More absentee ballots mean more corruption in elections

By Chris Powell

Judging by voter participation in Connecticut’s most recent municipal elections, Hartford may be the most demoralized place in the state.

The Hearst Connecticut newspapers report that only 14% of Hartford residents who are registered to vote did so in last year’s municipal election, when the city had the lowest voter participation among all Connecticut municipalities. The city’s voter participation rate is actually far worse than reported, since, as with all other municipalities, many eligible residents don’t even register to vote.

What is the City Council’s idea for curing this civic demoralization? It’s to diminish election security by mailing absentee ballot applications for future elections to all residents on the voter rolls.

Of course absentee ballots have been at the center of the recent election corruption scandals in Bridgeport, where absentee ballot applications have been pressed on people who did not apply for them and completed absentee ballots have been stuffed by political operatives into unsecured ballot deposit boxes.

Absentee ballots are a necessity of democracy but for election security their use should be minimized, not increased. For the more a voter is separated from the in-person casting of his vote, the more potential there will be for corruption. Requests for absentee ballots should be scrutinized for validation as much as the casting of completed ballots in person should be.

The Republican minority in the General Assembly is serious about this issue. The Democratic majority is not.

The Republicans propose to outlaw the mailing of unsolicited absentee ballot applications, to require people voting by absentee ballot to include a copy of an identification document bearing a photo, to require municipalities to provide voters with photo identification without charge, the cost to be reimbursed by state government; to require municipalities to update and audit their voter rolls regularly, and to suspend use of absentee ballot deposit boxes, since the U.S. mail can do the job more securely.

Democrats in Connecticut oppose requiring voters to present photo identification. The Democrats also support nullification of federal immigration law. This may not be a coincidence. 

*

PLEADING POVERTY: Should poor people have to obey the law in Connecticut? Legislation approved by the General Assembly’s Judiciary Committee suggests that poverty should confer exemption from the law.

The legislation, sponsored by four Democratic state representatives, would forbid the suspension of driver’s licenses for people who have failed to appear in court as ordered or who have failed to pay fines. Suspension of the driver’s licenses of people who ignore court orders and judgments has been an incentive for obeying the law.

The rationale of the legislation is that poor people are less able to take time off from work to attend court and less able to pay fines, and of course they are. But if poverty is to excuse people from respecting the law and the courts, why should they obey any law at all? 

Connecticut’s courts already carry hundreds of cases of failure to appear. If the Judiciary Committee’s legislation is enacted, the state is sure to experience much more contempt for law and an ever-growing inventory of “failure to appears” — and somehow the Democrats will call it justice.

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DILLON IMPROVED BRADLEY: In recent years Connecticut has put many millions of dollars into Bradley International Airport. Though the correlation between spending and improvement in state government is usually weak, the airport has improved much since the Connecticut Airport Authority was created to operate it and the other state-owned airports in 2013.

For the 11 years since then Kevin A. Dillon has been the authority’s executive director, overseeing a great expansion of service at Bradley — more international and nonstop flights, more airlines, better facilities, and more passengers, though the passenger total from the year prior to the virus epidemic has not quite been surpassed yet.

Bradley makes a huge contribution to Connecticut’s economy, its business environment, and quality of life, for which Dillon must be credited. He plans to retire early next year and before he leaves the authority should name something after him.

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

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Democrats scapegoat supermarkets for government’s inflation tax

By Chris Powell

Democrats in Connecticut think they have found someone other than their national administration to blame for the inflation ravaging the country: supermarkets charging too much for groceries.

So state Attorney General William Tong announced last week that he is sending letters to supermarket chains asking about their profits, and Democratic leaders in the General Assembly are proposing legislation to give him more authority to investigate “price gouging” generally.

It’s more like scapegoating than consumer protection.

While the food industry has suffered much anti-competitive consolidation as other industries have, supermarkets are at the bottom of the food chain and typically their profit margins on products are low. Sales volume is where supermarkets have made their money.

A Federal Trade Commission report cited by the Democrats as having prompted their inquiry about supermarkets is not so alarming. It says supermarket profits are marginally higher now than they were before the recent virus epidemic and the supply disruptions it caused. But then corporate profits have risen elsewhere as well, perhaps because the epidemic drove many smaller companies out of business.

In any case most prices of important products and services, not just food, have risen sharply around the world, and food prices have soared even in countries without supermarkets in the American style. So even if anti-competitive conduct can be found in the supermarket business, food price inflation extends far beyond it.

As for “price gouging,” the term is overused in free-market economies, since “price gouging” is possible only where there isn’t enough competition. If “price gouging” in food retailing is really a problem, Connecticut Democrats are opportunistically late to discover it — just when their president has presided over more inflation than the country has suffered in decades.

Even as Attorney General Tong was complaining about food prices last week, the U.S. Postal Service announced that postage rates soon will be raised 7%. This will have taken them up 30% in four years. That inflation is government’s doing, not the private sector’s. 

In addition, over the long term government expenditures generally exceed the official inflation rate, and most groups getting money from government in Connecticut are clamoring for still more, and it isn’t just because food has gotten more expensive. Everything has.

Taxes lately have not gone up to match increases in government spending, which is a big clue about where inflation is coming from. For both the federal government and state government increasingly are being financed not by taxes but by spectacular borrowing by the federal government, a form of money creation, since the debt is purchased by the Federal Reserve or foreign governments. 

This financing of government via money creation is the biggest part of inflation – and no one in the Democratic federal and state administrations expresses concern about it.

Practically every day Democratic elected officials in Connecticut congratulate themselves on their disbursement of goodies or grants financed with federal inflation money. They also insist that billions more should be spent on our proxy war against Russia in Ukraine. These devotees of free money paused last week only to blame supermarkets for the dollar’s loss of value, confident that journalism would not pose even one critical question to challenge the ruse.   

*

LOCAL AUTONOMY OR NOT?: If, as advocates of repealing property taxes on cars maintain, municipal property taxes on cars are unfair because identical cars can be taxed at different rates in different towns, then local autonomy is unfair too, since different rates are the products of local autonomy.

The big issue behind the car tax is how much local autonomy Connecticut wants. Should all towns operate the same way, with state government making all municipal decisions?

Connecticut’s political economy long has been to make the cities concentration camps for the poor, exploited by the government class ministering to them, provided that people who want and can afford something better can escape to the suburbs. 

Would a consolidated system rescue the cities or just ruin the rest of the state? Who wants to take the risk?

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

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Dodging poverty problem again; and no wonder kids skip school

By Chris Powell

News reports say the General Assembly’s Finance Committee has approved legislation “designed to eradicate concentrated poverty” — that is, the poverty of U.S. census districts in Connecticut where 30% or more of the households have incomes below the federal poverty level.

But the legislation, whose leading advocate is state Sen. John Fonfara, D-Hartford, won’t eradicate any poverty. It will only establish another bureaucracy, the Office of Neighborhood Investment and Community Engagement in the state Department of Economic and Community Development. The new bureaucracy would be assigned to write a 10-year plan for eliminating the “concentrated poverty.”

The ranking Republican on the Finance Committee, Rep. Holly Cheeseman of East Lyme, is skeptical. How, she asks, would the economic development department find the right people to run the new office?

But of course the department will have no trouble finding politically connected Democrats in the state’s impoverished cities to take the cushy new patronage jobs, whose work will consist mainly of distributing more state patronage to other Democrats in the name of alleviating urban poverty, even as no poverty will be alleviated except for the Democrats getting the jobs.

It has been decades since urban poverty was a mystery. There is plenty of social science showing it is mainly a matter of the childbearing outside marriage and fatherlessness induced by the welfare system and the resulting educational failure that disproportionately afflicts children of single-parent households. 

Of course poverty might be much reduced if government stopped inflation and dramatically increased the housing supply. But no special study, 10-year plan, and patronage appointments are needed to solve those problems either. The “concentrated poverty” legislation is just another dodge.

Find the kids some fathers and make sure they take their schooling seriously and poverty will be sharply reduced even before the new employees of the Office of Neighborhood Investment and Community Engagement in the state Department of Economic and Community Development qualify for the generous state pensions that are believed to be every active Democrat’s birthright.

*       

Nor should it be such a mystery why the chronic absenteeism rate of Connecticut’s public school students remained stubbornly high at 20% during the 2022-23 school year, according to the latest data from the state Education Department.

The rate is lower than the previous year’s but still above the rate before the recent virus epidemic. Students are classified as chronically absent if they miss 10% or more of their school days.

The worsening of poverty by inflation and housing scarcity is part of the problem, but education policy probably has a lot to do with it as well.

After all, exactly what is the rationale for conscientiously attending school in Connecticut these days when students and their parents — such as they are — know very well that the only hard rule of public education in the state is social promotion? That is, they know that students will be promoted from grade to grade and awarded a high school diploma regardless of whether they attend school and learn anything. Indeed, even if they have failed to master high school work, many will be admitted to public institutions calling themselves colleges and universities.

There aren’t truant officers anymore and there are no penalties for students or parents for chronically missing school, just some hand-holding with social workers, tedious as that may be. Schools no longer demand anything of students and parents, who may be confident that eventually — with food, housing, medical insurance, and other subsidies — government will take care of everyone who fails to bestir himself.

Maybe restoring standards all at once in public education would be impossible politically in Connecticut. But one small change in policy might help — requiring high school students to take a graduation test whose score would be imprinted on diplomas. Prospective employers could be encouraged to require job applicants to produce their diplomas for review. 

Of course even without diplomas scored this way employers easily could distinguish the dunces from the educated. But at least the procedure would remind the dunces and their parents of their negligence.

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

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Problem of mental illness isn’t shortage of treatment

By Chris Powell

When confronting a problem most people instinctively look first for its cause and try to eliminate it.

But such logic doesn’t apply so much in government, as indicated by government’s response to what is reported to be an explosion of mental illness among young people.

Teachers and school administrators throughout Connecticut say many more of their students are seriously troubled these days.

The commissioner of the state Mental Health and Addiction Services Department, Nancy Navaretta, reported the other day that one in seven teenagers is mentally ill and that suicide is the second-leading cause of death for 10- to 24-year-olds. State government’s child advocate, Sarah Eagan, added that 48 Connecticut children between the ages of 10 and 17 killed themselves from January 2016 through September 2022.

So members of Congress, including Connecticut’s U.S. Reps. Rosa DeLauro and Jahana Hayes, are sponsoring what they call the Expanding Access to Mental Health Services in Schools Act, which aims to put counselors or clinics in more schools. Educators and social-service people in the state are cheering them on.

But even if the legislation was enacted immediately it would be many years before it had any effect on the problem. For the legislation just sets up a federal agency for overseeing the training, qualifications, assignment, and compensation of school mental health counselors.

The legislation would appropriate no money at the outset. Money might be appropriated eventually, though like everything else at the federal level these days, money for mental health would have to get in line behind money meant to continue the war in Ukraine and support illegal immigrants.

So government might be far more helpful if it investigated the causes of the increasing mental illness of young people. Exactly why are so many more young people becoming mentally ill?

At a recent gathering at a school in Waterbury, Representative DeLauro attributed the mental illness epidemic to bullying, stress, isolation, and social media. 

But young people always have faced bullying, stress, and isolation. Youth is the primary time of life for apprehension, depression, and mental disturbance. So why have the causes of mental illness in young people become so much worse in recent years? 

Schools are notorious for failing to act effectively against bullying, perhaps because political correctness does not permit seriously disciplining students for misconduct. With a little political courage, school policy could be changed.

Social media are new, but parents can disconnect their children from social media by restricting their use of mobile phones. 

Other causes of stress among children and society generally are easy to see, at least if you’re not a member of Congress. In recent years inflation has been worst with the top two necessities of life, food and housing. Food banks and housing authorities in Connecticut report that food and housing inflation have made many people desperate and that even fully employed people are having much trouble supporting themselves and their families. 

But few members of Congress, and none from Connecticut, take any responsibility for inflation and the stress it has put on society. Members of Congress are content to congratulate themselves for the patronage goodies they are distributing that have been purchased not with tax money but borrowed money, money that the country never will be able to repay.

Parenting was already declining throughout the country long before government’s inflationary response to the recent virus epidemic. A third or more of American children are growing up without a father in their home, thus lacking the moral, emotional, and financial support a father ordinarily would provide. Impoverishing many of these households, inflation has weakened the parenting of many more children.

Mental illness among young people might be addressed directly by aiming at its causes — by knocking inflation down sharply and ending the welfare system’s subsidies for childbearing outside marriage. 

But instead advocates of the Expanding Access to Mental Health Services in Schools Act envision a lot more government employment and regulation, as if the bigger problem is the shortage of treatment for mental illness and not the explosion of mental illness itself.

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

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Should Connecticut declare that men can become women?

By Chris Powell

Transgender ideology, having conquered most of the Democratic majority in the General Assembly, suffered some pushback last week when the Appropriations Committee considered what was said to be mental health legislation.

The bill contained the term “pregnant persons,” and some Black and Hispanic legislators on the committee wanted to know what had become of “pregnant women” and “expectant mothers.”

State Rep. Robyn Porter, D-New Haven, spoke for the miffed. “My children call me Mother, Ma, Mommy,” she said. “I don’t answer to ‘pregnant person’ or ‘birthing person.'” So Porter proposed an amendment to add “expectant mothers” to the bill, though not to remove “pregnant persons.”

The legislature’s foremost advocate of transgenderism, Rep. Jillian Gilchrest, D-West Hartford, rebutted Porter.

“‘Pregnant person’ is actually the inclusive term,” Gilchrest claimed. “It is a gender-neutral term, and it would encompass expectant mothers, pregnant women. As we talk about DEI” — diversity, equity, and inclusion — “this is the direction we are hoping to move in in this state and ideally across the country. And so the term ‘pregnant persons’ is the more inclusive term, and so I would ask my colleagues to oppose the amendment.”

The committee disagreed with Gilchrest. Porter’s amendment was approved by a large margin as Republican legislators joined the Black and Hispanic Democrats to add “expectant mothers” to the bill. But few legislators seemed to want to talk about the bigger issue: what the strange new terminology pressed by Gilchrest signifies. This evasion was unfortunate, for transgenderism ideology will not be understood and checked without more inquiry and debate. Instead it will steadily and quietly insinuate itself into the whole of Connecticut law.

Gilchrest was not questioned in detail about what she and the other supporters of transgenderism are trying to accomplish with “pregnant persons.” But it can be inferred easily enough.

That is, they would have the law proclaim, contrary to science, that there are no physical and biological differences between men and women. They would have the law deny that the female sex is defined and distinguished from the male sex by the capacity to bear children. They would have the law proclaim that men can be women and bear children too — indeed, that there are really no sexes at all. 

While Gilchrest says “pregnant persons” is the “inclusive” term, that doesn’t make it accurate. And Representative Porter’s children aren’t the only ones who didn’t consider their mother a “pregnant person” as much as a pregnant woman or expectant mother.

Nearly everyone knows more biology than Gilchrest and her colleagues in transgenderism ideology pretend not to know. “Pregnant person” is not and has never been in general use because it implies a falsity — that men can be women.

What is the point of this ideology? Is it, as controversy suggests, to get men into women’s restrooms and women’s prisons and onto women’s sports teams and to allow schools to conceal a child’s gender dysphoria from his or her parents? Such objectives would never gain much public support if they were to be forthrightly legislated. 

Maybe this ideology aims to get government to change the language obliquely and indirectly without frank and democratic discussion so that people will wake up someday to find that the law and indeed the world have been transformed without their consent. 

Maybe this ideology means to alter the core purposes of government and its definition of elevating society. 

Do Gilchrest and Connecticut’s Democratic Party really think that transgenderism is the next phase of social uplift? Have Connecticut’s problems of poverty, education, child neglect and abuse, public health, housing, and their grotesque racial disproportions been solved?

Or is the increasing emphasis on transgenderism as societal liberation meant to distract from government’s longstanding failure to solve these problems and from the Democratic Party’s indifference to that failure as long as it increases membership in the party’s army, the government employee unions?

There is a serious political issue here, but not yet a political party with the nerve to raise it.

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

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Connecticut’s political left celebrates mental illness

By Chris Powell

As President Biden reminded the country with his ill-timed proclamation, this year Easter Sunday fell on a new and more politically correct holiday, Transgender Day of Visibility. A few days earlier at the state Capitol in Hartford, Connecticut Lt. Gov. Susan Bysiewicz led a celebration of a flag symbolizing transgender rights — more “diversity” stuff.

“By raising this flag,” Bysiewicz told the transgender people, she and Governor Lamont were saying: “We see you, we respect you, and we will keep fighting for you.”

But who these days does not see transgender people?

One needn’t attend a “drag queen story hour” in the children’s library. Transgender people are in the news and on entertainment programs almost every day. It evokes the old saying about homosexuality: What was, in the last century, “the love that dares not speak its name” cannot, in this century, shut up.

Few people these days begrudge the right of people to live their personal lives as they choose. The country, half of it high on marijuana or something else at any particular moment, is mostly libertarian when it comes to such matters now. 

Since they are not comfortable in their own skin, transgender people deserve not just basic respect but sympathy as well. They have gender dysphoria, a mental illness that is a burden to them even as most may be able to manage it and live otherwise normal and productive lives if they are not picked on, just as many others with mental illness do.

But mental illness shouldn’t be celebrated. It should be treated insofar as it can be. Celebrating gender dysphoria as the political left does and wants society to do normalizes it and risks great harm to those who suffer from it, especially children, encouraging them and their parents to take potentially life-altering drugs, treatments, and surgeries they may come to regret, as many do.

Indeed, a study by researchers in the Netherlands, published in February, concluded, as other studies have done, that most children with gender dysphoria outgrow it by adulthood. According to the study, “Gender non-contentedness, while being relatively common during early adolescence, in general decreases with age and appears to be associated with a poorer self-concept and mental health throughout development.”

Since school and medical authorities in Connecticut lately have been clamoring about an epidemic of mental illness among young people, what seems like an increase in gender dysphoria is probably part of it. 

Besides, the only rights seriously at issue in the transgenderism controversy belong to people who are not transgender at all: the right of gender privacy in public restrooms, the right of girls and women to equal opportunity in sports, and the right of parents to know what schools are doing with the health of their children.

The political left in Connecticut, in control of state government, is striving to take those rights away, and with accusations of “hate” it intimidates people out of objecting. So far only a few Republican state legislators have found the courage to speak up in defense of the rights of the many.

Calls for diversity in Connecticut don’t extend to political opinion. What passes for diversity in Connecticut involves mere appearances, races, and ethnicities. Connecticut-style diversity wants everyone to think the same.

Neither mental illness nor diversity should be celebrated. What should be celebrated is the highest form of personal respect and the best defense against persecution: indifference.

* * *

WILL ELECTRICS CHEAT?: Transportation writer Jim Cameron notes that state government’s clumsy push to force state residents to switch to electric vehicles risks cutting off revenue for highway maintenance and improvement, since gasoline taxes pay for highways and EVs don’t use gas. Worse, Cameron adds, because EVs are much heavier than gas-powered cars, they wear roads down more.

But since EVs use electricity to charge their batteries, they do pay the taxes hidden by state government in electric bills. Will the extra electricity tax revenue from EVs make up for the gas taxes they don’t pay?

Advocates of an EV mandate should investigate.

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

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To end car tax, spend less; and UConn abides thuggery

By Chris Powell

Many state legislators claim to be perplexed by the challenge of eliminating municipal property taxes on cars, which produce about a billion dollars per year for municipal governments. If property taxes on cars were eliminated, how would the money be replaced?

One advocate of eliminating car taxes, state Senate President Pro Tem Martin Looney, D-New Haven, is not perplexed. He would get rid of car taxes by raising the rest of the municipal property tax, which applies to real estate. State law restricts municipal property taxes on real estate to 70% of the assessment of a property’s market price, and Looney notes that 30% of real estate is tax-exempt. So to replace lost car tax revenue he would eliminate or get rid of most of the 30% exemption. Money saved by car owners would be recovered from real estate owners.

Looney’s idea will have little appeal, since typical Connecticut residents pay property taxes on both cars and their homes. Even people who rent their homes pay property taxes indirectly through their landlords.

But Looney figures that the poorest car owners might come out slightly ahead and government’s difficulty in collecting and keeping track of car taxes would be eliminated, along with the resentful surprise many people feel when they receive their car property tax bills in the mail every six months. 

Representing one of Connecticut’s permanently impoverished cities, Looney also always seems to figure that poverty is a virtue and that people who escape poverty and manage to support themselves are oppressors, a premise that the middle class may find tiresome, another reason his idea isn’t likely to get much support.

So how else might car taxes be eliminated and the foregone money recovered somewhere else?

Given state government’s fondness for deception, maybe car taxes could be reclassified as financing a “public benefit” and quietly stuffed with the other “public benefits” hidden by law in electricity bills, or added to wholesale sales taxes on fuel, tricks that cause the public to blame electricity and fuel companies for the resulting higher prices.

Or, as Looney might like best, state income tax rates could be increased and most of the additional revenue redirected to impoverished cities like Looney’s own New Haven, though urban poverty has not yet been alleviated by decades of such income transfers.

Or as a last resort car taxes might be eliminated through a little honesty in state government: by reducing spending at both the state and municipal levels.

Expensive state mandates on municipalities that cause them to spend much more than they need to spend to get the job done could be repealed, like binding arbitration of government employee union contracts, a practice that has subverted democracy and exempted municipal officials from responsibility.

Or state government could resolve to be less of a pension and benefit society for its own employees and divert the savings to municipal aid.

There’s no reason to be perplexed about getting rid of the car tax. It’s just a matter of political will, and it won’t happen until legislators and governors decide to pursue the public interest rather than the special interest — which in turn won’t happen until the public interest stands up for itself.

*

Rather than defend itself against the thugs among its students and their friends who might join them this weekend amid the final games of the national basketball tournaments, in which its men’s and women’s teams are participating, the University of Connecticut has decided to accommodate thuggery.

Last year when UConn’s men’s basketball team won the tournament, there was a riot at the main campus in Storrs, with the thugs tearing down lampposts and damaging cars and buildings.

So this week the university removed the lampposts considered most vulnerable.

A university publicist attributed last year’s damage to a “small fraction” of the young people celebrating. But if troublemakers are really so few, couldn’t a similarly small number of police officers have been assigned to guard the lampposts this weekend? Removing the lampposts has normalized the thuggery. 

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

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Disability pension scandal is shocking — but not new

By Chris Powell

Why is state government always short of money in the face of what are said to be compelling human needs?

One reason is that compelling human needs are easily confused with human wants, which are infinite.

Another reason is that state government is not at all careful with its money, especially when the recipients are its own employees, who are well organized by their union and constitute the army of Connecticut’s majority political party, the Democrats.

That’s the lesson the shocking report published last week by the Hearst Connecticut newspapers, written by reporters Jacqueline Rabe Thomas and Taylor Johnston.

The report focused on what it called the “curious” case of state Sen. Paul Cicarella, R-North Haven, who was working as a prison guard in 2008 when, breaking up a fight among prisoners, he slipped and injured his back. Doctors determined that while he had lost some back function, he remained able to do less strenuous work for state government. But no other state job was found for him.

So at age 27 Cicarella qualified for a lifelong disability pension even as he began work as a high school wrestling coach and private investigator. His disability pension was revoked when state government discovered he had found other work, but in 2021, just after Cicarella was elected senator, his pension was reinstated and increased by 84% for one year with retroactive payments. No one is explaining that.

The retroactive payments brought Cicarella’s 2022 pension to $412,000. Last year his disability pension was $66,000, on top of his other income, including his salary as senator.

The Hearst report found that the Cicarella case is only a small part of the problem of state government’s disability pension system. “Many former state employees,” the report said, “collect disability pensions despite working new jobs and making significant income. Hundreds of recipients have not submitted surveys used to determine if they still qualify. State officials have routinely failed to find less-exertive state jobs for workers who were cleared by doctors for such a role after an injury.”

This problem isn’t new. The state auditors identified it in 2015 but nothing was done. In a case that may have been more outrageous than Cicarella’s, the Hearst report said a former state government nurse collected a $33,000 disability pension while making $792,000 at a pharmaceutical sales job.

Governor Lamont, House Speaker Matt Ritter, and state Comptroller Sean Scanlon quickly pledged action on the Hearst report, which appears to have surprised them, though the governor appoints most members of the State Employees Retirement Commission, which decides on disability pensions, and the comptroller works with the commission in administering the pension system, which distributes $130 million each year. The governor said people will have to “play by the rules.” But to a great extent the rules themselves seem deficient.

While Democrats long have been running state government, that the auditors identified the disability pension problem in 2015 suggests that the General Assembly’s Republican minority could have made it an issue long before the Hearst papers did. Indeed, state government is full of policies and programs that fail to meet their nominal objectives but don’t get the corrective attention they should, even when the auditors point them out. The Republican minority often seems too scared of alienating the state employee unions, as if the unions might someday support Republicans.

Also to be faulted here are the advocates of spending more on the supposedly compelling human needs going unmet. They never call attention to the waste, fraud, and corruption in government that divert money from compelling needs. Those advocates also seem too scared of the unions and to be operating on the premises that there can be no enemies on the political left and that all government spending is equally good.

At least Republicans are proposing to restore the legislature’s Program Review and Investigations Committee. That might be a start. But then would any legislators have the courage to serve on a committee tasked with exposing failures and improprieties?

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

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State’s economy isn’t strong; and a teacher salary trick

By Chris Powell

Democrats warn that Donald Trump’s return to the presidency will endanger Social Security and Medicare. Trump has made ambiguous and contradictory comments on those programs and is not the master of policy details.

But as a practical matter President Biden’s administration already has made big cuts in Social Security and Medicare — through raging inflation and uncontrolled illegal immigration.

This year’s cost-of-living increase in Social Security benefits was 3.2%, the official rate of inflation. But the official rate long has been only a fraction of the real rate, which is closer to 9 or 10%, since the federal government has been manipulating the criteria for calculating inflation to make it look much lower than it really is. Anyone can see that under Biden the prices of food and housing — the biggest necessities — have risen far above 3.2% annually.

Meanwhile the explosion in illegal immigration resulting from Biden’s policy of open borders is causing big financial losses for hospitals, which now have many more uninsured patients to treat. This degrades service to everyone else.

The president, a Democrat, claims that the national economy is strong. Governor Lamont, also a Democrat, says the same about Connecticut’s economy. But their economic data doesn’t match real life, where poverty and homelessness are soaring.

Demand at Connecticut’s food pantries has increased sharply because of worsening poverty and illegal immigration.

A telling observation came recently from the chief executive of Connecticut Foodshare, Jason Jakubowski. “Grocery prices and cost of living are so high right now that we are seeing more people both at our local pantries and mobile food trucks,” Jakubowski said. “Many are fully employed. In our line of business, unemployment is usually the problem, but in this case it’s inflation and cost of living, not unemployment.”

Meanwhile donations of food and money to Connecticut’s food banks are falling, another indicator of hard times.

Economic weakness is also indicated by a big increase in the school lunch debt of Connecticut students.

So complaining about what Trump and the Republicans might do to Social Security and Medicare seems like an opportunistic distraction from the much broader impoverishment Democratic administrations are inflicting.

*   

Despite the longstanding inverse correlation between student performance and teacher compensation in Connecticut, most of the state’s legislators still can’t distinguish between education and teacher unions.

The other day the General Assembly’s Education Committee approved a bill to set a minimum annual salary for teachers of $60,000, a $12,000 or 25% increase over what is said to be the state’s average starting salary for teachers, $48,000.

The legislation couldn’t be more dishonest.

For its biggest effect would be not on salaries for starting teachers but salaries for all other teachers, who are far more numerous. The teacher unions, advocates of the legislation, largely control teacher salaries on the school district level through Connecticut’s system of binding arbitration of government employee union contracts. So as soon as pay for starting teachers goes up 25%, the unions will demand and almost certainly receive similar raises for all other teachers. Most of the spending increase under the legislation won’t go to starting teachers at all but to those already employed.

Where is the extra money to come from? The legislation would take it from what state government still has from the federal emergency aid for recovery from the recent virus epidemic. But everyone else is grabbing at that money too and it will run out and not be replaced. So the teacher salary legislation means big municipal property tax increases or more big claims on the state budget, which is already bumping into its “fiscal guardrails.”

At least the Republican minority in the legislature wants to re-establish the Program Review and Investigations Committee, which was eliminated years ago in the demented belief that there was nothing seriously wrong for the legislature to investigate.

A good start for the restored committee would be to investigate that inverse correlation between education spending and student performance. 

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

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Lieberman long was state’s most consequential politician

By Chris Powell

Joe Lieberman was Connecticut’s most consequential politician of his era, holding high office in the state for 40 of the 42 years between 1971 and 2013, 24 of those in the U.S. Senate. He was also often an insurgent and sometimes crossed his party’s establishment in a big way but got away with it, probably because he was calm and genial and quietly exuded integrity even when causing controversy.

Lieberman’s involvement in politics began in New Haven with the anti-Vietnam war campaigns of 1968 and 1970 when he was not long out of Yale University. He shocked observers by winning a primary against the state Senate’s Democratic majority leader, Edward L. Marcus of New Haven, who had been distracted by his campaign for U.S. senator.

Instantly Lieberman was a star. Soon he was Senate Democratic majority leader. His ascent was stalled by his defeat for the U.S. House of Representatives from the New Haven district in 1980 after a terrible campaign. But he remained so well regarded that he easily won the party’s nomination for state attorney general in 1982, whereupon he transformed the office into what it is almost everywhere now — a noisy platform as “the people’s lawyer,” hectoring and suing bad guys and gaining spectacular publicity if not spectacular results.

The attorney general’s office offered Lieberman a double opportunity — not just for constant publicity but also, in 1988, for challenging Connecticut’s Republican U.S. senator, Lowell P. Weicker Jr., without having to risk losing the attorney general’s office, where his term extended to 1990.

After three terms in the Senate Weicker had a national reputation, gained first by denouncing President Richard Nixon, a fellow Republican, amid the Watergate scandal, then by slighting Republicans in other situations as Connecticut became more Democratic. Republicans resented renominating Weicker and Lieberman saw his chance. Since his liberal credentials were solid, he struck some conservative poses to appeal to Republicans sick of Weicker, who notably included National Review editor and columnist William F. Buckley Jr.

Republican defections to Lieberman were probably decisive, as he won by just 10,000 votes, seven-tenths of a percentage point. 

In the Senate Lieberman was a reliably liberal Democratic vote and he easily won re-election in 1994. But in 1998 he had the nerve, rare among Democrats, to scold President Bill Clinton, also a Democrat, for his affair with an intern in the White House. While Lieberman voted against Clinton’s impeachment, his criticism of a president from his own party was taken as evidence of integrity. So when the Democrats nominated Vice President Al Gore to succeed Clinton as president in 2000, Gore chose Lieberman as his vice-presidential running mate in large part to signify some independence from Clinton.

Gore and Lieberman won the popular vote but lost the electoral vote not because Ralph Nader took crucial Democratic votes away in Florida but because Gore and Clinton couldn’t carry their own states for the Democrats anymore. Lieberman simultaneously ran for re-election to the Senate in Connecticut and easily won again.

Lieberman’s support for the U.S. war against Iraq in pursuit of imaginary “weapons of mass destruction” cost him renomination by the Democrats in a primary in 2006 narrowly won by Ned Lamont, now governor. But running as an independent and receiving most Republican votes, Lieberman easily won re-election and remained in the Senate Democratic caucus.

The next year Lieberman supported Republican Sen. John McCain for president over the Democratic nominee, Barack Obama. Still the Senate Democratic caucus didn’t dare expel him.

Lieberman worked well enough with Obama though he has been blamed or credited for keeping a “public option” out of the “Obamacare” national health insurance legislation, something perhaps to be expected from a senator from a state with a big insurance industry.

Lieberman retired from the Senate in 2013 but when he died this week at 82 he was still much involved in politics through the No Labels movement, trying to recruit a presidential ticket to provide an alternative to the awful Joe Biden and Donald Trump. Success for No Labels might be Lieberman’s greatest service.

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

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