Murphy’s silly tip to Democrats: Claim success on illegal immigration

By Chris Powell

Identifying the weakest feature of one’s product and then promoting the heck out of it is said to be the first principle of cynical advertising. Connecticut U.S. Sen. Chris Murphy, running for re-election, seemed to grab for it last week as he urged fellow Democrats to stop cowering amid illegal immigration.

Responding to Republican criticism of their newly minted presidential candidate, Vice President Kamala Harris, Democrats are denying that President Biden ever put her in charge of policy on the southern border, though in 2021 dozens of newspaper headlines and television news stories indeed publicized her appointment as “border czar,” and nobody demanded a correction. Actually the president had asked Harris to ascertain the causes of migration into the United States from El Salvador, Guatemala, and Honduras and to determine what might be done about them.

The initiative did little to stem the flood of illegal immigration into the United States, which reached record levels under the Biden-Harris administration and is among the top concerns of voters.

So last week Senator Murphy urged Democrat to proclaim the Biden administration’s immigration policy, and Harris’ work on it, to be a great success, because illegal entries have fallen substantially in recent months. 

It’s silly. For how can a few months of decline in illegal immigration excuse three years of negligence on the border during which millions of migrants entered illegally and the Biden administration claimed to be unable to do anything about it without new legislation, which the president and Democrats in Congress didn’t enact and didn’t really want? 

Murphy’s idea is doubly silly because the recent decline in illegal immigration may result mainly from the Biden administration’s reinstating policies of the Trump administration that Biden quickly canceled upon taking office. The supposed success of the new policies indicates that quite on its own the Biden administration could have greatly reduced the flood long ago.

“Immigration policy can be a strength, not a liability, for Democrats,” Murphy told the Washington Examiner last week. Yes, but only insofar as those millions of illegals, most of them having been sent to overwhelmingly Democratic cities, will be counted in the next federal census, sharply increasing the number of securely Democratic districts in the House of Representatives and diminishing swing and Republican districts even if the illegals, not being citizens, don’t vote.

Can the country assimilate so much immigration so fast? Does it have the capacity to house, educate, and provide medical care to so many new people, most of whom, hardworking as many may be, are unskilled and unable to speak English? 

Murphy and other Democrats don’t address such questions, though they already have been answered by the country’s desperate shortage of housing, rising homelessness, public education’s collapse, and strain on hospitals. When it comes to illegal immigration what seems to matter to Murphy and most Democratic leaders is only the prospective bonus to their party in congressional districting six years from now.

SKIP THE CENSORSHIP: Connecticut’s senior U.S. senator, Richard Blumenthal, is getting much credit for the Senate’s overwhelming passage last week of the Kids Online Safety Act. It will require internet service providers and particularly providers of social media to do a lot of censorship to protect children from the many nasty things in cyberspace, things that can make teenagers even more neurotic, including bullying, sexual exploitation, and general cruelty. Because of such experience on the internet and with social media, some teens have killed themselves.

But everyone should know that the internet and social media can be as dangerous as the world itself, and that government-instigated censorship can be even more dangerous. 

Senator Blumenthal complains that social media companies try to make their products “addictive,” but then all forms of media — like all members of Congress — seek to entice and hold an audience.  

The real problem here is neglectful parents. Parents can and should control their children’s access to the internet and social media via the computers and mobile phones they pay for. Instead of imposing censorship on the country, the law should hold parents more responsible.  

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

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Murphy’s money for nothing only makes poverty worse

By Chris Powell

Running for re-election, Connecticut U.S. Sen. Chris Murphy proposes that the federal government spend $4 billion over four years to provide free summer camp to poor children. Connecticut might get $40 million of that. 

“Outside experiences, adventure experiences, summer experiences where you get to improve your socialization skills, where you have your mind opened to new possibilities, new hobbies, new interests — it’s necessary,” Murphy says. “It’s a tough time to be a kid. It’s a tough time to be a parent. So we have to make sure that when our kids leave school for the summer they don’t lose access to learning and socialization.”

The senator seems to figure that it’s not a tough time to be a taxpayer, since he did not propose any revenue source for free summer camp. But then no member of Congress or presidential candidate bothers with revenue sources anymore for the goodies they propose. It is just assumed that the federal government — and increasingly state governments, recipients of ever-more federal largesse — can have infinite free stuff, financed by borrowing, the issuance of bonds whose interest increasingly will be paid by more borrowing, and that the foreign governments and investors who purchase many of these bonds will never worry about the insolvency. 

But they are already worrying about it and reducing their purchases.

Murphy’s proposal hints at two big problems.

First is that too much spending without taxing — that is, creation of too much money and debt, far out of proportion to the country’s economic production — causes inflation. That’s where the ruinous inflation of the last several years has come from. It didn’t begin with the recent virus epidemic, but it was turbocharged by the government’s response, which stopped people from working and gave them free money instead. 

Now elected officials are addicted to spending without taxing. This week Murphy and Connecticut’s senior senator, Richard Blumenthal, announced that they aim to include in the next federal appropriations bill almost $77 million in grants to dozens of municipal government and community organization projects. There are no particular standards for these grants. They are the personal political patronage of the senators. 

So the senators will get the thanks while most people keep wondering where inflation comes from and why the rising cost of necessities keeps outpacing their incomes and making their lives harder.

The second problem with the money-for-nothing approach of Murphy’s free summer camp idea is that it distracts from the big failures of life in the United States while purporting to address them.

Democrats particularly are claiming spectacular success for the administration of their president, Joe Biden, whom they frantically just pushed into retirement because of his equally spectacular unpopularity. The Democrats say Biden has been the best president in decades. So why is this, as Senator Murphy says, such a tough time to be a kid or a parent? 

Judging from Murphy’s proposal and others, poverty in the United States is increasing, not being reduced. More people can’t support themselves and their families and so they clamor for government to provide more free or subsidized stuff — child care, food, rent, electricity, heating fuel, treatment for the increased levels of mental illness and drug addiction, college loan forgiveness, and so forth, along with many new or expanded social programs. 

Then there are the subsidies for illegal immigrants, whose housing needs drive up rents and whose labor drives down wages.

Why are real incomes falling for many people, though government data strives to conceal this by sharply understating inflation? Apart from inflation arising from money for nothing, falling real incomes also may have something to do with the destruction of the family under the perverse incentives of the welfare system and with public education’s descent into social promotion, whereby many young people reach adulthood horribly undereducated and prepared only for menial work.   

So is government’s objective now a self-sufficient and prosperous population or an impoverished one permanently dependent on government? Money for nothing well may have that result, letting elected officials pose as heroes even as the country sinks.

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

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Bears become less cute; and Central blows $763,000

By Chris Powell

As their appearances in Connecticut become more frequent and damaging, bears become less cute and amusing.

According to the state Department of Energy and Environmental Protection, in the last two weeks:

— A woman sitting in her back yard in Cheshire was attacked by a bear that snuck up on her from behind. She suffered two puncture wounds before managing to scare it away.

— A man driving a small car on the Route 8 expressway in Torrington struck a bear that ran in front of him, causing the car to crash into a guard rail. The driver was uninjured but the bear was killed and turned out to weigh more than 500 pounds, almost as much as the car.

— A bear and its cub broke into a car in Winsted, destroying the interior.

— And residents of a home in Winchester interrupted a bear’s attempt to break in.

An official of the environmental agency says Connecticut is “good habitat” for bears and “they are here to stay.” 

Why is that? 

It’s because while state law now permits killing bears in self-defense or in defense of pets, in other encounters people are just supposed to shoo bears onto a neighbor’s property. Bears have no natural predator except man, and state government long has prohibited hunting them. Indeed, Connecticut is the only New England state without a bear-hunting season.

If bears really are “here to stay,” they won’t be stopped by securing trash cans and barbecue grills and taking down birdfeeders, as the environmental agency and bear lovers urge. There were no trash cans, barbecue grills, and birdfeeders in the forests through which the bears migrated back into Connecticut. Without predators, their population increased naturally and the northern forests couldn’t support all of them. 

So now bears will be reproducing in Connecticut until every town has many of them, and the more the state is “good habitat” for bears, the less it will be “good habitat” for people. Only a long hunting season will stop bears, and that won’t happen until state legislators are more scared of bears and the harm they increasingly do than they are scared of the bear lovers and apologists.

*

Connecticut Inside Investigator, a product of the Yankee Institute,reported the other day that state government has bigger management deficiencies than the supposed lack of diversity that has become Governor Lamont’s new focus.

The news organization said Central Connecticut State University has paid nearly $763,000 to its former director of student conduct, who, the state Supreme Court recently ruled, was wrongly fired in 2018 after police responded to a complaint that he had assaulted his wife at their home. Police arrested him there after a standoff.  

The university seems to have decided that since the director of student conduct handles complaints of abuse and harassment, it wouldn’t be right to have a director who was in that kind of trouble himself. But the man denied the charges, they were dropped eventually, and the incident involved conduct off the job, not on the job.

His dismissal went to arbitration, which ordered him rehired. The university appealed to Superior Court, where the arbitration award was vacated and the dismissal upheld. But then the man appealed to the state Supreme Court, which overturned the Superior Court and reinstated the arbitration award with its huge liability in back pay.

Was the university right or wrong to persist with the dismissal though its cause did not involve the employee’s job performance and the criminal charges were dropped? There is an argument on both sides, but a risk to due process should have been clear to the university. It might have been better just to transfer him to a position not involving complaints of abuse and harassment. 

In any case state government looks ridiculous here, and if the General Assembly ever comes to think that $763,000 is a lot of money to waste, it should investigate what happened, ascertain what legal advice the university got, and set clear policy so this kind of thing can’t happen again. 

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

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Lamont subverts competence in state government’s hiring

By Chris Powell

Racial preferences in hiring used to be considered unfair because they treated people as members of groups rather than as individuals. This unfairness was euphemized as “affirmative action” and for a few decades the U.S. Supreme Court maintained an ambiguous stance on it. But recently the court took the forthright position that racial preferences are unjust and unconstitutional. 

So now advocates of racial preferences are seeking to give them a new euphemism: “diversity, equity, and inclusion.”

Two weeks ago Governor Lamont joined this bandwagon, establishing the Office of Equity and Opportunity within his office “to ensure that state government is a leader in equity and inclusion with the goals of eliminating institutional and systemic barriers and creating opportunity and access for all those it serves and employs.”

The Office of Equity and Opportunity will aim to ensure that  “state government offices are representative of the people they serve, and that people from different racial, ethnic, gender, geographic, and socioeconomic backgrounds have a voice in the decision-making processes.”

That is, if the Office of Equity and Opportunity is taken seriously by state agencies, simple competence and experience will no longer be enough in their staffing. The race, ethnicity, gender, and geographic and socioeconomic backgrounds of job applicants will have to be considered, and agencies will be subject to “statewide diversity, equity, and inclusion benchmarks and measures of progress.” 

What’s more, the new office will “identify diversity, equity, and inclusion training opportunities for all state employees.” Of course no state employees are likely to avail themselves of such “opportunities,” thereby implicitly acknowledging their need for political re-education, unless they are paid to take time off from their regular jobs. So they’ll probably be paid for sitting through lectures in political correctness instead of working.

The implication of the governor’s plan is that state government is a bastion of discrimination against racial and ethnic minorities, women, the poor, and residents of certain municipalities — a complaint that, despite state government’s various faults, has seldom been made. Who knew state government was such a nasty place, besides, apparently, the governor?

As public education in Connecticut long has been declining, state agency hiring officers already may have enough trouble finding competent people. If the Office of Equity and Inclusion is taken seriously, hiring officers soon will have to meet quotas having nothing to do with competence.

The governor created the Office of Equity and Inclusion by executive order, apparently because as ordinary legislation the idea could not stand questions in the General Assembly and from the public. With luck the damage to be done and the expense to be incurred here will be limited to one or two more patronage hires in the governor’s office and no one will be more annoyed by the extra political correctness than the governor himself.

PENSION JACKPOT: The governor has nominated former state Rep. David Arconti, D-Danbury, to the Public Utilities Control Authority, and it’s probably an excellent choice. Arconti was House chairman of the General Assembly’s Energy and Technology Committee, where he was regarded as pro-consumer and pro-regulatory reform, and lately has been handling government affairs for the Avangrid conglomerate, owner of United Illuminating, Connecticut Natural Gas, and Southern Connecticut Gas, a position from which he presumably will resign. He has seen all aspects of utility issues.

But Arconti’s nomination is also interesting for illuminating the value of political patronage. As a state legislator Arconti earned only about $40,000 or less each year, but by serving 10 years he qualified himself for a state pension. As a PURA member he’ll be paid $175,000 annually, and his pension will be calculated from the average of his five highest-paid years in state service — and $175,000 is more than four times $40,000.

Even a couple of years with the utility agency will bump Arconti’s pension way up, so like many others who have moved from the legislature to the executive branch, he may have just hit the jackpot.

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

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Ousting Biden, Democrats show Trump isn’t the only liar

By Chris Powell

Forgive Democratic leaders for what seems like their hypocrisy, their overthrowing their presumptive nominee for president, the incumbent, Joe Biden, who won the party’s primaries, and replacing him instantly with Vice President Kamala Harris, who didn’t have to earn support for the nomination from the party’s ordinary members. 

It’s no big deal because polls show that Democrats throughout the country overwhelmingly wanted Biden to withdraw once his mental and physical decline no longer could be concealed by party leaders and news organizations. The vice president was the obvious substitute. Despite the mockery coming from Republicans, democracy is not so offended by this. 

Democracy is offended by the Democratic leadership’s having blocked Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s challenge to Biden’s renomination, forcing Kennedy to run for president as an independent. If Kennedy’s challenge had been allowed within the party, Biden’s incapacity might have been exposed at a safer distance from the election.

The ridiculousness of Democratic leaders and so many journalists is not forgivable either — their claim that Biden withdrew his candidacy for the good of the country. Biden didn’t withdraw as much as he was dragged away kicking and screaming after insisting that he would never withdraw unless God told him to. This week the New York Post claimed that Biden withdrew only when party leaders threatened to instigate his removal as president via a formal 25th Amendment finding of incapacity. 

That report seems more than plausible in light of Biden’s abrupt reversal on withdrawing after swearing that he would heed only God, and in light of his failure in his address to the nation this week to explain why he changed his mind. 

The Democrats are worse than ridiculous, having been shown to be as dishonest as Biden is senile. They long denied his worsening infirmity and even claimed that video evidence of it was forged. The president’s mental collapse on national television June 27 during his debate with Republican nominee Donald Trump made it impossible for Democrats and journalists to continue lying about the president’s competence. 

So party leaders resolved that Biden had to go, even as many did not publicly call for his departure. When their coup succeeded, nearly all party leaders involved with it and nearly all who did not object to it began hailing Biden as the greatest president in decades, even as his public approval rating long had been the worst of any president in decades.

Vice President Harris insisted on Biden’s competence and scolded doubters right up to the moment he withdrew. Did she really not know about his condition, or was she among the many who lied about Biden’s condition and who have returned to denouncing Trump as a liar?

While Biden is off the Democratic ticket, his party has contaminated itself by covering up for him only to retire him forcibly. So rather than let him get away, the Republicans may tie him around Harris’ neck along with the rest of the record of the Biden-Harris administration, which produced the president’s disastrous approval rating.

BUDGET RESERVE IS ILLUSION: Government employee unions and social-service groups are distressed that Connecticut state government has a budget reserve of more than $4 billion. The unions want the money for their members, the social-service groups for their clients, and they are sore at Governor Lamont and the General Assembly for not repealing or reducing the “fiscal guardrails” requiring state government to put so much money aside.

Of course state government always fails to meet some compelling human needs, but the impression that it is rolling in money is mistaken. While the “guardrails” have improved its financial position, state government still has an estimated $37 billion in unfunded pension liabilities, incurred during decades of overspending elsewhere. Even if the $4 billion reserve was used entirely to reduce those liabilities, Connecticut would remain hugely in debt.

The best way to find more money for compelling needs is to economize elsewhere. A good place to start would be state government’s extravagant payroll, which is increasing pension liabilities almost as fast as they are being paid down.

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

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Block housing development and your taxes may go up

By Chris Powell

Blame for rising property taxes in Connecticut may be shared more broadly than most people think. It’s not just the fault of elected officials who yield to the demands of special interests, particularly the demands of government employee unions for higher wages and benefits. 

Property taxes are determined in large part by property values, and the great inflation created by the spectacular overspending and overborrowing by the Trump and Biden administrations and Congress has increased the nominal value of nearly everything, including residential property. 

Then there is the flood of illegal immigration, a Biden administration policy. The millions of illegal immigrants admitted in recent years have to live somewhere, and the federal government and state government are often subsidizing their housing, causing scarcity. Without so many illegal immigrants and government subsidies for their housing, demand would be reduced, more properties would be vacant, and residential rents, prices, and property values would fall.

There is still another cause of housing scarcity and rising property values and taxes: state and municipal policy that restricts supply, like exclusive zoning and what is called farmland preservation, a politically correct mechanism for preventing housing development. People tend not to associate these policies with rising property taxes, which homeowners pay directly and tenants pay indirectly through their rent. 

But maybe the association will be noticed after more periodic municipality-wide property revaluations like the ones New London and Norwich recently underwent.

According to The Day of New London, residential property values in the little city just rose by an average of 60% and many people are shocked by the corresponding increase in their property taxes, since commercial property values didn’t rise that much if at all.

With employment booming at submarine manufacturer Electric Boat in neighboring Groton, New London and nearby towns especially need more housing. But since the housing shortage, rising property values, and rising property taxes are statewide and national phenomena, any town could facilitate a building boom and still not knock housing values down much.

At least people should take their rising property tax bills as a reminder not to complain so much about new housing. Obstructing new housing means scarcity, and scarcity means housing prices will be bid up, taking housing taxes with them.

LEAVE IDAHO ALONE: Abortion rights are more secure in Connecticut than they are in many other states.

Having long ago incorporated into its own law the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision in Roe v. Wade, Connecticut leaves abortion unrestricted prior to fetal viability, and even then no one is guarding against the abortion of viable fetuses. Connecticut also allows abortions for minors without parental consent, enabling child molesters to erase the evidence of their crimes. 

Still, the abortion policies of other states have Connecticut Attorney General William Tong in a frenzy. Lately Tong has been fulminating about Idaho’s restrictive abortion law and has even had filed a brief in an Idaho case in federal court though the case has no bearing on Connecticut.

Speaking of Idaho’s law the other day, the attorney general said: “This threat and severe state abortion bans are not going away. We’re going to have to keep fighting these fights in every court in every state where patients’ lives and reproductive freedom are at risk.”

But why? Reversing Roe two years ago, the U.S. Supreme Court didn’t restrict abortion anywhere. It just returned abortion policy to the states, restoring some federalism.   

Who is Connecticut’s attorney general to seek to override democracy in Idaho? Presumably if enough of the women of Idaho wanted their state’s abortion law to be like Connecticut’s, they could mobilize to achieve it. Apparently many if not most women in Idaho want abortion restricted. 

No one has to live in Idaho, or Connecticut.

And where does the attorney general find the authority to intervene in cases having no bearing on Connecticut? State law confines the attorney general’s office to legal matters “in which the state is a party or is interested.” Abortion law in Idaho is not a state interest in Connecticut, just a partisan political one.

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

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Democrats get rid of Biden to save themselves, not the country

By CHRIS POWELL

A historian as much as a politician, Winston Churchill foresaw the outcome of events like those of the Democratic Party’s last few weeks. 

“The loyalties which center upon No. 1 are enormous,” Churchill wrote. “If he trips, he must be sustained. If he makes mistakes, they must be covered. If he sleeps, he must not be wantonly disturbed. If he is no good, he must be pole-axed.”

Over the weekend President Biden was pole-axed by the grandees of his party, most of whom had realized that the rest of the party might be pole-axed if he remained at the top of their ticket. 

Only a few Democratic leaders had the courage to express the obvious in public — that the president’s mental and physical decline was worsening, not reversing, the more he tried to regain support. But enough leaders withheld their support and thus echoed polls showing that an overwhelming majority of ordinary Democrats wanted Biden to withdraw. 

Among Connecticut’s Democratic leaders only U.S. Rep. Jim Himes was forthright and candid in urging the president to give up his campaign for renomination. Returning from what turned out to be a politically convenient vacation, Governor Lamont meekly concurred with Himes. Other members of the state’s congressional delegation and the state’s constitutional officers took no position but their lack of enthusiasm for Biden — and their lack of courage — were implied. Maybe privately they urged the president to retire.

They may be lucky if their complicity with Biden’s years of failing intellect and stamina, complicity that for some included claims that the president remained sharp and vigorous, does not become an issue in their own campaigns this year or two years from now. The essential fact is that they would not risk their political careers for the national interest in removing an incapable leader. 

But then most Democratic leaders, including most of those who called for Biden to retire, might have been glad of his re-election despite his disability. Indeed, most now will not complain about his remaining in office for another six months in his diminished condition, which is obvious to the world. (The satirical internet newspaper, The Babylon Bee, imagined the State Department sending a letter to the country’s adversaries asking them to attack only between 10 a.m. and 4 p.m. Eastern Time, when the president is said to be most alert.)

Of course in pushing Biden out Democratic leaders think the party’s chances will improve with the presidential nomination conferred on Vice President Kamala Harris. Democrats well may hope that the sleaziness of their coup soon will be forgotten by most voters.

But Harris, who arose from increasingly nutty and impoverished California, seems not much better regarded nationally than Biden and has not been vetted much more than, say, the Republican nominee for vice president, Ohio Sen. J.D. Vance, who has all of a year and a half of experience in government.

In any case Democrats seem to have forgotten that long before his senility became obvious Biden was extremely unpopular because of the record of what the Republicans now may delight in calling the “Biden-Harris administration” — a record of ruinous inflation, declining living standards, a flood of illegal immigration, a proxy war against a nuclear power, social disintegration, rising homelessness, and putting boys and men in female sports, bathrooms, and prisons.

Can Republicans and their erratic presidential nominee, Donald Trump, press these issues effectively without Biden at the top of the other ticket? And are the Republicans and Trump unaware of the fun Democrats might have with the recent Republican convention, whose final night included an incoherent rapper and a cartoonish former professional wrestler introducing Trump’s own interminable descent back into narcissism?

Have the Democrats noticed that Senator Vance told the convention “We’re done catering to Wall Street” just hours after Trump told Bloomberg News that he will consider the embodiment of Wall Street, JPMorganChase CEO Jamie Dimon, for treasury secretary? 

Have Trump and Vance noticed their contradiction? Has even Bloomberg News?  

It’s ready to be noticed, and now that Biden is out, the election may not be over anymore.

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

Municipalities should be posting their most interesting records

By Chris Powell

Greenwich First Selectman Fred Camillo is sore at people who, he says, make lots of requests for access to town records under Connecticut’s freedom-of-information law. “Some people are abusing the system,” Camillo says, and requesting town records “has been weaponized and we’re getting harassed.”

So his administration has begun posting on Greenwich’s internet site the names of all FOI requesters and the subjects of their requests.

This is perfectly legal. No one who requests access to a public record can very well object if his own request is a public record too. But Camillo’s new practice seems meant to retaliate against and embarrass requesters. It’s mistaken and almost surely will fail.

For anyone who is making FOI requests mainly to annoy town officials isn’t likely to be embarrassed in the least by publicity. To the contrary, such people probably will welcome publicity and figure that their renown will help intimidate town officials and employees in the future.

Besides, Connecticut’s FOI law now authorizes government officials to petition the Freedom of Information Commission for relief from a “vexatious requester,” a person whose requests for records are so numerous and redundant as to constitute abuse. While they are few, there are such people and the commission has taken action against some, exempting the government agency being harassed from having to respond to the requester. 

So if First Selectman Camillo really thinks any FOI requester is “abusing the system,” he should identify the abuser in a complaint to the FOI Commission, whereupon the commission may call a hearing that may be as much an inconvenience to the requester as the requester’s requests are to town officials.

There’s no harm in posting FOI requests on a town’s internet site as Greenwich is doing, but there’s not much public service in it either. Indeed, if a municipality or state agency is going to put more effort into posting records on its internet site, many records would be of far more public interest than FOI requests.

For example, municipalities could post their payrolls as state government does. Some municipal government salaries are extraordinary but overlooked. Excessive overtime for police officers and others is often a scandal.

Municipal employee job evaluations and disciplinary records should be posted too. Those records are where some big scandals are hidden. 

While teacher evaluations, alone among all government employee evaluations, long have been exempted from disclosure under state FOI law — a testament to the influence of teacher unions and the subservience of state legislators to the worst of special interests — nothing prevents municipalities from disclosing teacher evaluations voluntarily just as municipalities are required to disclose the evaluations of other employees.

With local journalism weakening, these days most municipal governments have little serious news coverage and few if any reporters inspect disciplinary records regularly. 

Posting more records about government’s own performance would show the public far more about who is really “abusing the system.” Any annoyance to government officials from this greater transparency might be offset by accountability and better management.

SLICING AWAY AT DEMOCRACY: Many people who achieve public office quickly come to realize the truth of the old saying, “To govern is to choose.” French President Charles de Gaulle clarified that governing is always “to choose among disadvantages.” Of course choosing can be a drag.

So some non-profit social-service groups want Connecticut to impose a special tax on telecommunications services whose revenue would be dedicated to social-service groups. 

But why should cell phone or internet users particularly pay for social services? There’s no causal relationship between telecommunications and social-service needs. It’s just that the social-service groups don’t want to have to compete for state government money as everybody else has to. With a dedicated tax their money would be guaranteed.

If choosing is restricted this way, over time the practice would slice away at democracy and insulate many recipients of government money. Connecticut has done enough of that already.

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

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Dodging a bullet frees Trump to become civil and serious

By Chris Powell

Responding to the attempt to assassinate his Republican challenger, Donald Trump, and the hatefulness that has infected national politics, President Biden told the nation Sunday, “It’s time to cool it down.” It would be good if Trump expressed a similar thought this week as he accepts the Republican National Convention’s presidential nomination for the third time.

Having just survived a shooting after facing criminal prosecutions that would not have been brought against him except for politics, Trump may be entitled to more rage and narcissism. Will he realize that the assassination attempt has emphasized his martyrdom to enough people and won him some sympathy so that more rage from him would be unnecessary and counterproductive, and that the election is likely his if he can indeed “cool it down”?

Polls suggest that amid high inflation, a flood of illegal immigration, another “forever” war, and ridiculous wokeness the Biden administration is widely regarded as a disaster. Last week Connecticut U.S. Rep. Jim Himes, D-4th District, urged Biden to give up renomination, Governor Lamont quietly concurred, and Connecticut’s U.S. senators, Richard Blumenthal and Chris Murphy, hinted that Biden is no longer up to his job. If even leading Democrats in solidly Democratic Connecticut can be that candid about it, the disaster is beyond obvious.

But polls also suggest that, outside the Republican base, Trump’s demeanor is a disaster. His policies may make more sense than Biden’s but his demeanor is preventing him from winning the votes he most needs, the votes in the middle. Biden’s collapse into senility at his debate with Trump on June 27 should have quickly pushed Trump into a 15-point lead, but the polls barely changed. At least prior to the assassination attempt half the country still preferred even a comatose Biden to a manic, blustering, bullying, and insulting Trump.   

Both sides have been poisoning politics, though the Democrats, panicking over Biden since the debate, have been doing it more, as by likening Trump to Hitler. Now that the camouflage long given to Biden’s mental and physical decline by the White House staff, Democratic leaders, and national news organizations has been stripped away, few people think he is capable of being president for another six months, much less another four years.

But Trump does not yet inspire much more confidence.

Trump has embodied well-deserved contempt for government and politics. But contempt is easy; governing and building consensus are hard, and Trump’s four years in power, far from revealing him as the murderous totalitarian of liberal paranoia, showed him to be mainly lazy even when his policy was correct. 

Somehow Ronald Reagan got away with running against the federal government not only when he was challenging the inept Jimmy Carter in 1980 but even when he was running for re-election in 1984, after having been in charge of the government for four years. Maybe Reagan’s good humor and cordial demeanor caused voters to overlook the irony. 

But Trump lacks good humor and cordiality, and awful as the Biden administration is, many people still may remember the personnel chaos and backbiting of the Trump administration and Trump’s own incessant angry or insulting tweets from the White House. Tweeting isn’t governing.

Has the bullet he barely dodged taught Trump anything? The country may never know what exactly was in the mind of the young man who fired it, but the country is full of people who might have rejoiced if Trump had not dodged the bullet, just as the country is full of people who might rejoice at Biden’s unnatural demise. That is an environment for civil war.

At least the assassination attempt may have taught the Democrats something. Since last weekend they have been sending wishes for a quick recovery to the man they had just been denouncing as the reincarnation of Hitler. Insincere, of course, but a welcome return to civility.    

Can Trump become civil, and serious? Or does he not want to be president again that much? 

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

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Connecticut’s higher education won’t recover until it gives more value

By CHRIS POWELL

Connecticut’s four regional state universities and its 12 community colleges are looking enviously at Massachusetts, which, after spending a lot more money, seems to be reversing the decline in enrollment at its own public institutions of higher education following nine down years. One technique used by Massachusetts has been to make attendance at community college free for people 25 and older.

Applauding Massachusetts, the chancellor of the Connecticut State Colleges and Universities system, Terrence Cheng, says, “With that type of investment, we would see similar impact here in Connecticut. There’s zero question in my mind.”  

Yet enrollment at Connecticut’s regional universities and community colleges has continued to fall even as state government has increased their appropriations for the last two years. Since 2018 enrollment at the regional universities is down 12% and down 27% at the community colleges. In response the universities and colleges system has reduced programs and raised tuition, distressing faculty and students.

But the enrollment declines are emergencies only if the universities and colleges are to be sustained for their own sake — only if they are ends in themselves and not the means to an important end. That is, increasing the productive capacity and appreciation of life by Connecticut’s residents. 

Meanwhile developments are screaming that higher education is grossly overvalued and overpriced if not often an outright racket run by higher educators.

That’s partly what the national college student loan scandal is about, with millions of former students throughout the country emerging from college carrying substantial debt only to discover themselves unqualified for or unable to find jobs enabling them to repay their loans and live comfortable lives. 

The other part of the scandal is the Biden administration’s effort to forgive student loans, whereby the debt is transferred to taxpayers generally, including people who paid their own way through college or didn’t go to college at all — electricians, plumbers, nurses, mechanics, truck drivers, cashiers, and so forth — but who nevertheless are being taxed to pay for someone else’s degree in gender studies, art history, theater, and similar pretenses of education.

Where has all the wasted money gone? It went to higher educators, and less because of the supposed great value of higher education — a myth exploded by the student loan scandal — than because educators are a huge, politically active, and influential special interest before which most elected officials cower.

Of course not all higher education is worthless, but the student loan scandal shows that on average it deserves substantial reduction. 

Public colleges and universities may not be as overpriced as private ones, but then nearly everything in government is overpriced simply because of government’s lack of accountability. Chancellor Cheng’s annual salary is a clue — $440,000, far more than the salaries of any of Connecticut’s statewide constitutional officers or members of Congress. (No, he doesn’t coach a varsity sport.)

Anyone making that kind of money should have the courage and honesty to acknowledge that Connecticut’s education problem is not higher but lower education, where most students never master their studies and so never gain an understanding of civics and their country’s history and where their proficiency declines even as more money is spent on teaching them.

As with everything else in government, the objective with higher education should be to get value from it, not just to sustain enrollments and keep it going to satisfy everyone on its payroll.

Making community college free to students in Massachusetts hasn’t made higher education there more valuable; it has just concealed the value question by transferring more of the expense to non-students. When higher education starts providing more value, enrollments will take care of themselves.

TWO BLACK COMMISSIONERS: Last week’s column about the firing of Chief Public Defender TaShun Bowden-Lewis, Connecticut’s first Black chief public defender, by the Public Defender Services Commission and her lawsuit accusing the commission of racism asserted that one of the commission’s six members is Black. Two are.   

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

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