Can state legislators resist clamor to bust ‘guardrails’?

By Chris Powell

Last week’s projections of more than a billion dollars in unexpected state government tax revenue over the next two years have strengthened demands for more spending in the last days of the General Assembly’s current session. Legislators already had been grabbing furiously at the remnants of federal pandemic emergency aid, and the projections of much more tax revenue have increased pressure for lowering the state’s “fiscal guardrails.”

The situation is similar to that of state government in the late 1980s, where the state government’s budget surplus was greatly enlarged by an inflationary boom and Gov. William A. O’Neill and Democratic legislators rushed to spend it all. Whereupon a devastating national recession struck, bursting the real estate bubble, collapsing banks, and causing bankruptcies, layoffs, and a monstrous state budget deficit. It led to imposition of the state income tax.

Could another economic collapse happen? Indeed, is it already happening? 

The stock market, whose capital gains provide much income to the wealthy, the people who pay most of Connecticut’s income tax, seems to be stalling out. Large layoffs are increasing in the state’s private sector. Housing prices have soared with inflation and already are crushing the working poor. Commercial real estate has crashed under the trend toward working and shopping from home. Homelessness and hunger are rising. The economy is not as strong as elected officials contend, and its next big move is probably down.

That would quickly devour the state’s budget surpluses.

Additionally, state government’s indebtedness may not have been reduced as much as thought lately. Business consultant and commentator Red Jahncke notes that the extra money placed into state government’s pension funds in recent years has been mostly offset by an increase in their obligations. For the big raises bestowed on state employees by the Lamont administration have been “pensionable.” That is, the raises have greatly increased the pensions state employees will be owed. 

Also arguing for continued restraint in state government’s finances are the categories in which there is the most clamor for raising spending: higher and lower education.

Higher education in Connecticut is full of spectacular salaries and frivolity, while higher education generally has been heavily discredited by the college student debt scandal and the debt forgiveness scandal. Higher education is highly overvalued and overpriced.

Lower education long has been Connecticut’s much more compelling challenge, since student performance has declined even as per-pupil costs have increased. The situation screams for auditing. But since members of teacher unions receive most education spending and are the state’s most influential special interest — the largest element in the political army of the state’s majority party — no such auditing is politically possible.

For it simply doesn’t matter that increasing education spending does not improve educational results. The main purpose of education spending has become the purchase of political support. Accountability in education is out of the question — not that it figures much elsewhere in state government, where results are seldom gauged against costs.

While some aspects of government in Connecticut might improve with more spending, the more compelling the need, the less influential the advocacy. Self-interestedness rules, as indicated by a recent report by the Yankee Institute’s Meghan Portfolio. 

Portfolio detailed the support given by state Sen. Jan Hochadel, D-Meriden, to raises for state employees and more education spending even as she also serves as president of the Connecticut chapter of the American Federation of Teachers, a government employee union. This struck Portfolio as a conflict of interest.

Of course Senator Hochadel perceives no conflict among the public interest, the union interest, and her personal interest, and many of her constituents were aware of her associations and knew what they were voting for and would probably get. Maybe more should have known but didn’t. Maybe they should learn before she seeks re-election this year.

But even if, as H.L. Mencken wrote, “every election is a sort of advanced auction of stolen goods,” the thieves don’t elect themselves. 

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

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Must Connecticut subsidize more illegal immigration?

By Chris Powell

Connecticut’s state government seems to think that illegal immigration isn’t a problem here, just — maybe — in other states. The other day state officials gathered with advocates of illegal immigration at the state Capitol to congratulate themselves on what a Connecticut Mirror report called the “explosive” demand for state insurance coverage for illegal immigrant children.

When this insurance, which is much like federal Medicaid insurance, was extended to illegal immigrant children age 12 and younger in January 2023, the state Department of Social Services estimated that about 4,000 children would be enrolled. But enrollees now exceed 11,000.

Now pregnant illegal immigrants qualify for this insurance as well and can continue it for a year after childbirth. 

While it has not been publicized, children born to illegal immigrants in Connecticut also qualify for state government’s touted “baby bonds” program, in which the children are to receive as much as $24,000 in state money upon turning 18 — money to be used for higher education, starting a business, buying a home, or saving for retirement. The office of state Treasurer Erick Russell, which manages the program, lied to this writer to conceal the eligibility of the children of illegal immigrants but told the truth to a state legislator.

The deputy commissioner of the Social Services Department, Peter Hadler, gave the Mirror an absurd comment about the state’s medical insurance for illegal immigrant kids and pregnant illegal immigrants.

“Sometimes,” Hadler said, “there is trepidation on the part, especially of non-citizens, to participate in government programs. The good news is that that has not proven to be a barrier, and people are enrolling at strong rates and they’re seeking this out.”

Reluctance to claim government benefits? Maybe there was some back when the United States enforced its immigration law and immigrants were expected to cover their own expenses, but there is no reluctance today. Under the Biden administration and Democratic state administrations, illegal immigrants are qualifying not just for free medical insurance but also housing and monthly stipends.

There continues to be much agitation at the state Capitol to extend state medical insurance to all illegal immigrants in the state, though there are concerns about cost. It probably won’t happen during the current session of the General Assembly, since Governor Lamont is reluctant to give up the “fiscal guardrails” keeping order in state government’s finances.

At the rally at the Capitol a spokesman for the coalition seeking to extend state medical insurance to all illegal immigrants in Connecticut said: “Health care is a fundamental human right, and no one should be denied access based on immigration status.”

But anyone can be treated without charge in a public hospital emergency room in the state, and is entering the United States illegally and living in Connecticut a fundamental human right too?

The advocates of extending state medical insurance to all illegal immigrants seem to think so. They seem to think there should be no controls to ensure that immigration can be assimilated without overwhelming public resources — housing, medical care and insurance, and education — and without sparking ethnic conflict and jeopardizing national security and the democratic and secular culture.

With its disastrous shortage of housing and long decline of its public education, Connecticut especially should have awakened to the danger by now.

While the campaign to subsidize illegal immigration dresses itself in righteousness and goodness, it devalues citizenship. It would increase dependence on government, enlarge the constituencies of the Democratic Party, increase the number of Democratic-dominated legislative districts, and drain the private sector. It would make the country ungovernable.

If the Biden administration’s open-borders policy continues and Connecticut continues its own subsidies for illegal immigration and continues its own nullification of federal immigration law, in a year or two the state easily could double its population of illegal immigrants, now estimated at 113,000. Millions of people in troubled and impoverished places like Guatemala, Venezuela, and most of Africa perceive the grand invitation. How many more does Connecticut want? How many more can it afford? 

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

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Palestine would murder protesting U.S. students

By Chris Powell

At Yale University in New Haven, the University of Connecticut in Storrs, and a score of other institutions of higher education, students are protesting the support being given by the United States to Israel in its war with the Hamas regime in Gaza. 

The students want their colleges to dissociate themselves from Israel and from military contractors whose munitions Israel uses. The students call for a ceasefire in the war and chant, “Palestine will be free.”

But there were no protests at the colleges when Gaza attacked Israel on October 7 last year, launching hundreds of rockets and murdering, raping, kidnapping, and mutilating civilians. The protests began only when Israel naturally retaliated and undertook to destroy Hamas. As Israeli Prime Minister Golda Meir remarked a half century ago, the world loves Jews as victims but hates them when they fight back.

And what exactly do the students mean by “Palestine will be free”?

Do they mean freedom of speech, press, religion, and assembly? Due process of law? Sexual freedom? 

If so, the students’ sympathies are laughably misplaced, for there have been no such freedoms in Gaza under Hamas rule, and few such freedoms elsewhere in the Arab world. Gaza’s sympathizers on U.S. college campuses would be murdered within a week if they lived among the people are defending.

So maybe the calls of the students for a ceasefire in Gaza and freedom for Palestine really mean they want the area to be free of Jews. That always has been the objective of the people who have been running Gaza since Israel ended its occupation there in 2005. Back then Palestinians at last had their own state.

But two years later they elected Hamas, a movement sworn to Israel’s destruction. Soon missiles were flying from Gaza into Israel. For years Israel tried to handle the problem merely defensively. Then came last October’s barbaric attack.

Many people are appalled by the destruction and famine in Gaza. By some estimates more than half the structures in the territory have been destroyed or damaged beyond repair, and people are starving. Yet that is common in war. 

Gaza today still looks better than Hamburg, Dresden, Berlin, Tokyo, Hiroshima, Nagasaki, and dozens of other cities in Germany and Japan did in 1945. Those cities and many others had to be leveled by Allied bombing to compel the enemy’s surrender. 

Gaza’s sympathizers complain that Israel’s blockading Gaza has made starvation a weapon of war. But starvation always has been a weapon of war. With its submarines Germany tried to starve Britain out of both world wars, just as Britain and the United States, with naval blockades, tried to do the same to Germany. In 1945 the United States mined most Japanese harbors in what was frankly called Operation Starvation. It was highly effective and if undertaken earlier might have prevented the atomic bombings.

For starvation is a far more merciful weapon than bullets and bombs, as it gives an adversary more of a choice for survival.

Some of Israel’s tactics are fairly criticized. But Israel is fighting for survival against an enemy that, at least until recent days, has refused even to contemplate the “two-state solution” the world presses on Israel. Indeed, the integrity of the Palestinian hate for Jews is amazingly pure, since most Palestinians still prefer their own destruction to co-existence. Their longstanding fanaticism now is generating similar fanaticism among Israelis, who years ago moved far closer to peace than the Palestinian factions ever went.

The protesting students don’t help with their calls for a ceasefire. Since Israel was re-established by the United Nations in 1948 there have been dozens of ceasefires with the irreconcilables who surround the country. What is needed is not another ceasefire but peace — that is, a permanent settlement. 

Israel doesn’t want to rule Gaza. But Gaza wants war, having broken a ceasefire last October. So Gaza will have to be the one to ask for peace, and Gaza, not Israel, is where pressure for peace first must be applied. 

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

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Environmental Rights Amendment could justify almost anything

By Chris Powell

Belief that the world, or at least Connecticut, can be changed by grand but empty proclamations isn’t confined to the Lamont administration and its environmental protection commissioner, Katie Dykes, who recently tried to proclaim the prohibition of gasoline-powered cars. The belief infects much other environmental advocacy in the state, as indicated by the state constitutional amendment being promoted by leading Democratic state legislators and environmental activists.

It’s called the Environmental Rights Amendment.

“Each person,” the proposed amendment says, “shall have an individual right to clean and healthy air, water, soil, ecosystems, and environment and a safe and stable climate for the benefit of public health, safety, and the general welfare. The state shall not infringe upon these rights and shall protect these rights equitably for all people regardless of race, ethnicity, tribal affiliation, gender, socioeconomic status, or geography.

“The state shall serve as trustee of all of the natural resources of this state, including its waters, air, flora, fauna, soils, and climate, and shall conserve, protect, and maintain these resources for the benefit of all people, including present and future generations. Any funds supporting the state in its obligations as trustee as stated in this section shall not be diverted for nontrust purposes. The rights stated in this section are equivalent to all other inalienable rights and may be directly invoked and enforced by the residents of this state.”

What the heck does all this mean? 

Is it another mechanism for requiring Connecticut residents to trade their reliable gasoline-powered cars for unreliable electric ones? Does it mean converting more electric power generation to politically correct mechanisms?

Will it affect the siting of power-generation facilities? Will it impede farming, hunting and fishing, housing and road construction, and industrial production? 

How about human reproduction, population density, and the state’s total population? After all, environmentalism tends to oppose population growth.  

And exactly how may these new rights “be directly invoked and enforced by the residents of this state”?

No constitutional provision enforces itself, nor is any constitutional provision “enforced by the residents of this state,” at least under the state’s current form of government. Implementing all constitutional provisions requires action by the various branches of government — legislative, executive, and judicial.

Nobody can know what the Environmental Rights Amendment means, and that seems to be its point: to let people construe the amendment however they want, to bring lawsuits citing the amendment as authority for their policy desires that are not yet enacted, and to try to get courts to agree, thereby transferring legislative power away from the elected branches of government, the General Assembly and the governor, to the unelected branch, the judiciary.

The amendment easily could be construed to upend all life in Connecticut without ever submitting any specifics to the people or their elected representatives. So much for the right of the people to understand what government is doing or setting out to do. By approving the amendment, the people would be surrendering all their rights.

But if grand and vague constitutional amendments are the way of the future, how about proclaiming other rights for the courts to construe?

Why not the right to efficient government, a government that pursues the public interest instead of the special interest? Why not the right to schools that educate rather than propagandize and socially promote, and the right to be free of crime?

Environmental issues aren’t the only ones Connecticut has yet to resolve perfectly.

Indeed, to improve its environment Connecticut hardly needs something as grand but empty as the Environmental Rights Amendment. The state could do all sorts of ordinary things. 

It could appropriate more to improve sewer and storm water drainage systems. It could invest more in converting trash to energy. It could legislate to reduce unrecyclable consumer product packaging. It could outlaw sales of “nip” liquor bottles, millions of which mar the landscape to pad the profits of the liquor lobby.

Issues like these are already pending. They just lack the grandeur of a constitutional amendment and the opportunity for pious posturing.

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

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Wild ‘Kia boyz’ represent Connecticut’s grim future

By Chris Powell

What may prove to be Connecticut’s best journalism for many years was a 44-minute video documentary of sorts posted last week on YouTube by freelancer Andrew Callaghan and brought to the state’s attention by CTCapitolReport.com.

Callaghan gained the confidence of three teenage gangsters from Bridgeport and video-recorded them on their daily rampages — breaking into and stealing cars day and night throughout the state, speeding away wildly along highways and residential streets, risking death and the death of others, defeating police pursuit, and boasting that no one can catch them.

Of course the young gangsters might be caught, insofar as Callaghan repeatedly located them and even joined them at a government housing project in Bridgeport, where, he found, stolen cars are regularly being “sold” to other young gangsters for a mere hundred dollars or so, the contents of the cars having more value than the cars themselves, which are soon abandoned since they can’t be acquired legally.

Apparently the Bridgeport police were not yet aware of or interested in the use of the housing project as a stolen car market. Nor, apparently, was Mayor Joe Ganim, though his recent re-election campaign was noted for soliciting absentee ballots from public housing residents who may have feared that keeping their apartments required such cooperation with the regime.

Despite the harm they were doing, the kids seemed more lost and nihilistic than evil, glad that someone from another world was paying attention to them. As they sat on the roof of a small abandoned house, taking a break from their mayhem, Callaghan even got them to reflect briefly on their lack of parenting and particularly their lack of fathers.

The young gangsters call themselves the Connecticut Kia Boyz, since most of their target vehicles are Kias, which became notorious for the ease of bypassing their ignition systems with a screwdriver and USB cable.

It is hard not to see the Kia Boyz as the country’s future — the vanguard of the ever-growing urban underclass, products of the family-destroying welfare system; of schools that pay their employees well but fail to educate because they can’t educate when their primary policy is social promotion and parents are no help; and of a criminal-justice system that pretends that social work actually works and is preferable to imprisoning young repeat offenders, giving them what feckless state legislators call “the help they need” without ever defining or delivering it.

What the Kia Boyz and the hundreds of thousands like them around the country need most is parents. But no one in authority in Connecticut dares to inquire into what has happened to parents and particularly to fathers, and why. That’s because such an inquiry might distress the many government employees and others who make their livings doing what doesn’t work or even makes things worse.

Anyone daring to inquire into the collapse of the family would also risk accusations of racism, since fatherlessness and poverty are racially disproportionate,.

So the country’s nearly comprehensive abandonment of behavioral standards continues, worsened by the crushing pressure imposed recently on schools, hospitals, welfare agencies, and government budgets by the Biden administration’s admission of millions of illegal immigrants.

Daniel Patrick Moynihan, the social scientist who became a great U.S. senator, saw it all coming in the famous 1965 report that bears his name.

Moynihan wrote: “From the wild Irish slums of the 19th-century Eastern seaboard to the riot-torn suburbs of Los Angeles, there is one unmistakable lesson in American history: A community that allows a large number of men to grow up in broken families, dominated by women, never acquiring any stable relationship to male authority, never acquiring any set of rational expectations about the future — that community asks for and gets chaos. Crime, violence, unrest, disorder — most particularly the furious, unrestrained lashing out at the whole social structure — that is not only to be expected; it is very near to inevitable. And it is richly deserved.”

Six decades later Moynihan’s prophecy is still ignored even as new horrors fulfill it almost every day.

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

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Turn ‘nips’ into ‘caferos’; and Southbury defies FOI

By Chris Powell

Connecticut won’t be getting any relief this year from the plague of tiny liquor bottles littering the state. Legislation proposed by state Rep. Joe Gresko, D-Stratford, to allow municipalities to prohibit sale of the “nips” failed to get out of a committee in the General Assembly this month. 

Of course the liquor lobby, led by former state Rep. Larry Cafero, R-Norwalk, executive director of the Wine and Spirits Wholesalers of Connecticut, opposes the legislation. Cafero claims to see danger in having different standards of liquor regulation across towns, as if the public welfare would be diminished if “nips” could be purchased in certain towns but not others — just as Connecticut allows local option on marijuana retailing and as if most state residents don’t already do some out-of-town shopping each week.

But since nearly every legislative district has a bunch of liquor stores and most legislators are eagerly susceptible to special interests, the liquor industry’s opposition is always decisive on liquor law. Gresko acknowledges that even most municipal officials probably would oppose his bill as well, since they are glad to have the nickel-a-bottle tax money municipalities get on the sale of “nips” within their borders. 

While the “nip” tax law says cities and towns should use the money for environmental purposes, it needn’t be used to collect the “nip” litter, so few municipalities do anything to collect it, spending the money elsewhere.

“Nip” litter might be reduced if a substantial redeemable deposit was put on each bottle — say, 25 cents or more. But the liquor lobby opposes any deposit because liquor stores don’t want to handle the clutter they spew. The little bottles aren’t recyclable and liquor stores prefer the clutter to go on roadsides.

So people keep buying “nips,” hop in their cars, drink and drive, and toss the empties out the window, leaving any clean-up to civic-minded pedestrians, hikers, and scout troops — and sometimes to emergency personnel responding to drunken-driving crashes.

“Nip” litter gives the lie to all the prattle from Connecticut’s politicians about their devotion to the environment and public safety. They are devoted mainly to tax revenue. Against that revenue and the support of the liquor lobby, the environment and a few lives lost are of no consequence.

Gresko says he may introduce his local option legislation again next year. He should make it stronger, outlawing the sale of “nips” entirely, as New Mexico does. The next campaign against “nips” should go beyond the civic virtue of the pedestrians who collect the litter. It should have some bite illuminating the special-interest venality of the problem, as by calling the discarded bottles not “nips” but “caferos.”

*

For almost 50 years Connecticut has had a pretty good freedom-of-information law and a state commission to enforce it subject to judicial review. Many FOI precedents have been firmly established. But some municipal elected officials defy the law anyway and get away with it until a complaint is adjudicated, since that can take years, fines for violations are small, and fines are seldom imposed no matter how great the contempt shown by the violator.

One of those officials is Southbury First Selectman Jeffrey A. Manville.

A political adversary, former Selectman John Diehl, has asked Manville for access to the personnel files of town employees and particularly to letters of resignation so he can evaluate Manville’s management ability and confirm high turnover among town staffers. Manville is refusing to comply though the law makes public nearly all material in municipal employee files.

Manville says, “I don’t know what can and can’t be released, but there are a lot of employees who are expressing concern” that Diehl’s request could make their personnel files public.

But those files are already public, and if, as he says, Manville really doesn’t know, he needs only to ask someone who does, like the town attorney or the FOI Commission. Instead Manville will break the law to delay what might be bad publicity for himself.  

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

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Praise late chief justice but not for Sheff case

By Chris Powell

As the first woman to get tenure as a professor at Yale Law School, the first woman appointed to Connecticut’s Supreme Court, and the state’s first woman chief justice, Ellen Ash Peters must have had something going for her.

But the tributes offered for her last week after her death at age 94 credited her most for the Supreme Court decision she wrote in the school integration case of Sheff v. O’Neill in 1996 — a decision that has been heavily discredited by its consequences.

The decision, which divided the court 4-3, arose from the concentration of minority students in Hartford’s schools. The court held that Connecticut’s Constitution establishes the right of every public school student to a racially integrated education and that the state’s school districting by municipal boundaries is unconstitutional.

Desirable as racial integration is, nobody took the Sheff decision seriously — not the plaintiffs who brought the underlying lawsuit nor even the court itself. The decision was an empty gesture. Its logic was that all students had to be assigned to school by their race, that municipal school districts had to be dissolved and redrawn to balance their populations racially, and that many students had to be bused long distances to integrate the white student bodies in rural towns.

Of course all that would have been impossible politically and educationally, and none of it ever happened. Indeed, despite its proclamation of a constitutional right and a new era of social justice and better education, the Sheff decision produced little integration at all.

Instead the decision produced 25 more years of subsidiary litigation about enforcement, during which the lawyers for the plaintiffs — nominally some students in Hartford — quickly acknowledged that they really didn’t care about the right of every student in the state to a racially integrated education and wanted only more opportunity for Hartford students to escape the city’s poorly performing schools. The supposed constitutional right of every student in the state to a racially integrated education was a ruse.

Prompted by the Sheff decision, state government gradually appropriated hundreds of millions of dollars to build and operate regional “magnet” schools to mix minority students from Hartford and white students from the suburbs. But the regional schools still left Hartford’s schools with overwhelmingly minority and disadvantaged populations. Worse, the regional schools began to deprive the city’s neighborhood schools of their better and most-parented students, damaging city school performance even more.

Today Hartford’s schools are barely more integrated than they were when the Sheff decision was rendered. While the rest of Connecticut’s schools are slightly more integrated, mainly in the inner suburbs, it is not because of Sheff. That integration has resulted from the general increase in prosperity of members of racial minorities, enabling them to relocate to towns with better schools — or, really, better students.

The latest judicial “settlement” of the Sheff case has state government promising to make more room for Hartford students in regional schools. But this still will leave Hartford’s schools and most others in Connecticut heavily segregated, and the additional integration will remain pathetically small compared to the expense.

The results have been similarly dismal for Connecticut’s other big state Supreme Court decision on civil rights in education, Horton v. Meskill, issued in 1979.

The Horton decision found the state’s system of school financing to be unconstitutional because it relied too much on municipal taxing ability, which varied sharply with property wealth among towns. The resulting disparity in school spending was deemed to be the cause of the awful educational performance in poor municipalities.

State government responded to the Horton decision with much larger financial grants to poor municipalities, leading to a huge increase in the state’s total educational spending. But student performance in poor municipalities remains as bad as it was at the time of the Horton decision. Indeed, for years student performance has been falling almost everywhere in the state.

So it seems that educational performance has little to do with racial integration and spending. Now if only having children outside marriage and parental neglect were unconstitutional.

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

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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.

*

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.

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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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