Who’d want to be governor amid what’s lurking ahead?

By Chris Powell

In an interview the other day Governor Lamont sounded unenthusiastic about seeking a third term.

He complained that legislators and municipal officials parade through his office asking for goodies at state government expense even as the Trump administration is slashing away at financial aid to Connecticut, punching big holes in state government’s finances.

Connecticut’s elections can’t be secure without proof of citizenship

Waterbury child-abuse case is imperiled by local TV news

Connecticut’s most-neglected children are public-schooled, not home-schooled

The aid cuts don’t seem well-reasoned, or reasoned at all. They may be merely malicious. But having long been persecuted by Democrats, even as Democrats concealed and dissembled about the corruption and incompetence of their own national administration, Trump now can exact enormous revenge. 

Just as Democrats long have thrived on the patronage power they invested in the presidency, losing that power is going to hurt.

A national economic recession and even a worldwide one may be coming, possibly triggered by Trump’s leap into tariffs.

As a “sanctuary” state with several sanctimonious “sanctuary” cities, including New Haven, Connecticut may expect special hostility from the Trump administration, especially since the hostility is mutual here, as with the three Yale University professors who recently publicized their departure for Canada and attributed it to their detesting Trump. (Since Yale long has propelled Connecticut toward the looney left, these departures may be a good start.)

Lamont keeps saying he thinks Connecticut is in good shape, but developments contradict him. 

Remarking the other day on the human needs state government addresses, the governor noted that about 40% of the babies born in Connecticut are born to mothers on Medicaid — medical insurance for the indigent. But he didn’t grasp the bigger significance of that data. 

That is, people who can’t support themselves shouldn’t be having children — or else these are people who recently have fallen out of the middle class as times get harder.

Homelessness in Connecticut is rising again along with rents and housing prices, which have been driven up by rampant inflation and state government’s failure to clear the way for less-expensive housing. 

Connecticut’s food pantries are experiencing much heavier demand. 

Student proficiency in the state keeps declining as schools graduate illiterates and near-illiterates without prompting concern from anyone in authority. The failing, insolvent, and poorly managed school systems in Hartford and Bridgeport are undergoing financial audits by a state education bureaucracy that seems almost as large, inscrutable, and disconnected as the failing school systems themselves. But the educational results of those school systems are not being audited.

These developments don’t suggest that Connecticut is in good shape. They suggest that the state is sliding deeper into poverty and ignorance.  

The more the Trump administration slashes federal financial aid to state government, the more cautious the governor properly becomes about state spending. But the legislators, municipal officials, and special interests parading through his office with their hands out still can’t imagine financial restraint. They think state government has a large budget surplus and they want to spend it regardless of whether big cuts in federal aid will have to be covered. But they refuse to see that the surplus is only technical, the flip side of state government’s still grossly overcommitted pension funds. That is, the surplus is really just money borrowed from pension obligations, money that, if spent, will increase the heavy tax burden of the pension funds.

Lamont is often portrayed as a moderate Democrat. But he is moderate only insofar as he fears that overspending will produce state budget deficits and tax increases that will alienate voters. He is firmly part of his party’s far left in support of illegal immigration, transgenderism, racial preferences, and manufacturing and coddling poverty.

Other than the blindly ambitious, who would want to be governor amid what lurks ahead?

Even so, Trump’s slashing of federal aid just might be the tonic Connecticut needs to force audits of everything in state government and compel hard but necessary and ultimately beneficial choices. As long as state government remains primarily a pension and benefit society for its employees — the only people state government guarantees to take care of — it won’t even be trying to serve the public. 

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

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Connecticut’s elections can’t be secure without proof of citizenship

By Chris Powell

Having fallen in love with executive orders even more than his predecessor did, President Trump is coming down with a bad case of megalomania. He has little authority to command the states to follow any particular election procedures, as he presumed to do with another executive order the other day. Congress can do that but not the president on his own. 

Waterbury child-abuse case is imperiled by local TV news

Connecticut’s most-neglected children are public-schooled, not home-schooled

Connecticut leads Trump in privatizing government

Connecticut Secretary of the State Stephanie Thomas properly called the order “another unlawful and unconstitutional overreach into our electoral processes.”

But as a matter of policy in regard to the order’s most important component, Trump is right and Thomas is wrong.

Trump wants people to be required to provide proof of citizenship when registering to vote. While the law requires citizenship for voting in federal and state elections, Connecticut and most other states don’t require proof of it — a birth certificate, passport, or naturalization document. Registrants are required only to affirm their citizenship under penalty of perjury. 

Of course nobody checks, though many millions of foreigners entered the United States illegally during the Biden administration in a Democratic scheme to gain advantage in redistricting the U.S. House of Representatives.

Thomas echoed the weak objections to requiring proof of citizenship for voter registration: Many people don’t have or have misplaced their birth certificates. Many don’t have passports. Many have changed their names but not updated their identification documents.

While these are fair concerns, conscientious people can address them easily enough, even as government already often requires people to produce identification for purposes far less important than voting. 

These days in Connecticut even grizzly old graybeards are being “carded” in the supermarket when buying beer. In Connecticut you can’t legally drive a car without registering it with the state and obtaining insurance, and those things require producing identification. So does boarding an airplane. Such requirements are inconveniences, especially for the poor people Democrats prattle about, but there are good reasons for them and Secretary Thomas hasn’t proposed repealing them.

Being a good citizen requires some effort. It is not too much to ask people to maintain proof of citizenship in the face of the devaluation of citizenship that was undertaken by the previous national administration and continues to be advocated by most Democratic officials in Connecticut, whose belief in illegal immigration has made the state a “sanctuary” obstructing enforcement of immigration law.          

Many Democrats in Connecticut and elsewhere advocate letting non-citizens vote, at least in municipal elections. Indeed, in 2022 New York City, a Democratic bastion and “sanctuary city,” enacted an ordinance to allow non-citizens to vote in city elections, contradicting New York’s state constitution. Last month the state’s Supreme Court nullified the ordinance.

Secretary Thomas says Connecticut already has “strong and secure elections,” but that claim is undermined by recent election fraud involving prominent Democrats in Bridgeport and Stamford. Many municipalities in Connecticut seem unable to tabulate elections fully in less than two or three days, leaving plenty of room for fiddling with close results when observers have gone to sleep.

Republicans in Congress support legislation to require proof of citizenship for voting, but it will be blocked by Democrats in the Senate, just as similar legislation would be blocked in Connecticut by the big Democratic majority in the General Assembly. 

As long as Connecticut refuses to confirm the eligibility of voters, its elections won’t really be secure.    

WHY THE EXTRA GRADES?: A state legislator has noticed the disaster of social promotion in Connecticut’s public schools. State Rep. Tami Zawistowski, R-East Granby, has introduced a bill to require high school graduates to show they can read at an eighth-grade level.   

Of course there are 12 grades in public education, but even the low bar proposed by Zawistowski may terrify educators. Her bill might have a better chance if it linked graduation to a fourth-grade reading level.

Zawistowski’s honesty about education raises a good question: Whether the standard is to be eighth grade or fourth grade, why is Connecticut bothering with all those extra grades? 

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

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Waterbury child-abuse case imperiled by local TV news

By Chris Powell

While local television news in Connecticut is usually trivial and patronizing, it isn’t always harmless. In recent days it has been creating a great danger with its coverage of the case of the 32-year-old man alleged to have been held prisoner since boyhood by his stepmother at their home in Waterbury.

Connecticut’s most-neglected children are public-schooled, not home-schooled

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Can Murphy and other Democrats discern yet why Trump won?

Last week TV stations were covering the story incessantly though there were no significant developments. The stepmother remained charged criminally and free on bond. But some TV coverage included interviews with people who proclaimed her guilt and denounced her though they had no original knowledge of the case.

It’s typical for local TV news reporters to stick a microphone in the faces of people having no original knowledge of what is being reported and to ask them for comment. These bystanders dutifully concur that awful events are awful, adding nothing to the story but sparing the reporter the trouble of finding someone who does have some original knowledge and is willing to talk.

Broadcasting such coverage day after day without adding new information is horribly defamatory and there may be no recovering from it. Last week the stepmother’s lawyer waxed indignant about it, complaining that it had already convicted his client in the public mind prior to the fair trial to which she is entitled.

If the case is not resolved by a plea bargain and goes to trial, the defendant’s lawyer almost certainly will request a change of venue from court in Waterbury. But there may be no place in the state where a court can find jurors who aren’t already prejudiced against the defendant. Such prejudice can drag out a case, weaken the prosecution, and facilitate a plea bargain more favorable to the defendant than a trial would be.

This doesn’t mean that sensational criminal cases shouldn’t get news coverage. It means that they shouldn’t get disproportionate coverage — that when there is nothing new to report, reiteration is unnecessary and unfair, just piling on, and that speculation on a defendant’s guilt should not be reported at all.

News is telling people what they don’t know, not what they have heard many times, and there is always plenty of important local news to report. Local TV news sometimes is capable of finding it, as WFSB-TV3 in Hartford did admirably last week as it disclosed the steadily worsening response times of the two ambulance companies serving Hartford, incompetence that may have led to the death of a child.

The Waterbury child abuse case may continue for a long time. Connecticut doesn’t need it to become the local equivalent of the death watch that 50 years ago national TV news maintained for months for Spanish dictator Francisco Franco, a death watch that went on so long that the first season of “Saturday Night Live” was able to parody it with great success on its “Weekend Update” segment: “Franco still dead.”

When the Waterbury stepmother goes to trial or enters a plea, it won’t be a secret. The prosecution and defense will have something new to say. Until then local TV news should try to find some news.

STILL FAILING ON DOMESTIC VIOLENCE: For many years women’s rights advocates and some state legislators in Connecticut have prattled about the state’s failure to take domestic violence seriously. State policy still considers court-issued “protective orders” to be adequate, though nearly every woman murdered by her former lover seems to die clutching one.

Connecticut still doesn’t realize that the only defense for women against domestic violence is speedy justice, though another proof of the necessity of speedy justice was apparent last week when a New London police officer was charged for the fourth time with harassing his former girlfriend and disregarding another useless protective order. 

The officer was jailed only after his third arrest, and then only because he couldn’t make bond. Why didn’t he get a trial immediately after his first or second arrest? Women’s rights advocates and legislators should knock off the prattle and ask.

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

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Connecticut’s most neglected children are public-schooled, not home-schooled

By Chris Powell

Connecticut has just seen another case, this time in Waterbury, of what appears to have been the horrific abuse of a child who had been withdrawn from school, supposedly to be educated at home, but who wasn’t being educated at all, just abused.

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Can Murphy and other Democrats discern yet why Trump won?

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Past cases of child abuse that were concealed by false claims of home schooling got some attention from the General Assembly a few years ago but no action. The state Department of Children and Families is said to have looked into the Waterbury child’s situation twice at his home many years ago but not to have found any abuse, and no one in authority checked on the boy again. Last month, having turned 32 and weighing only 68 pounds, the young man sought attention by setting a fire in his room and was rescued by firefighters. 

His stepmother faces serious criminal charges.

The House chairman of the legislature’s Committee on Children, state Rep. Corey Paris, D-Stamford, says the Waterbury case shows the need to make sure “no child falls off the radar.” Paris wants to gather the state agencies involved with child protection to consider what must be done to prevent claims of home schooling from concealing neglect and abuse.

It is a compelling issue, since child neglect and abuse cause the nation’s worst social problems — generational poverty, educational failure, alienation, and physical and mental illness.

But of course the problem isn’t home schooling itself but government’s failure to ensure that children who are not attending public school are really being educated and raised properly. 

Remedying that problem wouldn’t be complicated. Parents home-schooling their children could be required to register with the state and to present their children every year to take an academic proficiency test. Such parents also could be required to accept a visit at home from child protection workers every year or two. Those workers could intervene against neglect or abuse.

Such accountability might be resented by home-schooling parents, and it might be expensive, since as many as 20,000 Connecticut families may be educating their children at home. The potential resentment and expense are probably why the legislature has not yet pressed the issue. But as child neglect and abuse proliferate, there may be no other way of checking on children who don’t attend school.

Resentment of such a system by home-schooling parents would be fair, for they would find themselves being held accountable by a government that grossly neglects tens of thousands of children in its own schools but never holds itself accountable for educational failure. Indeed, neglect of children in public schools is far more common than neglect of home-schooled children.

Last September Hartford was found to have graduated from high school a girl who could not read or write. For the six months since then city school administrators and the state Education Department have just shrugged it off. But following disclosure of the Hartford graduate’s illiteracy, current and former teachers throughout the state admitted confidentially that advancement from grade to grade and graduation of grossly uneducated students are common in Connecticut, especially in the cities, since the state’s only firm policy of public education is social promotion and since a quarter to half of city students lack parenting and are chronically absent.

If a law is enacted to regulate home-schooling, presumably home-schooled children would have to meet a certain achievement standard on state proficiency tests. But state government and municipal governments don’t dare to enforce any proficiency test standards with public school students. The results of the few proficiency tests Connecticut requires to be given in its public schools suggest that if any proficiency standards were enforced, more than half the students would have to be held back every year until word got around that social promotion was over and henceforth learning would be required for advancement and graduation.

This is the spectacular irony of the home-schooling issue: Children in public school are far more neglected than children schooled at home, yet no one in authority will consider doing anything about it.

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

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Connecticut leads Trump in privatizing government

By Chris Powell

Democrats throughout the country, including Connecticut U.S. Sen. Richard Blumenthal, are charging that the Trump administration wants to privatize government. By “privatize” the Democrats really mean that the Trump administration is cutting off their vast patronage from the federal government, as if elections mustn’t be allowed to change things. 

Can Murphy and other Democrats discern yet why Trump won?

Political correctness flusters response to assault in school

Plenty of ideas for taxes but few for economizing

Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent has acknowledged a desire to strengthen the national economy by enlarging the private sector while shrinking the federal government. That’s a good objective, and shrinking the government is quite different from privatizing it. 

Besides, to a great extent the federal government long has been privatized under both Democratic and Republican administrations, with major industries achieving “regulatory capture” and government failing to enforce antitrust law vigorously.

Despite the complaints from Connecticut Democrats about “privatizing” government, the state has led the country in privatizing government in a crucial respect: education.

This privatization has occurred not with charter schools and vouchers redeemable at church and other private schools but with ordinary laws that hobble administration of public schools.

Connecticut’s teacher tenure law is so strict and its processes so expensive that few teachers are ever fired. Now the state’s teacher unions are advocating legislation to make firing teachers even more difficult. The legislation would require a school administration to have “just cause” for firing a teacher, not just the “due and sufficient” cause now required. A “just cause” requirement would impose more impediments on schools and take the firing decisions away from a school board and place them with an arbiter.

Meanwhile binding arbitration for teacher union contracts gives the unions great control over teacher salaries and working conditions, again diminishing the authority of school boards. 

A state law demanded by the unions 50 years ago exempts teacher evaluations from disclosure under state freedom-of-information law, the only government employee evaluations so exempted. In Connecticut you have no right to know how well your child’s teachers are performing.

That is, the big problem with public education in Connecticut is that it really isn’t public at all. It has no accountability. It has been privatized by the people it employs.

Ironically, charter and church schools are far more accountable, since, unlike public schools, they have no guarantee of students. To stay in business, private schools have to be better than public schools, which get more money each year regardless of performance.

DEMOCRATS AGAINST DEMOCRACY: Many Democrats in Connecticut prattle about saving democracy from the Trump administration, but some of those Democrats also are advocating a state constitutional amendment that would sharply curtail democracy.

It’s being called the environmental rights amendment, and it would establish “an individual right to clean and healthy air, water, soil, ecosystems, and environment, and a safe and stable climate.”

Exactly how clean and healthy, safe and stable would Connecticut have to be? The amendment doesn’t say.

So in the absence of clear definitions in the constitutional amendment, law, or regulations, lawsuits would ask the courts to produce the definitions. The environmental rights amendment would invite many lawsuits to establish public policy. Courts also would be asked to determine how violations of “clean and healthy” and “safe and stable” would be remediated, and the means and costs of remediation.

Thus the governor and General Assembly — the elected branches of government — would be relieved of their responsibilities by the unelected branch, the judiciary, as every claim made on behalf of a “clean and healthy” and “safe and stable” environment would be dressed up as a constitutional right.

The amendment is platitudinous and politically correct posturing, wishful thinking, and reckless government.

Like most other undertakings of government, environmental protection requires a lot more than platitudes and posturing. It requires the continuous balancing of interests, attention to changing details, and compromise — the essence of democracy. So if Connecticut really wants to put the judiciary in charge of the environment, it should add another amendment to its constitution: to elect the state’s judges every two years, just like state legislators, since the judges will be the state’s new legislators.

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

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Can Murphy and other Democrats discern yet why Trump won?

By Chris Powell

Having told the country last year that Joe Biden was as sharp as ever mentally and deserved another four years as president and that a new law with gaping holes in it was needed to control the border, Connecticut U.S. Sen. Chris Murphy now is aspiring to the Democratic Party’s national leadership. He wants his party to start by obstructing President Trump at every turn — including Trump’s having nearly halted illegal immigration just by threatening mass deportations. 

Political correctness flusters response to assault in school

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Murphy would have liked to thwart Trump this month by preventing passage of another temporary federal budget, thereby closing much of the federal government — ironically, closing far more of the government than Trump and his chainsaw-wielding aide Elon Musk have undertaken to close, thereby outraging Murphy and most other Democrats.

Trump’s slashing away is reckless, making little attempt to distinguish the necessary from the unnecessary, but at least it has shown that most of the work of the federal government has become the distribution of money, much of it borrowed and distributed to Democrats and their allies. This is what most of the Democratic shrieking is about — their loss of government patronage, not any threat to the country.

Most telling may be the Democratic hysteria over Trump’s desire to eliminate the U.S. Department of Education. 

The department was created in 1979 during the Carter administration as a reward to the teacher unions for their long support of the Democratic Party. The department lately has been spending $268 billion annually, most being distributed as grants to states and municipal governments. Trump says the money will continue to flow via other agencies, but whether it flows or not is not the important question. The important question is: What has the Education Department accomplished?

Judging by student proficiency tests, the department has presided over the utter collapse of public education. Somehow schools produced far more educated students before the department was created, the teacher unions took charge, and federal money began to deluge the schools. 

Mainly the department has sustained a massive bureaucracy of federal, state, and municipal employees who call themselves educators even as there is ever less education to go around.

Senator Murphy would not have to travel far to evaluate the department’s results. He could stick to Hartford, where Mayor Arunan Arulampalam said the other day the city’s schools get $28 million a year from the department and would be ruined without the money. But despite all that money, most Hartford students never master the basics. 

Last September a recent Hartford Public High School graduate sensationally confessed her inability to read and write. It should have been a much bigger scandal. Hartford’s school superintendent and the state education commissioner said they would investigate but have reported nothing, and despite its heavy investment in Hartford’s schools, the U.S. Education Department took no notice at all. 

Nor did Senator Murphy. 

That’s because Hartford and all the other cities with educational results that should be horrifying are Democratic fiefdoms. That they are fiefdoms of failure doesn’t matter. All that matters is that Democrats own them and collect the rent.

So what should the Democrats stand for besides rage over Trump’s taking their patronage away? The Democrats remain the party of open borders, transgenderism, racial preferences, manufacturing and coddling poverty, poking the Russian bear on its own doorstep, censorship, cancel culture, and indifference to the results of their policies.

Recent polls show the party with its lowest approval ever — lower even than the approval for the Republican Party and Trump himself.

Connecticut is so heavily Democratic that the party’s leaders here can survive without caring about results and without appreciating contrary opinion in the rest of the country. But any Democrats who aspire to national leadership must take broader opinion into account.

Such Democrats might start by asking: How could someone of Donald Trump’s character and recklessness be elected president a second time? As they ask that question, Democrats should be standing in front of a mirror.  

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

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Political correctness flusters response to assault in school

By Chris Powell

Three principles of Connecticut’s political correctness have collided sensationally in Waterbury, where two middle school students recently assaulted two other students. The victims, twin 13-year-old sisters new to the school, are of Arab descent and wore Muslim hijabs that were ripped off, so the alleged perpetrators, ages 12 and 11, are suspected of religious or ethnic prejudice. That would make the assault a “hate crime,” and a political fuss is being made about it.

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Children are often cruel and stupid and pick on others simply for being different. So it’s just as plausible that the assault was motivated by ordinary cruelty and stupidity rather than any serious animus toward religion or ethnicity. Waterbury police are investigating and maybe they’ll find out, though the public may not be told, because of those colliding principles of political correctness.

Those principles are:

1) Perpetrators of “hate crime” should be more severely punished than perpetrators of ordinary crime because ordinary enforcement of criminal law doesn’t demonstrate political correctness.

2) Short of murder, children misbehaving in school shouldn’t be charged criminally or even punished at all, just referred to social work.

3) Crime by juveniles should be handled secretly so there can never be any accountability for them or the government.

The collapse of discipline in public education argues for serious and visible punishment of students who commit assault — something more ominous than the Waterbury middle school principal’s squishy statement about “respect, inclusivity, and kindness,” something requiring suspension from school and reparations to the victims.

But in the end little can be done with 11- and 12-year-olds except to watch them grow up. School authorities should be held to account but the “hate crime” crowd should can its bluster.

CANNIBAL WATCH: Questions posed by Republican state senators to the state Psychiatric Security Review Board about the murderer-cannibal the board recently paroled have turned out to be good ones.

In response last week, the board’s executive director, Vanessa Cardella, confirmed that despite the heavy supervision the parolee is receiving at the group home where he has been placed — six state employees or contractors are keeping an eye on him — he still will have plenty of time to be out and about on his own. Cardella didn’t know how much the supervisors will be paid for working on the parolee’s case, but it seems likely to be many thousands of dollars a year.

Most people may not understand the necessity for the murderer-cannibal’s parole and its expense. Indeed, they may be shocked and appalled. But they shouldn’t blame the board, for it is only following the law, which calls for the perpetrator’s release if the board thinks he’ll be fine if he adheres to the conditions of his parole, which include medication.

Of course there can be no guarantee. Serious risk to the public will continue, which is why a better outcome would have been to keep the man residing in a comfortable room at the state’s high-security mental hospital. This probably would be less expensive as well.

But that better outcome requires changing the law about acquittals by reason of insanity. The law simply shouldn’t allow release of murderers prior to their old age. Republican legislators, a small minority in the General Assembly, should submit such legislation even though the Democratic majority will reject it. For at least then some Democrats may be asked to explain why people should feel good about the outcome of the murderer-cannibal’s case.

THE PERFECT TAX: A recent study by the state Department of Mental Health and Addiction Services found that people addicted to gambling constitute less than 2% of Connecticut’s population but produce more than half the state’s sports betting revenue and a fifth of its revenue from all forms of gambling.

While the department sees this as a problem with a huge human cost, elected officials see it as a political solution — the perfect tax. A tiny and disparaged minority finances a disproportionate share of state government and that human cost is not on state government’s books.

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

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Plenty of ideas for taxes but few for economizing

By Chris Powell

Members of the Democratic majority in the General Assembly have a new tax idea. They would impose a 28-cent tax on every delivery of a retail product. Anything that comes to your door from Amazon, Walmart, UPS, Federal Express, Door Dash, pizza shops, and other restaurants would be charged. 

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The idea is copied from Colorado, which has imposed such a tax to raise money for transportation infrastructure. Connecticut’s Special Transportation Fund is said to be in good shape but the Democrats are concerned that it may be drained in a few years — a fair concern if the Democrats continue to control the state.

But since money is “fungible” — that is, easily moved around — there is no guaranteeing that it will end up being applied as advertised. The delivery tax revenue might continue to be placed in the transportation fund but other revenue now deposited to the fund might be diverted.

Democratic legislators are proposing at least two other dedicated taxes: a tax on telephone lines to replenish a workers’ compensation fund for firefighters with cancer, and a tax on sugar-sweetened beverages to finance free meals for public school students.

The Yankee Institute’s Connecticut Inside Investigator reports that the state already imposes a dedicated tax on certain medical insurance policies. The tax helps finance the state Insurance Department, the state Office of Health Strategy, the Office of the Healthcare Advocate, and certain government health initiatives. It’s not clear why medical insurance policies, already so expensive, should be made still more expensive with a tax. Nor is it clear why this tax should apply to some medical insurance policies but not others. 

Did legislators think that they more easily could get away with taxing medical insurance policies if the tax didn’t apply to everyone’s policies?

Democratic legislators say they’re just studying the retail delivery tax. Well, of course — every tax starts as a study. What is more disturbing is what is not being studied by the General Assembly: the efficiency and priorities of state government.

Legislators seem happy to leave to Governor Lamont any initiatives to reduce spending, so the governor is taking the heat for noting that the state colleges and universities system should economize as enrollments decline. 

The governor also is taking heat for noting that as the Trump administration rampages through the federal government with Elon Musk’s chainsaw, Connecticut should be extremely cautious financially as federal financial aid is likely to be cut. While the governor is a Democrat, only members of the small Republican minority in the legislature seem to have appreciated his warning.

Many compelling human needs in Connecticut are not being met even as state government remains full of inessential and overgenerous appropriations. It is a fair suspicion that, forced down to its last several hundred million dollars, state government would spend them all on raises for its unionized employees.

A perfect political system for Connecticut in its current circumstances would go far beyond the controversial “fiscal guardrails” now being subverted. It would require reducing state government spending by 5% each year for five years. For eventually this would induce the people clamoring to spend more on the human needs that seem compelling to them to begin scrutinizing the budget for items that are not so compelling and could be canceled. That is, a perfect political system for Connecticut would require people who consider themselves liberals to become liberals and show some respect to the private sector, which pays for all government.

Instead what passes for liberalism in Connecticut is mainly whining, like the complaint the other day from the Connecticut Conference of Municipalities that state financial assistance to cities and towns isn’t keeping up with inflation. CCM doesn’t seem to have noticed that most private-sector incomes haven’t kept up with inflation either even as government-sector incomes have kept up just fine.

If municipal officials don’t want to keep asking their constituents for property tax increases, they should stop whining and pursue efficiency in government — that is, making choices more in the public interest.

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

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A sanctimony city and a sanctimony state milk politics for patronage

By Chris Powell

Two more tedious but true tales from the Sanctimony City and the Sanctimony State unfolded last week.

In New Haven dozens of people gathered at Trinity Church on the city’s green to mark the 200th anniversary of the last recorded sale of slaves in the city and Connecticut — two women who were paraded to the green and purchased by an abolitionist who eventually set them free. Last week’s gathering called itself a “service of lamentation and healing.”

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Meanwhile at the state Capitol a legislative committee considered a resolution to condemn the Treaty of Hartford of 1638, which marked the end of the war between the Pequot Indian tribe and its adversaries — the English, Mohegan, and Narragansett tribes. The war killed most of the Pequots and the treaty sought to nullify the few who were left, bestowing them on their adversaries as slaves and prohibiting the tribe’s reconstitution.

Last week’s events implied that modern society bears some enduring guilt for the abominations of centuries past. Indeed, establishing this guilt seems to have been the political objective. This was mistaken and ironic.

Americans like to believe in their country’s exceptionalism, but slavery was and remains a worldwide phenomenon going back millennia and transcending nations and races. The slaves brought to the United States and delivered to white masters had been sold first in west Africa by other Black people. To some extent slavery continues today in Africa, the Middle East, and Asia. 

So in the larger context Connecticut’s connection to slavery may be more remarkable for the efforts to overthrow it than to sustain it. In any case no country ever fought a more devastating war to destroy slavery than the United States did.

But even as New Haveners gathered to “lament” and “heal” from the wrongs of two centuries ago, the city remained the scene of a devastating wrong for which no sanctimonious services of lamentation and healing are ever held. That is, most of the city’s children — members of racial and ethnic minorities, far more numerous than there were ever slaves in the state — lack parents, live in poverty, and fail in school. New Haven’s schools have the worst chronic absenteeism in the state and many of those schools are in terrible repair. Many of their students, undereducated and demoralized, graduate to a more subtle but far more prevalent form of slavery.

As for the Indian wars of almost four centuries ago, they were full of atrocities, though today it is politically correct to remember only those of the winning side. 

The massacre of the Pequots in May 1637 in what is now Groton was the most horrible thing ever to happen in Connecticut. But the Pequots started the war. The tribe’s very name meant “destroyers” and they already had made deadly enemies of the Mohegans and Narragansetts long before attacking the English settlement in Wethersfield in April 1637, killing nine unarmed people, including three women, kidnapping two women, and killing the settlement’s cattle. 

So a month later the English, Mohegans, and Narragansetts united in a conclusive slaughter.

While the Treaty of Hartford fairly can be called genocidal, it was itself a response to genocide in an era when genocide was common.

No morality is taught by the sanctimony that evoked these horrors last week. Slavery has had no constituency in Connecticut since those last slaves were sold in 1825. Nor is there any constituency here for genocide, though in modern war civilians are often killed.

But there is a selfish political constituency for mobilizing the horrors of the past. 

Sanctimoniously reminding people of slavery can intimidate them out of opposing the claims of racial minorities for more government patronage, though that patronage isn’t righting any wrongs.

And sanctimoniously reminding people of the Treaty of Hartford may insulate the absurd patronage enshrined in state law whereby the ultra-distant descendants of the ancient Pequots, the victims of genocide, share a casino duopoly with the ultra-distant descendants of the ancient Mohegans, that genocide’s co-perpetrators.

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

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Where did the parents go? And is poverty forever?

By Chris Powell

Every few weeks some government agency or news organization in Connecticut reports that members of racial minorities are more afflicted than whites in some respect. Two weeks ago it was the state child advocate’s office, which said children from racial minorities are far more likely to die from gun violence than white children.

This is supposed to be shocking. But the reaction it deserves is just: Uh, duh.

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A member of the child advocate office’s Child Fatality Review Panel — Pina Violano, a nursing professor at Quinnipiac University — says: “This is a tragedy every day in our neighborhoods that we are normalizing. We need to draw more attention to this. We need wraparound services for these kids. We need for them to be in school. We need mentors and we need mental health programs.”

No, thank you. 

The murder of children is mainly the consequence of generational poverty. It won’t be addressed until generational poverty is addressed and particularly not until government examines why decades of poverty policy and its billions of dollars in spending have failed to reduce generational poverty and improve living conditions in the cities. Until that failure is addressed, please, no more “wraparound services,” “mentors,” and “mental health programs,” all the bromides of ineffectual social work, the nanny state, and bloated government.

If, as Professor Violano notes, children who are especially at risk are often not in school and in places where they shouldn’t be, what they need most is parents, who were omitted from the professor’s list of needs. Parents are “wraparound services,” or are obliged to be.

Most minority children in Connecticut’s cities live in single-parent households. Some are being raised by a grandparent. Many are neglected and when they get to school they don’t know how to behave. The misbehavior of neglected children has made hiring and retaining good teachers extremely difficult for city schools.

Within living memory nearly all children in Connecticut had two parents. So why do so many more children in the state, especially in the cities, no longer have two or even one? What happened in society, law, and government policy to change that? What might reverse the disastrous trend?

The child neglect of generational poverty, not gun violence, is the big tragedy Connecticut has been normalizing. Indeed, a whole industry has developed to normalize it, to try to remediate rather than eliminate it, and the more that gets remediated, the more that is produced to be remediated. All because no one in authority dares to ask: Where did the parents go? What destroyed the family?

Meanwhile state legislators are again contemplating whether Connecticut should give up on expecting members of racial minorities to comply with ordinary motor vehicle rules. 

Last week the General Assembly’s Judiciary Committee held another hearing on a bill to prohibit police from stopping motorists for equipment violations — broken headlights and taillights, improperly displayed license plates, and such.

The complaint behind the bill is that such enforcement disproportionately targets racial minorities. Is this disproportion a matter of the racism of police officers, or is it, like the disproportion in child murders, a matter of racially disproportionate poverty — a matter of people who can’t as easily afford to keep their cars in good repair or who, being poor, lack respect for society and the law?

In any case there was testimony at the hearing that stops by police for auto equipment violations can get drivers violent and lead to shootings — either shootings of police by angry drivers or shootings by police of angry drivers who threaten them.

Of course no motorist likes being pulled over by police. But the premise of the legislation is that members of racial minorities simply can’t be expected to follow the law as everyone else is expected to do, so the law should not be enforced anymore.

That premise is disgraceful, demoralizing, and — yes — racist, but it may make sense if Connecticut believes that it will never alleviate poverty and the disproportions it imposes throughout life.

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

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