Connecticut Mirror, the Yankee Institute’s Connecticut Inside Investigator, and the New Haven Independent, leaders of the Democratic majority in the General Assembly are creating another legislative committee — a committee on government oversight. The new committee will more or less restore the Program Review and Investigations Committee, which the legislature abolished a decade ago with predictable results: more scandal, incompetence, policy failure, and official indifference.

Connecticut’s congressmen are even nuttier than Trump

Supporting illegal immigration, Connecticut’s left cuts wages

Rell’s capital went unspent; and choices take courage

Not that the old committee accomplished much. It was usually timid and trivial, mainly just impersonating concern about wrongdoing and failure in government. The committee’s abolition signaled that the legislature no longer wanted even to pretend to be concerned.

It’s unclear how seriously the new committee will take its assignment. The legislature’s dwindling Republican minority hopes that the new committee will follow the old committee’s bipartisanship by alternating its chairmanships between Democrats and Republicans. Since Republican legislators seem not to have been consulted about the committee’s restoration, the Democrats may be planning only more pretense. 

The House chairwoman of the new committee will be a Democrat beginning her fourth term in the legislature, state Rep. Lucy Dathan, D-New Canaan, who has experience as an auditor and financial officer. But the Senate chairwoman will be Sen.-elect Sujata Gadkar-Wilcox, D-Trumbull, a rookie legislator and college professor. Neither brings political clout to the committee, though to do the job right, committee members will need to be tough and ready to make and overawe their enemies, not to be ciphers hoping to make friends. 

Probably no legislator with any clout and ambition wanted to chair the new committee. But the committee just might be the place for legislators seeking to pursue the public interest rather than the special interest. State government, usually shameless, badly needs to be embarrassed frequently — that is, forced to acknowledge the messes all around it.

Where should the committee start? Options are too numerous. 

Recent investigations by the state auditors have found gross overpayments to employees in the Department of Energy and Environmental Protection, the Correction Department, and especially in higher education, where many perfectly authorized salaries are wildly excessive anyway. 

The subsidies for the Hartford-to-New Britain bus highway, the New Haven-to-Springfield CT Rail service, and the Shoreline East railroad should be calculated and publicized, since the state Transportation Department won’t do it.

The criminal-justice system’s coddling of repeat offenders and its dismissal of most gun law violations deserve detailed examination to make clear how public safety is betrayed and how advocacy of more gun control by legislators is so phony.

The expensive incompetence and corruption at the Connecticut Port Authority needs extensive investigation and publicity.

Inadequate discipline throughout state employment should be reviewed, as indicated again recently by the failure of the state police to impose serious discipline on troopers who falsified traffic ticket data. Also escaping discipline lately is the employee of the Department of Administrative Services who leaked promotion test questions to a colleague but will have been kept on paid administrative leave for 13 months at an annual salary of $146,000 before being allowed to retire without rebuke. 

If Democratic legislators ever change their minds about flooding Connecticut with illegal immigrants, the new committee could investigate the marriage frauds recently perpetrated at city halls in New Haven, Bridgeport, and elsewhere by the vice chairwoman of the Bridgeport Democratic committee and others.

But probably the most compelling subject for the new committee to start with would be the Hartford school system’s graduation this year of a student who in September confessed to being illiterate. 

The state Board of Education and the Hartford school superintendent promised investigations about this but after 2 1/2 months have reported nothing, apparently expecting the scandal to be forgotten even as some educators acknowledge that graduation of illiterates is common in the state despite ever-increasing appropriations in the name of education.

The comprehensive repeal of educational standards is the scandal of scandals.   

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

Connecticut’s congressmen are even nuttier than Trump

By Chris Powell

Some of President-elect Donald Trump’s personnel selections for his new administration are worrisome. But then some of Joe Biden’s personnel selections are worrisome too, like the defense secretary who entered a hospital for treatment of a longstanding medical condition without informing the White House of his whereabouts, and the Supreme Court nominee who, under Senate questioning, affected not to know what a woman is. (That nominee, now a justice, has just accepted a part in a Broadway play celebrating transgenderism.)

Supporting illegal immigration, Connecticut’s left cuts wages

Rell’s capital went unspent; and choices take courage

Terrible policies created Connecticut’s underclass

Both major political parties have plenty of nuttiness. Having discarded impartiality, mainstream news organizations are just far better at reporting Republican nuttiness than Democratic nuttiness.

In any case it’s not necessary to leave Connecticut to find nuttiness in high office. The state’s seven members of Congress, all Democrats, are enthusiastic supporters of their party’s worst nuttiness, starting with the U.S. proxy war against Russia in Ukraine. 

What could be nuttier than poking the Russian bear by expanding NATO right up to the Russian border in Ukraine, having already done that in Poland, Lithuania, Latvia, and Estonia? What could be nuttier than having U.S. military personnel launching and guiding rocket bombs from Ukraine into Russia, as President Biden recently authorized?

When, in 1962, Russia installed nuclear missiles in Cuba, 90 miles from Florida, the United States invoked the Monroe Doctrine of 1823, by which the U.S. claims military authority over the entire Western Hemisphere. Then the U.S. imposed a naval blockade against Cuba and threatened war against Russia if the missiles were not removed. Russia capitulated.

Now Russia has claimed along its border a tiny bit of the authority the United States long has claimed along its border. Russia’s claim applies to territory that long had been and until recently was part of Russia itself, including territory where most residents speak Russian, not Ukrainian. In response to Russia’s claim, Connecticut’s members of Congress have affected to be outraged — even though Russia’s president, Vladimir Putin, repeatedly warned the U.S. and its allies that their continued meddling in Ukraine would mean war.

What could be nuttier than admitting as many as 15 million foreigners in just a few years outside normal immigration procedures without making any provision for their housing, medical care, education, policing, and cultural and political assimilation, and, nuttiest of all, without evaluating their character and intentions?

Of course unleashing illegal immigration has made perfect sense for drastically changing the districting of the U.S. House of Representatives in favor of the Democrats. Dump most of the illegal immigrants in largely Democratic metropolitan areas, and even if they aren’t allowed to vote, after the next federal census they will cause the creation of two dozen or more solidly Democratic districts at the expense of Republican and competitive districts. 

To the Democrats the costs of massive illegal immigration — the great increase in housing prices and crime and the severe burdening of schools and hospitals — are small prices to pay for permanent control of the House.

Connecticut’s congressional delegation supports all this illegal immigration.

What could be nuttier than requiring schools to let males who imagine themselves to be females play on female sports teams, use female restrooms, and, when imprisoned, be placed in women’s prisons? Were society’s recent premises mistaken about establishing equal opportunity for girls and women in sports? Are males on average no longer bigger and stronger than females?

What could be nuttier than allowing sex-change drugs to be given to children and sex-change operations to be performed on them when, because of their age, they cannot give informed consent for such life-altering actions?  

But Connecticut’s congressional delegation supports all this transgenderism too.

What good would be done by all the programs and policies advocated by the Democrats if aggravating Russia over what it considers its vital security interest, as Russia aggravated the United States in 1962, escalates into nuclear war?

Nutty as Trump can be, the Democratic nuttiness is far worse and far more urgent, and Trump says he wants to end it. So Inauguration Day can’t come soon enough. 

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

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Supporting illegal immigration, Connecticut’s left cuts wages

By Chris Powell

On some days Connecticut’s political left argues for raising the minimum wage on the grounds that no one can support a family of four on the salary of a janitor or a fast-food drive-through window attendant. (The left doesn’t think wages should be related to the actual value of the labor provided. No, all jobs should be required to pay enough to support a family of four.)

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But on other days Connecticut’s political left argues for demolishing the wage base of the low-skilled by declining to enforce immigration law against the millions of illegal and unvetted entrants who have no special job skills, speak little if any English, and are desperate enough to work “off the books” for unscrupulous employers at less than minimum wage. The more illegal immigrants are hired, the lower the de-facto wage base goes, the more child labor is used, and the more welfare expenses rise.

Two weeks ago there was one of the latter sort of days as two leading Connecticut leftists, nullifiers, and insurrectionists — Attorney General William Tong and New Haven Mayor Justin Elicker — spoke in New Haven to a group that facilitates illegal immigration, Integrated Refugee and Immigrant Services.

According to a report in the Connecticut Centinal, the attorney general and the mayor promised to do everything they can do legally to obstruct enforcement of federal immigration law under the incoming administration of Donald Trump, who was elected on a pledge to deport everyone who entered the country illegally under the open borders policy of his predecessor.

The attorney general articulated the leftist hallucination that the country can’t function without illegal immigrant labor.

“Half of farm workers and meatpacking workers are undocumented,” the attorney general said. “If you won’t eat anything touched by an undocumented worker’s hand, you’ll be pretty hungry.” 

Connecticut is estimated to have more than 100,000 illegal immigrants, and Tong added, “If you take 100,000 people out of Connecticut’s work force, we’re toast.”

Not really.

Yes, Connecticut’s manufacturers and restaurants do report great difficulty in finding workers. But the manufacturers are looking for skilled people and they provide good salaries and benefits. Their problem is that the state’s schools are not producing enough graduates with manufacturing skills or, really, any skills. Few illegal immigrants are qualified for the manufacturing jobs. 

As for the restaurants, it’s a tough business, the work is usually part-time, pay is low, and the availability of illegal immigrants drives it lower. The attorney general implicitly acknowledged as much, noting that many restaurants employ illegal immigrants as dishwashers. 

Though Tong seems not to have noticed, for months the Dalio Education philanthropy has been lamenting that Connecticut has more than 100,000 “at-risk” or “disconnected” youth who have dropped out of school or are in danger of dropping out or are unemployed or unemployable. Welfare benefits sustain many adults and young people in dissolute lifestyles in Connecticut, but lower welfare benefits and higher wages in entry-level positions might re-engage them. 

But why bother if there never is to be any enforcement against illegal immigration? In that case the wage base for the low-skilled can be held down forever and the state’s population can be driven up with more people who will never be able to afford decent housing.

If, as the nullifiers and insurrectionists contend, there should be no immigration law, in a year or two half of Central and South America could be living in Connecticut and receiving state medical insurance and other subsidies.

The attorney general said of illegal immigrants, “We can’t live without each other.”

The heck we can’t. What Connecticut can’t and must not do is let the education and work skills of its citizen population keep eroding and its “disconnected” population keep sulking when there is always entry-level work to do, learn from, and advance from. The state also must not forget, as Tong and Elicker have done, the atrocity of Sept. 11, 2001, and the danger of failing to evaluate all immigrants and visitors individually.

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

Rell’s capital went unspent; and choices take courage

By Chris Powell

Connecticut was very happy with Jodi Rell when she was governor. Her ascension upon John Rowland’s resignation under threat of impeachment for corruption brought relief from months of scandal and dissembling. Rell, who died the other day after eight years of retirement in Florida, was calm, cordial, reasonable, honest, and not partisan, though inclined toward Republican restraint instead of the big and dubious projects that the Democratic majority in the General Assembly would have loved to see and that Rowland, while also a Republican, was easily seduced by.

Terrible policies created Connecticut’s underclass

If free speech is criminal, there really will be ‘hell to pay’

Rallies at murder scenes aren’t stopping violence

Rell served the remainder of her predecessor’s term and with a job-approval rating of 70% was easily elected in her own right in 2006, winning 63% of the vote. But her full term was unimpressive as state government borrowed for current expenses, diverted pension fund contributions, ignored the continuing disintegration of the cities, and did nothing to control the exploding “fixed costs” of government, primarily the cost of government employees. She proposed but soon abandoned a big increase in education spending. It was embarrassing.

Having amassed more political capital than any Connecticut governor in decades, Rell declined to spend it lest she put her pleasant image at risk in controversy. To her credit she signed legislation for public financing of campaigns for state elective office, but it hasn’t changed much. The same special interests, led by the government employee unions, still rule.

Despite state government’s worsening financial position, Rell probably could have been elected to a second full term in 2010. But since an economic recession was getting worse, there would have been no more avoiding controversy, and she already had served 25 years in elective office. So she retired instead, leaving state government’s finances in disorder, and the Democrats swept back into power and have stayed there ever since. At least she might have counted on them to make people miss her.

* * *

Lefties from Connecticut to California have a tiresome rhetorical routine for rationalizing more spending on social programs — the “choose” routine. Why, they ask, should people have to choose between prescription drugs they need and putting food on their table? Why should people have to choose between going to work or staying home with a sick child? And so forth.

To some extent these are fair questions about the adequacy of the social programs, but not entirely so. For life itself is always a matter of choosing, and not all choices are good ones. When people make bad choices, how much of the expense should government cover? That is a fair question too.

Having children may be the biggest choice in life. Some people are very careful about it, having children only when sure they are prepared to support them.

But many people aren’t careful at all. They have children, sometimes many, they can’t support, and when a child gets sick and needs care at home and work has to be missed, it’s a financial disaster.

So now Connecticut pays people to miss work to care for sick children or relatives. Meanwhile the state has no program extracting any responsibility from people who have children they are unprepared to support. To the contrary, the state has been subsidizing the irresponsibility. Run by the political left, state government seems to think that this irresponsibility is OK.

For some reason the left hasn’t noticed that the proxy war against Russia in Ukraine is also a choice — a choice against more socially useful things. Indeed, now that the federal government finances itself and much of state government through inflation rather than taxes, elected officials are giving people the same impression the welfare system has been giving them: that choices are no longer necessary, that everything can be afforded and no one in particular has to pay. 

A leading leftist of a century ago, Leon Blum, the Popular Front premier of France, eventually knew better. “Life does not give itself to one who tries to keep all its advantages at once,” he reflected. “I have often thought that morality may consist solely in the courage of making a choice.”

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

Terrible policies created Connecticut’s underclass

By Chris Powell

After three fatal shootings of young men in New Haven in less than two weeks, Mayor Justin Elicker gave news interviews to assure people that downtown is safe for holiday shopping, dining, and other festive activities. The mayor noted that, as with murders and shootings in other cities, most in New Haven involve people who know each other.

That is, no harm is likely to come to people visiting New Haven as long as they don’t know anyone there. As for New Haven residents themselves, most figure they’ll probably be OK as long as they’re not young men or associating with young men.

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Essentially the mayor was saying the mayhem is just a problem of the underclass. He noted that city social workers and police officers are pressing New Haven’s young men to control their impulses to violence and change their dissolute lifestyle. Good luck with that.

Of course no elective office is more difficult than mayor of an impoverished city, and Elicker was trying to protect New Haven’s image. But outsiders should worry about the urban underclass. For the policies that created and sustain it and concentrate it in the cities are state and national policies, not city policies, and they are disgracefully designed to discourage people from worrying about the underclass, designed to let people think that it’s the natural order for young men in the cities to be killing and maiming each other.

What are these policies?

They extend far beyond exclusive suburban zoning, which at least Connecticut’s political left dares to challenge.

These policies begin with the destruction of poor families with welfare subsidies for childbearing outside marriage. Such subsidies proclaim that no one needs to be prepared to support one’s own children and that fathers aren’t needed anymore, though fatherlessness correlates heavily with bad outcomes for children, especially boys. Most children in Connecticut’s cities live without fathers.

These policies continue with the repeal of standards in education and their replacement with social promotion, thereby destroying the incentive to learn for children who lack prepared and competent parents. Education is mostly a matter of parenting; without well-parented students who accept an obligation to learn, schools can’t accomplish much. So government in Connecticut pretends that education is all about teacher salaries and busies itself with raises instead. 

But having grown the underclass so large, government lacks the courage necessary even to recognize the disaster it has created. 

What politicians will try to fix the problem of family destruction when it means telling so many of their constituents — in the cities, most of their constituents — that they should not have responded to the damaging incentives government gave them? 

What politicians will try to restore education when it means telling educators, the most pernicious special interest, that it is a fraud for them to advance uneducated students from grade to grade and then to graduate them when the kids are unprepared to do more than menial work and to be citizens, and that this fraud leads them to demoralization and crime?

Destruction of educational standards worsened in last month’s election. At the urging of its teacher unions, Massachusetts voted at referendum to repeal its requirement that high school students pass a proficiency test to graduate. The test was accused of racism for being too difficult for minority students, but it wasn’t racist. The racism is the welfare system’s depriving those students of fathers.

Connecticut doesn’t dare attempt a high school graduation test or any proficiency test of high school seniors, lest the public discover that the huge amounts spent in the name of education produce so little and that most graduates never master high school work.

How can people raised in the welfare system and delivered to adulthood so uneducated be expected to support themselves? They can’t. Hence the desire for state government to appropriate more and more to subsidize people who can’t take care of themselves and their kids — more food, day care, medical care, housing subsidies, and such.

So Connecticut’s underclass keeps growing — and shooting itself.

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

-END-

If free speech is criminal, there really will be ‘hell to pay’

By Chris Powell

Even the most firmly established constitutional rights often seem to be hanging on by a thread. 

That may be the lesson of the case of William Maisano of Guilford, a retired police officer and former school board candidate who, according to Connecticut’s Hearst newspapers and the Yankee Institute’s journalism project, Connecticut Inside Investigator, could be imprisoned for as much as five years for his conviction on a felony charge of threatening and a misdemeanor charge of breach of peace.

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Maisano’s “crime” seems to have been only his sending an e-mail to the principal of Guilford High School asserting that there would be “hell to pay” if she allowed a teacher to dye her hair in rainbow colors to show support for sexual minorities during the school’s graduation ceremony last June. Maisano saw the rainbow hair plan as more of the political propagandizing in school that he had complained about at Board of Education meetings — propagandizing that indeed is common now in schools throughout the country.

The principal told the local police she was concerned about Maisano’s e-mail. So an officer interviewed Maisano by telephone, and he said he never intended to hurt anyone. He sent another e-mail to school officials explaining that by “hell to pay” he had meant generating unfavorable publicity.

Whereupon the officer closed the case. 

But then the teacher with the rainbow hair complained to the police that she felt dreadfully threatened by Maisano’s e-mail. So this time they arrested Maisano for breach of peace, and when the case got to Superior Court in New Haven, a prosecutor added a charge of felony threatening, perhaps because Maisano insisted on his First Amendment rights and would not plea-bargain.

A trial was held and on Oct. 11 a jury convicted Maisano on both counts. Sentencing is scheduled next week.

Connecticut Inside Investigator notes that court precedents hold that to be a criminal matter threatening must be more specific and constitute more than political hyperbole. So if Maisano has the sense to find a civil-liberties lawyer — someone who does what the Connecticut chapter of the American Civil Liberties Union used to do before succumbing to political correctness — his conviction may be overturned by the first appeals court to hear it.

But a reversal of Maisano’s conviction won’t mean that the danger to freedom of speech in Connecticut has passed. For the case has demonstrated several related dangers.

First is that the case has not been widely publicized by news organizations, though it puts everyone’s rights at risk, including the rights of news organizations themselves, which routinely engage in political controversies.

Second is that the political left has discovered that the quickest way of silencing contrary views is to assert that one feels threatened by them. This is supposed to nullify free speech. Hence the increasing demands, especially in what calls itself higher education, to establish “safe spaces” where no contrary thoughts are allowed.

And third, in convicting Maisano for his disagreeable politics rather than any real danger he posed, the six members of his jury demonstrated a willingness to sign their own rights away. Lacking much appreciation for civil liberties, most people might agree with the jury.

With elegant understatement many years ago Supreme Court Justice Felix Frankfurter noted that “the safeguards of liberty have frequently been forged in controversies involving not-very-nice people.”

For many years the political left understood this and was the courageous defender of freedom of speech and press. Not anymore. Having tasted power, the left is now more oppressive than the right used to be and enthusiastically advocates censorship by the government, while the right, finding itself on the oppressed side now, has become the defender of free speech.

If political disagreement and hurt feelings become cause for criminal prosecution, as they seem to have become in Connecticut, before long there really may be “hell to pay.” Maybe the new administration of “fascist” Donald Trump will give the left a reason to reconsider its own fascism.

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

Rallies at murder scenes aren’t stopping violence

By Chris Powell

Most shootings in Hartford are followed by rallies by Mothers United Against Violence at the scenes of the crimes. The shootings two weeks ago were especially atrocious, the victims being a 20-year-old woman and her infant son, killed in what police said was a dispute over a car, with the young perpetrator fleeing to Puerto Rico but quickly apprehended there.

The rallies always feature appeals to the “community” to stop the violence, as well as a hand-wringing harangue by a street preacher. They often get a couple of minutes on local television newscasts. But what exactly do the rally participants want everyone else to do? They don’t say, and the perpetrators aren’t listening. 

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Ranked-choice voting is good but Connecticut isn’t ready

McMahon is qualified at last — by the shrieks of teacher unions

The rallies serve only to make their participants feel relevant and the TV stations feel as if they have covered the story when they haven’t even touched it.

At least the rally-goers notice the violence. These days even the atrocities in the cities pass without comment from the governor, state legislators, and other leaders, who behave, along with journalism, as if the social disintegration sweeping Connecticut but worst in the cities is the natural order of things. 

It wasn’t always this way. Indeed, historians say that a century ago Hartford was the richest and finest city in the country. Today atrocities like the murder of the young woman and her baby seldom occur outside the cities, an indication that society somehow can be arranged to prevent them in other places. 

People in authority in Connecticut may claim to be trying to reduce the atrocities, but their frequency indicates that whatever they are doing isn’t working any better than those hapless rallies of lamentation and hand-wringing. Government’s failure to stop social disintegration wasn’t even an issue in last month’s state election and isn’t on the agenda for the session of the General Assembly that will convene in a few weeks, though if people listen closely enough the gunshots sometimes can be heard from the grounds of the state Capitol.

* * *

RACISM DIDN’T ELECT TRUMP: Many Democrats, including some in Connecticut, are inadvertently signifying that people tend to see and hear only what they want to. These Democrats claim that Donald Trump has just been elected president for a second time because so many voters are racist and bigoted against women and as a result voted against the Democratic nominee for president, Vice President Kamala Harris, a mixed-race woman in an interracial marriage.

Of course some voters always will be racist and bigoted. But last week the nonprofit survey organization DataHaven reported that it recently polled more than 7,400 people throughout Connecticut and 40% said they are struggling financially. More people said they are worse off than they were a year ago than said they are better off.

A few weeks ago similar surveys by the United Way and Connecticut Voices for Children reported alarming increases in poverty in the state.

Connecticut is solidly Democratic but in the election last month Trump substantially increased his share of the vote in the state, even in the overwhelmingly Democratic cities. Are even many Democrats racist and misogynist?         

Or might the sharp economic decline found by those surveys and others around the country have had more to with the results of the election? While some Democratic leaders acknowledge that their party has lost touch with the working class, few admit the possibility that their party’s last four years in charge of the federal government worsened living standards.

Trump may end the U.S. proxy war with Russia in Ukraine even as he makes America nuts again in other respects, as with tariffs and more deficits and inflation. But he is going back to the White House because most voters thought he would be better than the current administration, and no one seems more out of touch on this point than Connecticut’s just re-elected U.S. senator, Chris Murphy. 

Last week Murphy told an interviewer, “I’m spending most of my time preparing for dystopia,” as if most voters hadn’t already seen enough dystopia under the senator’s own party.

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

Attorney General Tong succeeds Trump as foremost insurrectionist

By Chris Powell

The more fulminating they do, the more elected officials should be challenged and questioned by journalism. These days Connecticut’s fulminator-in-chief is Attorney General William Tong, a Democrat, yet he gets a free ride from the state’s news organizations and even from the General Assembly’s Republican minority.  

Two weeks ago Tong was joined at the state Capitol by the mayors of four Connecticut cities and other political leaders as he pledged to defend all illegal immigrants in the state against deportation by the incoming Republican administration of Donald Trump, though the federal government has exclusive authority over immigration law.

Ranked-choice voting is good but Connecticut isn’t ready

McMahon is qualified at last — by the shrieks of teacher unions

Connecticut’s nullifiers echo the old South’s segregationists

“Connecticut gets to decide how Connecticut wants to live,” Tong declared, directly contradicting the law. But no journalists asked the attorney general to explain his absurdity, even though some news organizations in the state often had denounced Trump as an “insurrectionist” for inciting the Jan. 6, 2021, “Stop the Steal” rally that became a riot and briefly impeded congressional certification of the results of the 2020 presidential election, which Trump had lost.

What could be more insurrectionary than to claim that Connecticut is exempt from federal law — to claim that anyone who breaks into the country illegally and makes his way to Connecticut is above immigration law? Yet Connecticut has been obstructing federal immigration law enforcement since 2019, when it forbade its police officers from assisting federal immigration agents in most circumstances. Even before that New Haven had declared itself a “sanctuary city” and was issuing identification cards to illegal immigrants to facilitate their lawbreaking.

Connecticut also has violated federal law by purporting to legalize marijuana and managing and taxing its distribution.

While Trump’s attempt to obstruct certification of the 2020 election was disgraceful, the country seems to have returned him to the presidency because the administration that succeeded him has been so bad, in large part because of the illegal immigration it permitted.

But that doesn’t make insurrection right, and now the biggest insurrectionist in the country is Connecticut’s own attorney general. Fortunately for him, no news organizations will ask him to explain why he isn’t one.

If journalism in Connecticut ever resumed asking critical questions, it could put another one to the attorney general in response to another of his fulminations.

On the same day as he pledged to defend illegal immigrants, Tong issued a statement lamenting more rate increases by Connecticut’s two major electric utilities. 

He acknowledged that the utilities were not to blame. The new rates, Tong said, “are the result of a competitive bidding process,” whereby the utilities purchase electricity from independent generators and make no profit from the transactions.

But the attorney general added: “Connecticut families need real relief from these unsustainable costs. Everything has to be on the table. I’m going to keep fighting every single day in every single proceeding before the Public Utilities Regulatory Authority.” 

This was just vain chest thumping. For as was implicit in the attorney general’s statement, the rate increases were not caused by the utility company greed or mismanagement that he often rails against but by the general inflation that has been ravaging the country during his party’s administration of the federal government. 

So if “everything has to be on the table,” instead of pledging to keep hectoring the utility regulators, the attorney general should examine where all this inflation has come from, especially since no one in authority in either major political party seems to be asking.

That’s because the answer would incriminate both sides. For inflation results largely from the government’s creating and distributing so much more money than the economy matches in production of goods and services. Today most new goodies from government are financed without imposing regular taxes to pay for them. So the goodies are financed by inflation, a sort of tax but one that most people don’t understand.

The attorney general could explain it to them if he wasn’t afraid that it would cost him his usual scapegoats. 

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

‘Guardrails’ have big gaps and so don’t achieve much

By Chris Powell

There’s a big gap in Connecticut’s “fiscal guardrails,” the rules enacted in 2017 to require state government to save a big part of any budget surplus and apply it to its unfunded pension obligations. The gap was noted the other day in an essay in the Hartford Courant by the executive director of the Connecticut Conference of Municipalities, Joe Delong.

While the “guardrails” have slowed the increase in state spending, the governor and General Assembly lately have been producing budgets that favor state government’s own agencies and programs at the expense of the appropriations state government makes for municipal schools. That is, since the “guardrails” were enacted, state government has economized disproportionately with its share of the cost of municipal education. 

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In turn, to keep school spending up, municipalities have raised their property taxes, most of whose revenue goes for schools.

Delong writes: “The national average states spend to support public education is 44%.  In Connecticut, since the enactment of the ‘guardrails,’ the state has dipped into the lower quartile at a 36% state share. This is not a sound fiscal spending control. It is a calculated spending shift out of the state budget and into the regressive and already overused property tax.” The burden of that tax falls most heavily on low- and middle-income households.  

This tax shift is not a direct result of the “guardrails” themselves but rather a result of the choice made by the governor and legislature. They can claim political credit for keeping state spending under control and avoiding state tax increases while local officials raise municipal spending and property taxes and risk the blame.

To some extent the governor and legislators may figure that they can let school aid to wealthier towns be eroded by inflation because those towns can afford higher property taxes and education aid should go mainly to poorer towns. 

But then as measured by student performance, public education in Connecticut has been declining for years without regard to spending. There may be some fairness to taxpayers in shifting school aid from wealthier towns to poorer ones, but Connecticut often has rewritten its school aid formulas since the state Supreme Court decision in Horton v. Meskill in 1977 without making any substantial difference in education. For while elected officials don’t want to acknowledge it, educational success is almost entirely a matter of parenting. Without good parenting of their students, schools can’t do much, regardless of how much they spend. 

Municipal spending and property tax increases could be avoided without increasing state aid if state government enacted controls on municipal spending, particularly by eliminating binding arbitration of municipal employee union contracts or allowing municipalities to elect their contract arbiters. But that would remove the power the teacher unions have over municipal treasuries, and the unions are far more influential than mere taxpayers.

There’s another big gap in the “fiscal guardrails,” one identified by political columnist Red Jahncke. He notes that the extra billions of dollars that the “guardrails” have been applying to state government’s vast unfunded state employee and teacher pension obligations aren’t reducing those obligations much at all. That’s because those obligations simultaneously are being increased by the big raises paid every year to state employees.

The pension obligations are based on salaries, so the cost of raises keeps increasing through the pensions. The unfunded pension obligations can’t be substantially reduced without much more restraint with payroll, as with a long freeze on salaries.

“Connecticut residents,” Delong notes, “deserve an open and honest debate over how we can experience the benefits of fiscal restraint without the continued hidden regressive tax increases that are buried within.”

Even more than that, Connecticut needs a debate about what it’s really getting for its taxes — effective public services or an amply compensated political army protecting an unchangeable and unaccountable regime. Greater progressivity in taxation does little good when the cost of government goes up anyway without a matching increase in public services; it just makes elected officials feel better about their ineffectiveness.

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

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