Connecticut’s schools are unlikely to improve until unions are ‘tackled’

By Chris Powell

Acknowledging reality sometimes seems like the worst offense in politics and government. Fifty years ago opposing the war in Vietnam got one called a Communist. Today opposing NATO’s proxy war with Ukraine against Russia gets one called a tool or at least an apologist for Vladimir Putin. 

Something similar happened the other day in Norwalk, where the school system’s new human resources director, Denise Altro-Dixon, committed candor. She pronounced herself ready to improve local education, help school employees develop their careers, and “tackle those unions.”

Leaders of unions representing Norwalk teachers, administrators, and other school employees denounced Altro-Dixon for being “antagonistic” and taking “a union-busting approach and attitude.”

The school system’s chief financial officer, Lunda Asmani, tried to smooth things over. He said Altro-Dixon’s comment was “a poor choice of words” and he was confident she will achieve a “productive working relationship” and “genuine partnership” with the unions.

Ah, yes — a genuine partnership. So let’s pretend that the public’s interest in Norwalk’s school system is exactly the same as the interest of the school employee unions: Accountability for staff, disclosure of teacher evaluations, performance-based pay, and efficiency, as well as accountability for students and parents so that promotion from grade to grade and graduation from high school are based on learning rather than aging out.

Of course the public interest and the union interest in schools are almost exact opposites.

As a practical matter in Norwalk’s school system and most others, there is already a “genuine partnership” between the school board and the unions. The unions tell the administration what they want and rather than fight over it the administration tells municipal government how much money it must have for labor peace; municipal government raises property taxes accordingly; and school costs per pupil continue their long rise while student performance continues its long decline. Neither union members nor parents may be disturbed lest political trouble ensue.

Most municipal expense and thus most property taxes go for personnel compensation, and most municipal personnel compensation goes for school employees. If the public interest and the interest of school employee unions are the same, municipalities don’t need their current mechanisms of government. They can just let the unions run everything. Indeed, Connecticut is almost there already.

On the other hand, if municipal government ever is thought to be taking too much and delivering too little, the public will need someone to “tackle those unions” and insist that for a government official to tell the truth is not “a poor choice of words” but rather an obligation.

PANDERING ON TIPS: The major-party presidential candidates, Republican Donald Trump and Democrat Kamala Harris, agree on something: that tips received by restaurant workers should be exempt from the federal income tax. Remarkably, Trump, supposedly the embodiment of plutocracy, got to the idea before Harris did. Despite their agreement, it’s a bad idea, just a lot of pandering.

For income is income, whether from tips or interest payments from a bond portfolio. If the objective is to shield the working class against income taxation, income taxes are already largely progressive, and because their incomes tend to be low, most wait staffers pay little federal income tax already.

An income tax exemption for tips would increase possibilities for income tax evasion, since extraneous payments could be disguised as tips. 

Besides, even being subject to income taxes, tips already are rife with tax evasion, since there are often no records or no good records of them, and tip recipients can underreport their tip income with impunity. Since there are millions of restaurant wait staffers, most are part-time, and most aren’t making a lot of money, the Internal Revenue Service doesn’t have the staff to investigate so much small stuff.

If Trump and Harris really want to be working-class heroes, let them make the hard choices in the federal government that would be necessary to eliminate the inflation that is grinding the poor down.     

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

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Connecticut Republicans have lots of opportunities: issues

By Chris Powell

Low participation in the recent primary for the Republican nomination for U.S. senator has renewed observations that there doesn’t seem to be much left of the party in Connecticut. Such observations are often accompanied by pro-forma expressions of support for competitive politics, if usually from people who would be appalled if the state ever put a Republican in a position of power. 

But then hypocrisy remains the tribute vice pays to virtue, and Connecticut could benefit from more competitive politics. Stupidity, waste, and surrender to special interests would be more difficult.

The Republican decline in Connecticut has accelerated the move of the state’s majority party, the Democrats, to the far left, which is not where most state residents want to go. Members of the Republican minority in the General Assembly are usually the only ones in politics to point out the nuttiness of state policy, and lately they have had two big successes.

This month Republican legislators ignited the public’s opposition to big increases in electricity rates that were caused in part by the stuffing of utility bills with the costs of Democratic social welfare policy. Last year Republican legislators mobilized public opinion to defeat a Democratic scheme to forbid sale of new gasoline-powered cars in the state by 2035. The scheme was especially nutty since there was no plan for the necessary and expensive increase in the capacity of the state’s electric grid to handle full conversion to electric cars, and since electric cars are not yet affordable and durable.

So the public can be mobilized — even by Republicans.

State government remains full of nutty policies that the public might oppose if politicians had the courage to dispute them. 

Connecticut political columnist Red Jahncke has shown how the recent and touted bolstering of state government’s state employee pension funds has been mostly nullified by the Lamont administration’s award of huge raises to state employees, which correspondingly increase pension entitlements. Republicans have let this deception pass unremarked, being afraid of alienating the state employee unions.

It’s the same with the collapse of public education under the weight of social promotion, and with state government’s long acceptance of the racial achievement gap in schools. Of course there can be no pressing these issues without risking the outrage of the teacher unions and the race mongers, but as two heroic politicians of a century ago, New York City’s Fiorello LaGuardia and Britain’s Winston Churchill, liked to say, and went on to prove: Kites rise against the wind.

Connecticut Republicans seem afraid to press even some obvious issues where the public would be overwhelmingly on their side, like the state’s allowing biological males to compete in female sports events and its requiring schools to stock feminine hygiene products in male restrooms. Pressing these issues also might get a politician called a name or two, but while transgenderism may seem like a small thing, it’s not. It’s about reality itself. 

If government policy can hold that there are no physical differences between the sexes, or not enough differences to justify separate sports, restrooms, and prisons for males and females, the rest of reality may be defenseless.  

Journalism could help challenge these policies but won’t now that most news organizations have rejected impartiality and fairness in news reporting and have joined the partisan left. 

Just as discouraging is the adage of election campaign strategy: If you’re explaining, you’re losing.

But how are voters to understand issues if no one in politics tries to explain them?

His aide and biographer, Ernest Cuneo, wrote: “LaGuardia’s main concern was policy. He took definite positions and was at great pains to state his reasons for them. These reasoned arguments he forcibly brought to the attention of his district’s voters, paying them the compliment of assuming they had brains in their heads and cared about the issues of the day. This paid dividends; his constituents appreciated him and were proud of him.”

Could it happen again? Connecticut Republicans have little to lose by trying.

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

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With misleading address, Harris poses as change

By Chris Powell

As a matter of oratory, Kamala Harris’ address to the Democratic National Convention accepting the presidential nomination Thursday night was excellent — clear, articulate, enthusiastic, empty of cackling — and it excited the crowd. 

Content was something else. 

The address was largely about fooling the country into thinking that she represents change, that she shares no responsibility for the disaster of the administration in which she has been President Biden’s vice president.

“We’re not going back,” Harris said, describing her candidacy as “a new way forward,” thereby implying that the way pursued by the Biden-Harris administration has not been the right way. Indeed, no delegates chanted “four more years,” as is traditional when a political party seeks another term in control of the executive branch. 

For despite assurances from Harris and other speakers that under the Biden-Harris administration the country never had it so good, the country emphatically believes otherwise, and did so even before the president collapsed in senility during his debate in June with former President Donald Trump, the Republican nominee. 

Harris made some perfectly valid criticisms of Trump — like the Jan. 6, 2021, riot at the Capitol by the supporters he had summoned there, and his lack of seriousness about government. But she also spouted much nonsense, asserting that if they return to power in Washington the Republicans will outlaw abortion nationally and destroy Social Security and Medicare.   

If the Democrats gain full control of the federal government they are far more likely to legalize late-stage and live-birth abortion nationally than the Republicans are to outlaw abortion. Indeed, most Democrats in Congress already support the proposed Women’s Health Protection Act, which would eliminate all restrictions on abortion.

If they really believed that the Republicans would outlaw abortion and destroy Social Security and Medicare, the Democrats would not be so eager to repeal the Senate’s filibuster rule, under which a minority can block legislation. If Republicans gain control of the Senate, the Democrats will use the filibuster rule as they have done many times over the years, just as the Republicans have.

Harris promised to secure the southern border, apparently assuming that people will forget her administration’s disastrous open-borders policy, under which as many as 10 million people have entered the country illegally. She said Trump’s influence with Republican congressmen had killed bipartisan border security legislation, but the legislation wouldn’t have secured the border at all; it actually authorized much more illegal immigration.

Harris said “fundamental freedoms” are at stake in this election: “the freedom to live safe from gun violence” and “the freedom to love who you love, openly and with pride.”

For a moment it seemed as if the Democrats had forgotten that they were in Chicago, where there are dozens of gun-related shootings every week, with the city and its state long having been under ruinous Democratic administration. Reflection on Chicago might lead to suspicion that gun violence is much less a problem of gun laws, the focus of the Democrats, than of the long failure to do much about poverty, especially among racial minorities, even as the Democrats claim that they should be kept in power because of their concern about poverty. 

Their real concern often seems to be to keep people poor and thinking of themselves as victims forever dependent on government.

As for “the freedom to love,” if homosexuals were still oppressed, Democrats wouldn’t constantly be calling attention to homosexuals being elected to public office. These days minority status is usually a positive in politics, but here too Democrats seem to want to perpetuate a sense of victimhood even as hardly anyone cares anymore about the sexual orientation of candidates.  

Harris played both sides of the war between Israel and Gaza, but the essence of her administration’s position is that it would keep the Hamas terrorist movement in power in Gaza, a mortal threat to Israel, even as it still holds U.S. citizens hostage.

Can Trump illuminate Harris’ many contradictions and far-left positions? And would it matter much as long as he remains his truculent, blustering, insulting self?

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

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Stop Connecticut’s utility regulator from usurping tax power

By Chris Powell

Even a few members of the General Assembly’s Democratic majority last week expressed alarm at the latest arrogance at the Public Utilities Control Authority, its raising electricity rates again. 

This time the increase is to repay Connecticut’s two largest electric utilities, Eversource and United Illuminating, for the millions of dollars the agency ordered them to spend reimbursing individuals and businesses for installing electric car chargers. The program was meant to reduce climate change. 

The program was silly, since even if Connecticut stopped using every kind of energy and reverted to a prehistoric way of life, it would have no bearing on climate change, nor on the introduction to the atmosphere of the “greenhouse gases” that climate hysterics believe will destroy the planet before Greta Thunberg grows up. China and the rest of the developing world will see that oil and coal remain the world’s primary fuels for decades to come, until wind and solar power become much less expensive and more reliable. 

Connecticut is far too small to measure in those calculations.

Stuffing the expense of somebody else’s electric car charger into ordinary electric bills, joining other expenses of government policies that have nothing to do with the generation and delivery of electricity, as Connecticut long has done, has always been beyond silly. It’s offensive, because electricity, like food and medicine, is a necessity of life and commerce. 

Leaders of the Republican minority in the General Assembly and even some ordinary citizens noted last week that the rate increases to pay for electric car chargers are doubly offensive because they take more from the poor than the rich. Rate increases for electric car chargers are essentially regressive taxes. Since electric cars are so expensive and less durable, only wealthy people can afford them. But while Democrats claim to be the party of the working class, they don’t mind regressive taxes hidden in the fine print of electric bills.

But now soaring electric bills in Connecticut at last have prompted ordinary people to start questioning what have been euphemized as the “public benefits” hidden in those bills — “benefits” like charging people extra to make up for the people who don’t pay.

Reporting on the controversy last week, the Yankee Institute’s Meghan Portfolio noted another reason why hiding EV charger costs in electric bills is offensive. That is, quite on its own three years ago the Public Utilities Control Authority required the electric companies to reimburse people and businesses for installing EV chargers and related equipment, making the costs payable to the electric companies through general rate increases.

This appropriation was made and its method of financing was levied without legislation enacted by the General Assembly and Governor Lamont. Portfolio writes: “PURA’s ability to impose sweeping mandates without legislative oversight has left ratepayers footing the bill for policies that disproportionately benefit a select few.” 

That is, Governor Lamont and the legislature have essentially delegated taxing power to an unelected agency. That’s irresponsible and anti-democratic.       

Republicans have asked the governor to call a special session of the legislature to undo some of the recent electric rate increases. The governor says he is open to the idea — that is, he’ll call a special session if more people clamor for an end to the “public benefits” racket. People should take the hint. 

MORE CASINOS COMING? Does Connecticut want more gambling casinos, and more casinos that operate from the authority of licenses awarded as ethnic privilege?

That question soon may become compelling. Last week Connecticut’s Hearst newspapers reported that the U.S. Bureau of Indian Affairs may reverse its position and invite the three state-recognized tribes in the western part of the state to reapply for the federal recognition that long ago was denied to them. Such recognition almost certainly will come with the same casino privileges enjoyed by the two federally recognized tribes in the southeastern part of the state.

If that happens, it will be time for the state to democratize casino licenses and let people get into the casino business regardless of their ancestry.

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

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Blumenthal escapes questions as he promotes needless war

By Chris Powell

Last week Connecticut U.S. Sen. Richard Blumenthal returned from a quick trip to Ukraine even more enthusiastic about the U.S. proxy war against Russia there. He said he plans to propose many more billions of dollars for the war.

Journalists dutifully conveyed what the senator said but their reports gave no hint of critical questions. 

Where is the money for more proxy war to come from? Still more debt and inflation rather than taxes and difficult choices in spending? 

Should Russia not have felt provoked by U.S. involvement in the overthrow of Ukraine’s pro-Russian government in 2014, our maneuvering to bring Ukraine into NATO, and our use of Ukraine for gathering military intelligence at Russia’s border?

Eastern Europe has been partitioned dozens of times over the centuries and all of Ukraine used to be part of Russia, so what is wrong with reincorporating into Russia Ukraine’s Russian-speaking provinces? 

Having already extended NATO right up to Russia’s border in four Baltic countries, are the United States and its allies really prepared to fight a war there when they can’t even properly staff their militaries?

What exactly do those nations add to the defense of the United States? Do their contributions match the liabilities they impose?

What is wrong with having neutral buffer zones between great powers?

More than 70 years ago there was good foreign policy advice in the Rodgers and Hammerstein musical play “The King and I,” wherein the king sings similar questions: 

Shall I join with other nations in alliance?
If allies are weak, am I not best alone?
If allies are strong with power to protect me,
Might they not protect me out of all I own?

Yes, Russian President Vladimir Putin is a bad guy — maybe, in the estimation of Blumenthal and other Democrats, almost as bad as Donald Trump. But before it attacked Ukraine, Russia seemed to want only a tiny buffer against the United States and NATO, nothing like the buffer the United States has extended over the whole Western Hemisphere since James Monroe was president. 

This war is not necessary to U.S. security or that of its allies. It is a dangerous provocation and a bloody mess. Having provoked it, the United States should move urgently to end it, not prolong it.

‘EQUITY’ IS PENSION JACKPOT: Another former state legislator is on his way to a state pension jackpot.

He’s Brandon McGee Jr., a Democrat who served nine years as state representative from Hartford and a year as deputy housing commissioner. He has just been named executive director of the Connecticut Social Equity Council. 

As a state legislator McGee never earned more than a part-time salary, but as deputy housing commissioner he was paid $152,000 per year and he’ll likely be paid more as the Social Equity Council’s executive director. His nine low-paid years in the legislature provided most of his qualification for a state pension, and that pension will be based on the average of his five highest-paid years with state government, with three more high-paid years being virtually assured to him.

Life is good — in state government anyway.

But the Social Equity Council is based on a faulty premise. 

The council will distribute as political patronage millions of dollars in state marijuana tax revenue, which will be awarded in communities believed to have been disproportionately harmed by the “war on drugs” — poor communities, which are disproportionately minority. 

The harm done by the “war on drugs” is construed to mean mainly the criminal prosecutions of dealers and users of contraband. During the “war on drugs,” the poorer, less parented, and less educated were more tempted to try to make money in contraband, just as they are now.

Mistaken as much drug policy may have been and still may be, the communities in which the contraband trade disproportionately occurred also disproportionately benefited from it, disproportionately reaping its profits, since not everyone dealing drugs was caught.     

And what will state government give people who have always obeyed the drug laws? Higher electricity bills.   

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

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Without an auditor for prisons, legislature should do the job

By Chris Powell

People may never care much about the health of criminals serving prison time, nor about their treatment generally, even if most of them will be released eventually and many may have a barely suppressed desire to take revenge on the world. But Connecticut should start caring more than it has cared lately.

For years miserable medical care for the state’s prisoners has been a scandal. Lawsuits and other formal complaints have disclosed many cases where prisoners with serious ailments were misdiagnosed or denied proper care until it was too late to save them. These cases were in large part what two years ago prompted the General Assembly and Governor Lamont to create an ombudsman for the Correction Department, an outside officer empowered to investigate prisoner complaints, examine records, and question prison employees.

But the position is yet to be filled amid wrangling between the governor and urban legislators from minority groups. 

The minority legislators represent the families of prisoners, most of whom are from minority groups and thus may be easier to abuse or neglect. The minority legislators want the new ombudsman to be strong and aggressive, and they have favored a candidate who several times sued the Correction Department on behalf of prisoners. 

The governor seems to want an ombudsman who won’t be eager to embarrass his administration. So the appointment and even the mechanism for developing candidates remain tied up in slow and fitful negotiations.

The governor has the upper hand insofar as he can stall the appointment forever if he wants to. In retaliation, the minority legislators seem to think that they can only threaten to make trouble for legislation sought by the governor. But the legislators could do more than that. They could insist that the legislature undertake its own regular investigation and oversight of the Correction Department, something the legislature should do in regard to failing policy and administration in other respects but never does, contenting itself with less important matters.

Both sides should compromise to get the ombudsman position filled urgently, if only with an interim appointee. For the Correction Department is the most insulated and secretive part of state government. The public and news organizations have little access to prisons and no way of reliably evaluating contradictory claims by prisoners, prison administrators, and prison employees.

Forty years ago when the Journal Inquirer had a columnist who was a prisoner at the high-security prison in Somers, the prison administration was enraged by the public’s peek inside and by the threat of accountability. Eventually the administration transferred the prison writer out of state, purportedly for his own safety but actually to silence him and thereby kick the public out. 

Meanwhile in a letter the warden threatened the newspaper’s managing editor with criminal prosecution for communicating with prisoners by mail. When the editor conveyed the warden’s threatening letter to the state’s attorney and asked for a ruling, the threat was quickly dismissed as a baseless attempt to intimidate.

Such are the totalitarian impulses nurtured by secrecy in government. Connecticut’s prison administrators today may not be as heavy-handed but they surely won’t be if the minority legislators maintain their nerve and insist on transparency and accountability. 

All state agencies would benefit from a full-time auditor-journalist with access to everything. The legislature long has empowered the office of the child advocate to investigate and bring transparency and accountability to the occasional serious failures of the state Department of Children and Families, and the same principle should apply to prisons, though prisoners are seldom sympathetic characters like children. 

If the governor won’t compromise to the legislature’s satisfaction on a prison ombudsman, the legislature should claim subpoena power and start doing the job itself. Maybe then the legislature will understand better why it should stop enacting exemptions to the state’s freedom-of-information law to protect special interests. For state government is the biggest special interest of all.

Prison administration is thankless work but keeping the public ignorant deserves no thanks. As a practical matter the prison ombudsman will be working for the public as much as for prisoners.

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

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Will Connecticut ever notice its many chronic offenders?

By Chris Powell

According to government officials and politically correct journalism, crime in Connecticut is down. But a dedicated band of chronic criminals is trying to keep up the appearances of a crime wave, even if elected officials refuse to notice.

According to police in New Haven, two weekends ago a 49-year-old man hijacked a city police cruiser with an officer sitting in it. Rather than be hijacked, the officer pulled on the steering wheel, causing the cruiser to crash into a church. Nobody was badly hurt and when the police caught up with the perpetrator, charging him with kidnapping, assault, and a few other things, they discovered that they knew him well, as he already had been arrested 80 times.

It was a big story for a day but few news organizations bothered to quote the police about the perpetrator’s long criminal record.

Journalistic follow-up here is unlikely, since it would be too politically incorrect. “Long criminal record” is hardly news in Connecticut anymore; it’s more like a journalistic cliche.

But campaigns for the November election for the General Assembly have begun. Might some legislators and some challengers see a public service in asking how someone with 80 arrests has managed to stay out of prison and why there has been no recognition of his incorrigibility despite the constant harm he has done to public safety and order?

Every few years the Correction Department issues a report on recidivism — the return to crime and prison of offenders even after they have been imprisoned and released — and typically the rate is around 50%. This rate may be fairly construed as the rate of failure of the criminal-justice system. It would be much higher if it included crimes for which there was never an arrest.

The recidivism rate is so high because most people in Connecticut have to work hard at crime before being sent to prison, having repeatedly received lesser sentences and probations that persuaded them that criminal justice is not serious, and because most offenders are already seriously if not permanently damaged psychologically before a court gets around to locking them up. 

Prison often tries to help offenders gain some education and work skills, but this seldom succeeds. Most prisoners are released into poverty, many of them still disturbed psychologically and without housing, a job, transportation, medical insurance, and any idea of what to do with themselves besides more of what got them into trouble.

There may be alternatives to this cycle — like giving parolees an efficiency apartment, a job, medical insurance, transportation, and counseling for a year or so of adjustment. New Haven, home to thousands of former and likely future offenders, is experimenting with something like this. But with severely chronic repeat offenders, nothing is likely to work. 

Whether it’s a three-strikes, 10-strikes, or even an 80-strikes law requiring life imprisonment for chronic repeat offenders, reality requires starting there. But does Connecticut have any legislators or legislative candidates willing to face reality?

*

TRY SUING FOR PEACE: Horrible carnage continues in Gaza, as does clamor in the United States and around the world for a cease-fire between Gaza’s terrorist Hamas regime and Israel. 

The Associated Press quotes a widowed Gazan mother of three saying, “We don’t know where to go,” and a Gazan father of five saying, “The situation is unbearable.”

But a cease-fire is not peace. There have been dozens of cease-fires in the long Palestinian war against Israel. What is most unbearable in Gaza is not war but peace. No one in Gaza is calling for peace and few outside Gaza are. A cease-fire is just the euphemism for preparing more war against Jews. 

Peace might be had tomorrow if Gaza wanted it. There was a sort of peace until last October 7, when Gaza invaded Israel, killing, raping, and kidnapping mostly civilians. But anyone in Gaza who called for peace would be murdered by those dedicated to exterminating Jews.  

Exterminating Jews remains the objective of those in charge of Gaza, and now, not surprisingly, the Israeli government is losing fear of exterminating Gazans in return.

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

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Connecticut isn’t ready to prosper; and stop taxing electricity

By Chris Powell

When federal census data showed Connecticut’s population increasing by about 57,000 in 2021 and 2022, Governor Lamont construed it as great news, evidence of the state’s prosperity under his administration, a remarkable contrast with the population losses of nearby states.

But the other day the U.S. Census Bureau acknowledged that the population increase report was a mistake and that Connecticut probably experienced a population loss of 13,500 during that period. 

In a way this may be construed as great too.

For the state has a severe shortage of housing, home prices and rents have been soaring, and homelessness is rising. Experts say the state needs at least 100,000 more housing units just for its current population to be able to live decently. If the state really had gained 57,000 people, it would be under much greater strain. 

Connecticut isn’t prepared for greater prosperity, and more strain is promised by the increased military contracting coming into the state for which thousands of new workers are needed.

Even if the national economy is entering a recession, as it seems to be, Connecticut still will have thousands of inadequately housed people.

Equating construction of inexpensive housing with poverty because of the mess the state has made of its cities, Connecticut has been slow to recognize that its housing policy — unfriendly if not hostile to new housing — has been a disaster too.

But the Lamont administration has taken the hint and is proceeding with state government incentives for housing construction. Hartford and New Haven are encouraging apartments and condominiums and are showing that city living can attractive, and a few suburbs are viewing housing proposals more favorably than usual.

It’s far from enough but it’s a start. If housing initiatives continue for a few more years and state government discourages exclusive zoning and controls spending and taxes, maybe even accurate census data will start showing that more people want to move to Connecticut than leave it for lower-taxed states with milder winters.

*

Connecticut has nearly the highest electric rates in the country, and the big increases imposed last month are painful reminders that the state will have to reduce rates if it would increase its prosperity and population — or even just maintain its population.

The latest rate increases have two major causes: the decision by the governor and General Assembly to guarantee purchase of the electricity generated by the Millstone nuclear power plant in Waterford as a matter of Connecticut’s energy security; and second, the “public benefits” charges that long have been largely hidden in customer electric bills, essentially sales taxes to finance state government programs having little if anything to do with generation and delivery of electricity.

Among the “public benefits” charges is one by which people who pay their electric bills are required to pay as well for people who don’t pay but who under state law can’t be disconnected during much of the year. Since this charge is a welfare expense, it should be borne by taxpayers generally, not by electricity users particularly.

Indeed, there is no good reason to charge electricity users particularly for any of the “public benefits” hidden in their bills. Insofar as electricity is a necessity of life, taxing it is no more justified than taxing food and medicine would be. 

The real justification for financing the “public benefits” from a de-facto sales tax on electricity is that state legislators and governors have liked obscuring the costs of those “benefits” and deceiving the public into thinking that the big, bad electric companies are overcharging. By some estimates 20% of the cost of electricity for a typical Connecticut resident results from non-electrical “public benefits” charges.

Members of the General Assembly’s Republican minority have been making an issue of this and fortunately have begun pressing it harder. “Public benefits” charges on electricity bills should be eliminated, along with the “public benefits” themselves, or else their costs should be recovered through general taxation or spending cuts elsewhere. 

Now who wants to specify the tax increases or spending cuts necessary to get rid of the “public benefits” charges?

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

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‘Smart phones’ aren’t why Connecticut’s students are dumb

By Chris Powell

Schools increasingly are prohibiting students from operating or even carrying “smart phones” — internet-equipped telephones — in class. Some schools are investing in special pouches in which students must lock their phones in school, being able to unlock them only with a special device made available when they are leaving. 

At $25 or so each, the pouches are a significant expense, but educators find them effective at restoring students’ concentration. The pouches even induce students to start talking to each other face to face.

Governor Lamont was an early advocate of banning “smart phones” in school, and while he was unable to get the General Assembly to legislate on the point, he has asked the state Education Department to draft and recommend such a policy to municipal school superintendents and boards. It’s a good idea and most school systems probably will go along with it if pressed by the Education Department.

But there is a bigger underlying problem here that no one in authority seems inclined to address.

For if students spend too much time on their “smart phones” in school, it’s because they know they can afford to miss the teaching being attempted. They know they are going to be promoted from grade to grade and even graduated from high school no matter what. Learning is completely optional.  

That is, even if school policy bans “smart phones,” a bigger school policy will remain: social promotion. While it would be much more expensive, repealing social promotion would do much more to restore education than locking up “smart phones.”

Repealing social promotion would require teachers and school administrators to enforce academic standards not just against students but also against their neglectful parents, who outnumber responsible parents in many school districts.

Like most states, Connecticut has resorted to social promotion to boost graduation rates and thereby make education look more successful even as it is failing, with the academic proficiency of students in basic subjects continuing to decline. Schools know that when uneducated students graduate they become someone else’s problem — the problem of employers and the welfare, medical, mental health, and criminal-justice systems.

The refusal to restore standards in public education may be behind the governor’s recent conversion to “diversity, equity, and inclusion,” the new euphemism for “affirmative action” — racial and ethnic preferences in hiring, college admissions, and other endeavors.

Connecticut schools long have suffered an appalling gap between the educational achievement of white students and those from racial and ethnic minorities. The gap results mainly from something over which schools have no control — the great disparity in the parenting and wealth of the homes students come from. Students who do poorly in school almost always need more attention at home, but state government declines to examine why they don’t get it. More broadly, state government declines to inquire into why poverty endures and is worsening. 

The state’s primary policy for improving education is just to increase the compensation of educators. This has done little for education and nothing for closing the racial achievement gap, but it has kept Connecticut’s biggest and most influential special interest, the teacher unions, working for the state’s majority political party.

The governor’s new plan to create an Office of Equity and Inclusion to diversify state government’s workforce racially and in a few lesser respects indicates state government’s acceptance of the racial achievement gap. 

After all, if schools eliminated the gap and most high school graduates were of largely equal education across the races and ethnic groups, state government would not have to look so hard for qualified applicants from minority groups and would not have to incorporate racial and ethnic preferences into the hiring process in pursuit of diversity. Diversity and integration would occur naturally and income inequality would fall.

But the racial and ethnic gap in education generates an impoverished underclass dependent on government for sustenance, which in turn maintains government’s power, size, and expense. In that respect the many who have made comfortable careers ministering to Connecticut’s worsening poverty may consider the gap a great political success.

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

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Repulsive as Trump may be, his remarks weren’t racist

By Chris Powell

For the sake of argument stipulate that Donald Trump is the most repulsive creature to walk the Earth since the dinosaurs. But that doesn’t mean he is always wrong or that his adversaries are always right. Contrary to what his adversaries are trying to construe from what they consider Trump’s repulsiveness, it doesn’t mean that it was right for the Biden administration to stop enforcing immigration law, instigate the war in Ukraine, or order states to let males impersonating females use female restrooms.

Nor does it mean that Trump is racist for making a point involving the race and ethnicity of his rival for president, Vice President Kamala Harris, or that he was racist for his remark 30 years ago in protest of the government’s awarding casino licenses according to race and ethnicity, a remark made in reference to Connecticut: that is, “They don’t look like Indians to me.”

Racism is the subordination of people because of their race or ethnicity and denying them rights enjoyed by everyone else.

So Trump didn’t commit racism last week when he noted that in her earlier political campaigns, in California, Harris emphasized her south Asian Indian ancestry while she now is emphasizing her Black ancestry. Why she is doing this is obviously political and involves Trump. 

When President Biden was expected to be the Democratic nominee for another term as president, his party was losing its lock on the Black vote because of the weakness of the national economy and a surprising number of Blacks were expressing support for Trump. So it is more politic now for Harris to stress her Black ancestry instead of her south Asian Indian ancestry. Harris will be making many similar adjustments to escape her extreme-left record.

Trump was explicit last week that he wasn’t disparaging Harris’ ancestry; he said both aspects of it were fine with him. Instead he was highlighting her political opportunism.

If journalism wasn’t so biased in favor of the political left it might acknowledge that Harris doesn’t deserve the political credit she is seeking for her ethnicities. For they caused her no trouble in her rise in politics in California, an extremely liberal state, nor in her rise in national politics. Indeed, she wouldn’t be stressing her ethnicities now if she didn’t think they conferred advantages.

Even so, Trump may have been mistaken tactically to make an issue of this, since he should have known that his adversaries would try to twist Harris’ opportunism into his racism and misrepresent his point. But Trump has yet to learn that some points, while perfectly fair, aren’t worth the trouble of making, especially when most news organizations are sworn to destroy you.

As for Indian casinos, the federal law that authorized them was meant to redress the general poverty of Indian tribes and the prejudice their members still suffered in many places. The law was a grant of racial and ethnic privilege — a politically correct form of racism — and in Connecticut it was exploited by two Indian tribes whose members long had fully assimilated into the state’s life, had not suffered prejudice for decades, and were not impoverished. Most were middle class. 

But political correctness and cynical politics gained a lucrative casino duopoly for them and they quickly got rich, though they deserved far less compensation for injustices to their ancestors than Blacks and Puerto Ricans in Connecticut’s cities did. 

That’s what Trump meant when, seeking a casino license in Bridgeport but lacking the necessary ancestry, he said, “They don’t look like Indians to me.” That is, Connecticut’s casino Indians didn’t look like the sort of Indians everyone imagined when the government decided to award casino licenses as racial and ethnic patronage dressed up as social justice.

They still don’t look like they were ever oppressed, but now that they are rich, politically influential, big employers, and major advertisers with news organizations, the racket is beyond criticism.

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

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