Chris Powell column

By Chris Powell

Connecticut’s Education Department was fairly candid the other day with its annual accountability report for public education. Student performance statewide remains lower than it was before the recent virus epidemic, though schools have been fully reopened for two years.

But faulty as public education in the state has been, with its social promotion, diminishing standards for students and teachers alike, and ever-increasing politically correct distractions from the academic basics — reading, writing, and arithmetic — it would be wrong to blame Connecticut’s schools for their worsening results. Mostly the schools are just playing the hand they have been dealt.

The Education Department’s chief performance officer, Ajit Gopalakrishnan, makes what may be the crucial observation from the report. He says 93% of ordinary students are performing as they should be so that they will be able to graduate from high school on time, but only 74% of “high needs” students are.

“High needs” students are those from impoverished households, students who haven’t learned English, or students who have disabilities.

That is, the report is probably signifies worsening poverty in the state more than it signifies worsening work done by schools. Children from poor households are coming to school unprepared, farther behind in ordinary parenting and intellectual stimulation at home — when they come to school at all, as the state’s chronic absenteeism rate remains above 20% generally and above 40% in the cities.

Teachers long have been distressed by the growing number of the youngest students who come to school without knowing the alphabet, numbers, and colors, and even without knowing how to behave.

Immigration from other countries is a great ideal but as a practical matter it’s no good when it overwhelms schools with children who don’t speak English and worsens the state’s desperate shortage of housing, driving housing costs up and pushing into poverty even native English speakers with steady jobs.

Schools increasingly are providing not only free lunches to students but also free breakfasts and even free dinners, as so many more students are not being adequately fed at home. The next step may be to ask teachers to take their neglected students home with them at night.

Teachers also are increasingly distressed by worsening student misbehavior and disrespect in school, another sign that neglect and even abuse of children are worsening at home. This misbehavior and disrespect are worst in city schools and making if difficult for those schools to retain teachers.

Education can do wonders, and many teachers are compassionate, take heartfelt interest in students, and become mentors to them. But the more neglect of students at home and the more dysfunctional students in school, the less schools are able to help them.

Just as Connecticut’s emphasis on higher education, with its stratospheric salaries, frivolous course offerings, and laughable arrogance, distracts from the state’s overwhelming and far more important education challenge — lower education — lower education’s increasing effort to remediate child neglect distracts from the source of the problem, the homes where the neglect occurs.

Indeed, as was indicated by falling proficiency test results long before the virus epidemic, Connecticut has probably reached the point of diminishing returns with education and the ever-increasing spending that is never reflected in improvements in student performance.

Reducing household poverty in Connecticut might do far more for student proficiency than spending more in education’s name. But is any reform of education possible now that so many people are on its payroll, the unions of its employees are the most politically influential, and spending more on education is such a thoughtless habit, automatically considered virtuous?

Will the Education Department’s disappointing new accountability report prompt anyone in authority to wonder aloud, or even privately, if Connecticut should do something with education other than more of what is not improving student performance, however much it pleases the people on the payroll?

That is, will anyone accept the report’s invitation to hold schools to account — and then take a look at parents?

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

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By Chris Powell

President Biden’s nomination of Sarah F. Russell to a federal judgeship in Connecticut is supported by her strong resume. Russell teaches law at Quinnipiac University and directs its legal clinic and used to teach at Yale. She is a former assistant federal public defender and was a clerk for two federal judges. 

But three years ago Russell did something stupid, joining hundreds of politically correct and far-left individuals and groups as well as a few crazy ones in signing an open letter to Governor Lamont urging him to release nearly all criminals in Connecticut’s prisons and forbid any new imprisonments because prison is inherently unsafe and was being made more dangerous by the virus epidemic then underway. The letter was actually a long manifesto denouncing the criminal-justice system generally.

At a confirmation hearing two weeks ago Republicans on the Senate Judiciary Committee confronted Russell about the letter, which she had neglected to include among the background materials she had compiled for the committee. Russell apologized for omitting the letter but insisted she didn’t remember it and then tried clumsily to evade questions about how she could function properly as a judge if she really believed the assertions to which she had signed her name. 

Pressed, Russell started to retreat from the letter, saying that as a judge she would follow the law.

Russell well may know better than the crazy stuff in the letter. She may have been induced to sign it by collegiality to the leftist academic cloister and may not have thought much about its substance. But thoughtlessly is not how anyone, much less a law professor, should behave when addressing the governor about policy, even as Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Texas, was only too happy to take Russell’s letter seriously.

“Lots of people sign something kooky,” Cruz told her, “but lots of people haven’t been nominated to be a judge.”

To sustain her nomination in the narrowly divided and ferociously partisan Senate, Russell may have to start remembering the letter and declare that it no longer fully represents her views. But she signed it only three years ago, not 20 or 30, and it will remain what Cruz called it: “astonishing.” 

*

Russell’s nomination is largely the doing of Connecticut’s U.S. senators, Richard Blumenthal and Chris Murphy, both Democrats, who, by tradition, privately assemble and review possible candidates for federal judgeships in the state and recommend their favorites to the president. While the senators might not have come across Russell’s letter even if they conducted their review in public, they usually focus on political ideology and opportunities for patronage. Russell’s leftist leanings and the gender integration she might bring to the judiciary would appeal strongly to the senators.

Of course the judicial nomination process is the same when Republican presidents and senators are in charge of it. Typically Republicans seek conservative nominees, as President Trump did, spectacularly pushing the Supreme Court and the rest of the federal judiciary to the right, sometimes nominating people even loonier than Russell’s letter makes her seem.

The ferocious partisanship in Congress, worsened by the narrow majorities, is not improving the staffing of the judiciary. But the process often has been uneven. 

*

When, in 1970, President Richard Nixon nominated a formerly segregationist federal appellate judge, G. Harrold Carswell, to the Supreme Court, the nominee was scorned as “mediocre.” Whereupon Sen. Roman L. Hruska, R-Nebraska, rose to Carswell’s defense. “Even if he were mediocre,” Hruska said, “there are a lot of mediocre judges and people and lawyers. They are entitled to a little representation, aren’t they, and a little chance? We can’t have all Brandeises, Frankfurters, and Cardozos.”

Hruska was ridiculed for asserting mediocrity’s entitlement to representation, but as a practical matter he was right, as Russell’s confirmation may show. Few judges will be brilliant all the time, and some may not even be very smart, just politically correct, left or right. With luck Russell at least will notice eventually that Connecticut is being ravaged by repeat offenders, people who never should have been released from prison, and that her letter to the governor didn’t help.  

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

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By Chris Powell

Most Connecticut state legislators purport to hate the car tax — that is, municipal property taxes on automobiles. A special committee of the General Assembly has been created to review the tax and suggest alternatives for raising the billion dollars it pays into municipal government treasuries each year.

Since cars are sold more frequently, collecting the property tax on cars is more complicated than the property tax on residential and commercial property. Since the property tax on cars is not escrowed as property taxes on mortgaged properties usually are, car taxes fall unexpectedly on many people when the bills arrive from the local tax collector. As the economy weakens, poverty worsens, and more people live from paycheck to paycheck, the car tax is resented even more.

Another complaint is that the car tax is unfair because identical cars may be taxed much differently among towns. But this isn’t peculiar to the car tax; it’s a function of differences in local tax rates. Similar residential and commercial properties are taxed differently among municipalities as well because of different tax rates, and different rates are not necessarily bad, insofar as some municipalities choose to spend and tax much more than others.

Eight years ago a state law reduced the disparities in car taxes, imposing a car tax cap of 32.46 mills. According to the Waterbury Republican-American, the car taxes of 54 municipalities are capped — that is, their general property tax rate is higher than the car tax cap. The disparities in taxes on similar cars have been reduced but often remain sharp.  

The disparities in all municipal property tax rates result mainly from the concentration of poverty in the cities, which in turn results mainly from the concentration of the least expensive housing there and from the decision of municipal officials, under political pressure and the pressure of state labor law, to pay local government employees more generously, as well as from the inefficiency encouraged by large grants of state financial aid.

Inconvenient and unfair as the car tax may be, the real problem with it is that legislators and governors don’t dislike it as much as they like the revenue it raises and the ever-increasing spending they require in state and municipal government. Indeed, the most obvious remedy for the dislike of the car tax isn’t even proposed — to reduce municipal spending or reduce state spending and redirect the savings to municipalities.

As always, cutting spending is out of the question at both levels of government, even in the face of policies and programs that don’t achieve their nominal objectives. The broadest and most expensive policies and programs, like education and welfare for the able-bodied, are never audited for their failures. To the contrary, their failures are mistaken as evidence to do still more of what hasn’t accomplished what the public imagines the objectives to be.

That is, politically the status quo is loved far more than the car tax is hated.

Since even $100 million in spending cuts can’t be found in state and municipal budgets, how could state government find the billion dollars needed to eliminate the car tax?

Of course state Senate President Martin M. Looney, Democrat of New Haven, has his usual idea — raising taxes on the wealthy, particularly on their capital gains. Progressivity in taxation is always a fair issue and matter of judgment, but in Connecticut it is meant less as justice than as protection for inefficiency and patronage.

Another idea is an 8% sales tax on homeowner and auto insurance policies. That wouldn’t be more popular than the car tax, if people noticed it. But they wouldn’t if it was levied against insurers on a wholesale basis, like the state’s wholesale tax on fuel and the taxes on electric utilities that are passed along hidden in electricity prices. Then the sales tax would be hidden in the price of insurance, and insurers, not state government, would be blamed for the price increases while legislators congratulated themselves for eliminating the car tax at last.

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

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By Chris Powell

According to a report issued the other day by Dalio Education, the Connecticut-based philanthropy, thousands of children and young adults in the state are “disconnected” — uneducated, alienated, unemployed, or even unemployable.

Meanwhile Connecticut Attorney General William Tong had the state join a national lawsuit against Meta, operator of the social media companies Facebook and Instagram, alleging that thousands more of the state’s children are too connected — to social media. Instagram particularly, Tong and other attorneys general claim, has grabbed kids with “addictive platforms” that have caused a “youth mental health catastrophe.”

The attorneys general claim that this attractiveness to children violates state consumer protection laws and the federal Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act.

But the essential claim of the lawsuits is just that the “platforms” are too interesting to kids. A statement from Tong’s office condemns “features like infinite scroll and near-constant alerts,” features that “were created with the express goal of hooking young users. These manipulative tactics continually lure children and teens back onto the platform.”

But the only new element here is the technology being used in pursuit of an objective, not the objective itself, which is as old as storytelling: gaining and holding on to an audience. That was the objective of troubadors, fairs, and theaters, and then newspapers, magazines, radio, and television, long before computers and the internet. Newspapers, magazines, radio, and television still sensationalize to grab audiences to sell advertising just as Facebook and Instagram do, though Facebook and Instagram may do it better because their subjects are the members of their audience themselves.

Kids spent much less time gossiping about each other before the advent of the telephone. Before television they were far less fascinated by violence and guns. Before welfare for childbearing outside marriage they were far better raised and educated and healthier mentally and physically.

Any “addiction” here is not physical, as with drugs, but psychological. People can walk away from Facebook and Instagram if they have something else to do. Indeed, most users of Facebook and Instagram do have other things to do — like make a living.

It’s just the nature of young people to be self-absorbed, neurotic, insecure, and idle, more so if they live in homes with little parental supervision and in a society that demands no educational accomplishment from them.

Citing company documents obtained by The Wall Street Journal, the attorneys general cite the indifference of Facebook and Instagram to the neurosis its “platforms” can induce in children, especially girls. Of course children probably shouldn’t be exposed to some things until they are older, if then. But if Facebook and Instagram are destroying young people, it couldn’t happen if their parents didn’t provide them with mobile phones and computers that allow internet access to those “platforms.”

Attorney General Tong blames Facebook and Instagram for the inability of children to get enough sleep, as if children didn’t lose sleep because of other obsessions long before social media. But if some children still aren’t getting enough sleep, who should be called to account first? The distractions that interest the kids — that is, themselves and their friends and acquaintances? Government? What about their parents?

Whether they are “disconnected” or too connected, children need constant attention from parents so they remain engaged with life without becoming alienated, neurotic, self-absorbed, and obsessed. Is a government that increasingly throws gambling, marijuana, and transgenderism at children, a government that lets just about any danger bypass immigration law and infiltrate the country, really fit to regulate children’s use of social media even in their own homes, as the attorneys general suggest?

In the land of the First Amendment, is government really fit to prevent any particular mechanism of expression from reaching young people? If so, how would that be any different from the supposed “book banning” many of the attorneys general oppose?

Or might the country do better in regard to social media, “disconnection,” and other troublesome issues if it stopped destroying the family with welfare policy and education with social promotion?

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

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By Chris Powell

How did Connecticut come to have, according to the state Education Department, more than 20% of its young students chronically absent from school? 

How did the state come to have, according to Dalio Education, about 20% of its young people “at risk” or “disconnected,” having dropped out of school or being in danger of dropping out, or unemployed or even unemployable?

Nearly everyone in authority blames it on the recent virus epidemic, during which, under the pressure of the teacher unions, Connecticut closed most of its schools, resorting to the silly pretense of “remote learning.” But schools have been open again for two years.

No, something much bigger is going on here, something that began before the epidemic, though the epidemic worsened it — the steady impoverishment and demoralization of the people at the bottom of society, what social scientists have called the underclass.

Of course there have always been and probably always will be poor people, for reasons of bad luck, bad character, or bad government policy. But not so long ago few households in Connecticut needed anything like state government’s new Learner Engagement and Attendance Program, or LEAP, wherein social workers visit the homes of chronically absent students, ask parents about the obstacles to their children’s attendance, direct them to resources, and urge them to try harder to get their children to school.

Not so long ago even poor parents in Connecticut understood that getting their children to school was their primary obligation and that if they failed, “truant officers” might visit them for enforcement. But today “truant officers” are as unfashionable as parental responsibility. 

Many parents who don’t get their children to school are receiving various financial supports from government that could be conditioned on improved attendance by their children. Indeed, frequent failure to get one’s children to school could be defined as child neglect or abuse — that is, a crime.

If government took chronic absenteeism that seriously, it might be taken more seriously by negligent parents. But with the LEAP program state government policy now is essentially just to ask, “Pretty please?” — and to spend a lot of money doing so while achieving only marginal results.

*

Last week at a press conference at East Hartford High School, Governor Lamont and state Education Commissioner Charlene Russell-Tucker boasted that the LEAP program and others had helped reduce chronic absenteeism in the state’s schools from 23.7% in the 2021-22 school year to 20% in the 2022-23 school year. The governor and commissioner acknowledged that chronic absenteeism remains a huge problem, so state government plans to have spent about $25 million on the LEAP program by 2026.

The merely marginal results suggest that while “pretty please?” policy may put a few hundred more people on government’s payroll, it will not come close to ensuring education for children stuck in the underclass, alienated, disconnected, and “at risk,” and incorporate them into society so they can realize their potential in good rather than menial jobs and enjoy productive lives instead of wallow in dependence like their parents or turn to crime.

*

Despite government’s claims of a strong economy, conditions in Connecticut are worsening for many households amid high inflation, the worst housing scarcity ever, increasing homelessness, and declining educational achievement that leaves many young people ever less qualified for good jobs.

But hard times come and go. Parental responsibility endures. When government fails so badly to enforce parental responsibility that chronic absenteeism in city schools approaches 50%, as it does in Connecticut, many people seem to have gotten the impression that it really doesn’t matter how they raise their children — that the worst they will suffer is some cajoling from a social worker. 

That impression already has been conveyed powerfully by Connecticut’s educational policy of social promotion, which tells parents and students that students will be graduated from high school even if they learn nothing. So why should they worry about being chronically absent?

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

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By Chris Powell

Respectable people are calling for an unconditional ceasefire in the long war between Gaza and Israel, but their calls came only after Israel began retaliating for Gaza’s most barbaric attack and kidnappings. While respectable people may have been appalled by the attack, they aren’t appalled enough to suggest that anything should be done about it beyond deploring it.

For many years Israel had been indulging attacks from Gaza, relying mainly on anti-missile systems, occasionally responding with punitive fire aimed at the leaders and military facilities of Gaza’s Hamas regime. But these retaliations were not severe enough to solve the problem. Indeed, the so-called blockade Israel has imposed on Gaza has just been shown to be completely ineffective against the import of armaments. 

A blockade against food, water, and medicine might be effective against armaments as well, but respectable people insist that Israel feed and heal its enemies, a first in the history of warfare.

Remarkably, there are no calls from within Gaza itself for an unconditional ceasefire, only hints that some hostages might be released if Israel stops fighting back.

Respectable people say that the conflict can be ended only by “a two-state solution,” one state for Jews and another for Palestinians. But there already are and for 18 years have been two states, Gaza having been a Palestinian state since Israel evacuated the territory in 2005 and Yasser Arafat’s Palestine Liberation Organization drove in waving automatic rifles to the cheers of Gaza residents. Soon Gazans elected Hamas to run their government, attacks on Israel began, and Israel responded with its ineffective blockade.

Even now Gaza is recognized as independent by many countries, including Russia, which last week received Gazan diplomats.

So the “two-state solution” did not stop the conflict. Israel accepted two states but the Palestinians did not. The conflict can end only when Palestinian leaders forthrightly accept Israel, whereupon many of them will be murdered by their own people, or when one side destroys the other.

Respectable people and even President Biden assert that the people of Gaza are not Hamas. But the people of Gaza installed Hamas in their only election, held in 2006, and they sustain their government, and no one in Gaza seems to be beseeching it to end the war against Israel in exchange for peace. No, the Hamas charter demands Israel’s destruction, Hamas acts as if it wants the destruction of all Jews as well, and most Palestinians concur.

Maybe with enough leveling of Gaza by Israeli bombs and enough misery the people of Gaza will change their mind about war against Israel. But for the moment Gaza is Hamas and Hamas is Gaza. There is no difference.

What exactly should Israel do to end the constant attacks from Gaza? Respectable people don’t say. They imply that Israel should just live with the attacks. Meanwhile Hamas’ position, and Gaza’s, is that Israel should disappear.

So there is nothing to negotiate. Israel can survive only by making Gaza disappear. 

Respectable people at least may admire the searing integrity of the Gazan position, which is the Palestinian position generally: that misery and death are preferable to letting Jews have peace. Indeed, those who insist on death for others invite it to come for them too.  

*

Connecticut’s five members of the U.S. House of Representatives, all Democrats, along with all other Democrats in the House, might want to reflect on the ouster of Speaker Kevin McCarthy. For while McCarthy’s ouster was superficially a Republican matter, nearly all the votes to remove him came from Democrats.

By the standards of the House Republican caucus McCarthy was a moderate. Indeed, he was assailed by the extreme conservatives in his caucus because he had compromised with the Democrats to avert a federal government shutdown. A few Democratic votes would have kept McCarthy as speaker.

But last week the Republicans united and elected Louisiana’s Mike Johnson as the new speaker. Johnson’s positions are even more contrary to Democratic positions than McCarthy’s were, so the Democrats have turned out to be the great enablers of the Republicans they consider the most dangerous. What brilliant strategy!    

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

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By Chris Powell

Flash! Having surveyed its members, the Connecticut Education Association, the state’s largest teacher union, reports that they are unhappy with their jobs and want higher pay and less accountability. A survey last year got the same results, and future surveys well may get the same results forever.

Ho-hum. For this unhappiness has been manifested for many months as teachers have left the profession for other jobs, retired early, or transferred to less troubled school systems, and inadequate compensation probably isn’t the big reason teachers are unhappy. 

Rather than compensation, the big problem for teachers is working conditions.

While the survey found teachers complaining about “school and classroom decisions made by politicians and non-educators,” that is just their usual resentment of democracy. If schools are public, teachers must answer for themselves to outsiders, especially since school performance in Connecticut has been crashing for years.

More revealing in the survey were the complaints about lack of respect for teachers among students, the weakening of student discipline, and the increasing mental illness of students. Indeed, from the clamor around the state for mental health clinics in schools and outpatient mental health clinics for children generally, it may be a wonder that Connecticut still has any education at all.

Worsening working conditions and a decline in respect are also driving people out of police work, particularly in Connecticut’s cities, where mayhem and social dysfunction are rampant despite state government’s insistence that crime is going down. Crazy as it is, police officers often can be paid more to work in relatively safe suburbs than in dangerous cities. State government long has spent plenty of money for raising teacher salaries in cities but not for raising police salaries there. Maybe that should change.

School performance seldom has been an issue in municipal elections but it has become one in a few towns this year. This year Republicans in heavily Democratic Manchester actually have something to say, focusing on what they call the town’s “failing” schools. 

Lower performance in schools became almost inevitable as Manchester, like other inner suburbs, opened itself to multi-family housing in recent decades, reducing average household income and increasing the number of students from single-parent households. Acknowledging the education problem as the Republicans are doing is a start, but exactly what can school boards do about declining performance? The campaign signs don’t say.

Something can be done even in schools with many disadvantaged students, like tightening discipline and putting an overwhelming focus on the basics — English and math — while scrapping the politically correct nonsense state government likes to emphasize to distract from worsening academic performance.

But education is first a matter of parenting, and lately in many school systems a quarter or more of students are chronically absent. Schools can’t educate kids who don’t show up reliably, and getting kids to school is the obligation of parents. 

That is, Connecticut’s schools aren’t failing as much as its parents are, and what candidate for office dares to tell his own constituents that “failing” schools are their own fault?

*   

The political left in Connecticut refuses to see that welfare policy’s destruction of the family and education policy’s elimination of academic standards are causing poverty and social disintegration, as well as sparking opposition to housing construction in the suburbs. For people made poor by welfare and education policy are civic burdens.

Meanwhile the political right in Connecticut refuses to see that its opposition to housing construction in the suburbs creates poverty too, increasing the cost of housing beyond what even decent and productive working people can afford and pushing the poor deeper into destitution.

The result is political gridlock on housing.

Could there be some compromise, whereby government stopped manufacturing poverty and social disintegration and facilitated housing construction everywhere, especially inexpensive housing with government finance to help people become homeowners?

Not so long ago both the left and the right understood that society was healthier and more stable and property more secure when everyone had some.

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

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By CHRIS POWELL

Few people in Connecticut have the impression that there recently has been less crime in the state. Most people seem to feel that crime here is exploding.

But last week the state Department of Emergency Services and Public Protection — the state police — reported that crime in Connecticut is down on an annual basis: 4% overall, with a 3% reduction in violent crime, a 13% reduction in murders, and an 18% reduction in robberies.

What explains the dichotomy?

The leader of the Republican minority in the state House of Representatives, Vincent Candelora of North Branford, interviewed last week by WTIC-AM1080’s Will Marotti, said plainly of the crime report, “Nobody believes those numbers.”

There may be a good reason not to believe them. After all, four months after an outside audit concluded that state troopers may have issued thousands of fake traffic tickets, perhaps to sabotage an effort to discern racial discrimination in traffic enforcement, the state police still haven’t produced an explanation. While Governor Lamont hasn’t publicly criticized anyone about the scandal, he is seeking replacements for the department’s top two executives.

But the public’s disbelief and the loss of state police credibility don’t mean that the crime numbers have been falsified like the traffic tickets. The disbelief may arise from other factors.

*

Social disintegration is worsening and becoming more distressing even if it doesn’t always result in arrests and crime data.

More children than ever are skipping school and more parents than ever are letting them. Even before schools were closed during the virus epidemic student performance was crashing, diminishing young people’s job qualifications and earning potential, while Connecticut’s manufacturers complain they can’t find skilled workers for thousands of jobs.

Homelessness and drug abuse are rising again. Contempt for law and decency seems to be rising as well, with crimes becoming more brazen even if not more numerous. Car thefts and shoplifting are up, and reckless and discourteous driving and road rage seem to have exploded.

Severe inflation has made times harder and people seem more confrontational. Last week alone Connecticut police officers shot and killed three men in separate incidents, all appearing to involve men who threatened an officer with guns.

Last week the state’s biggest teacher union complained again about disrespectful students, and the Connecticut Hospital Association complained that patients and visitors increasingly are assaulting hospital staff. But arresting students and maintaining order and learning in schools have become politically incorrect, and while the hospitals said they aren’t going to take the abuse anymore, let’s see if they start to call the police.

Connecticut may remain, as Governor Lamont said in response to the crime report, “one of the safest states in the country,” but the comparison with other states is little consolation. Connecticut long was better than other states, and now many people feel as if the state is falling apart, even if not quite as fast as the rest of the country.

*

Maybe the crime report and public perceptions don’t really conflict as much as they seem to. For the report covers calendar 2022 and social disintegration may have worsened greatly in the 10 months since.

And maybe journalism has made social disintegration seem worse than it is. For the substance of journalism in the state has been much reduced in recent years as its audience has been fractured by social media and civic engagement has declined. These trends have diminished the profitability of news organizations and caused them to eliminate staff, especially for matters of government, and to devote more coverage to crime, accidents, and fires, which is usually easier and less expensive while it crowds out more important news.

“If it bleeds, it leads” long has been the rule for local television news and it is being followed more diligently. This may hold on to audiences but also may give a misleading impression that encourages people to move to Florida. But that state has plenty of crime, accidents, and fires too even if victims there don’t freeze to death.

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

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By Chris Powell

By most accounts Hartford Mayor Luke Bronin, who is retiring at the end of the year, is leaving the city a better place after two four-year terms in office. Bronin has been competent and decent, has encouraged downtown housing development to try to draw the middle class back to the city, and has avoided demagoguery. 

So he will be missed, if maybe not for too long, since Connecticut’s majority party, the Democrats, could do worse than Bronin for a candidate for governor if Governor Lamont declines to seek a third term in 2026.

But despite Bronin’s work Hartford’s problems remain serious — more serious even than generally understood. 

While the city was on the verge of bankruptcy when Bronin took office — and indeed should have filed for bankruptcy, the better to shape up financially — bankruptcy was avoided not because of any reforms but because state government assumed $500 million of the city’s bonded debt. This was a bailout unprecedented for Connecticut, enacted by a dull-witted General Assembly that, despite the huge amount of money at stake, didn’t realize what it was doing.

Bronin claims credit for the bailout but it was mainly the doing of Gov. Dannel P. Malloy. Bronin’s contribution was his seeming likely to be more competent than his predecessors as mayor and thus not to cause more embarrassments.

While Lamont’s administration has made good progress reducing state government’s unfunded pension liabilities, it was facilitated largely by the billions of dollars in “emergency” aid bestowed on the state by the federal government. Meanwhile, as Connecticut’s Hearst newspapers noted the other day, Hartford city government’s unfunded pension liabilities have worsened dramatically. 

According to the Hearst report, in 2014 the city’s pension fund was 80% funded and had unfunded liabilities of about $252 million. But the most recent estimate is that the fund has only 67% of the assets it should have to be considered sound and its unfunded liabilities have more than doubled to nearly $600 million. On top of that, the performance of the city’s pension fund appears to be very poor.

Mayor Bronin told Hearst that the “fundamental” problem with the city’s finances is the same with all Connecticut’s cities — that “the local property tax is the only significant source of local revenue.” But that’s not really the big problem.

For Hartford’s property tax rate long has been high, as the tax rates of all Connecticut’s cities long have been — powerful disincentives to business, industry, and residents with any property wealth. The cities raise plenty of money from their high tax rates and still get about half their budgets reimbursed by state government in one way or another. So complaints about all the tax-exempt property concentrated in the cities are not persuasive. 

For decades city property taxes and city government spending have risen fairly steadily, not coincidentally along with the generous compensation of their unionized employees, even as city populations have grown more impoverished. Indeed, the longstanding disaster of Connecticut’s urban experience has caused and sustained suburban and rural opposition first to racial integration and now to construction of just about any housing that any normal person can afford.

Of course Connecticut’s urban problems arise as much from state government’s mistaken welfare, education, and government labor policies as from any malfeasance in the cities. The situation actually has been designed this way, the cities being operated as poverty and patronage factories for the state’s majority political party, with suburbs and rural towns not caring much as long as the poverty manufactured and expensively ministered to is mostly confined with its pathologies.

This is Connecticut’s social contract and it wouldn’t have endured so long if it wasn’t intended to do what it does. 

Will any mayor of a Connecticut city ever have the political courage to challenge the social contract and the mistaken policies that underwrite it? Or will there just be more ineffective social programs and bailouts? 

The lack of action on the insolvency of Hartford’s pension fund suggests confidence that another bailout will always be an option.

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

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By CHRIS POWELL

Maybe a couple of the state’s problems can solve each other. 

Many suburban shopping malls are fading and failing as people increasingly shop from home via the internet and have their purchases delivered. With its virus hysteria government keeps scaring them against going out, and as the economy weakens, many people can’t afford to buy as much.

Meanwhile Connecticut has a desperate shortage of housing and soaring housing prices are a major cause of the worsening poverty in the state.

So property developers here and around the country are interested in converting fading and failed malls to housing or attaching multi-family housing to them. 

Since mall property is already in commercial use and fully equipped with utilities, zoning obstacles and neighborhood objections should be much reduced, and new residents on site might substantially increase the customer base for retailers and professional services remaining in a mall. If enough housing at malls was built, housing costs would diminish for everyone.

A project successfully combining a shopping mall with a lot of new housing might create a walkable environment with much less need for cars — making something resembling city life available in the suburbs without the poverty-induced nastiness that has overtaken most cities.

Sustaining rather than eradicating poverty would remain big business for government, but any substantial increase in housing might do more to reduce poverty than any other government social program.

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OBSESSED WITH TRIVIA: New Haven sometimes seems to be striving to embody the metaphor about rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic.

The city’s Peace Commission may think it has achieved the big objective cited on its internet site — averting nuclear war — but it seems to have been surprised by Gaza’s recent attack on Israel. And though crime continues to plague New Haven while more than three-quarters of the city’s schoolchildren are not performing at grade level, many being chronically absent, the other day a committee of the city council found time for a different issue: whether the city should become the first municipality in Connecticut to prohibit the sale of menthol cigarettes.

The U.S. Food and Drug Administration is also moving to ban menthol cigarettes. The rationale offered is that menthol flavoring in cigarettes appeals especially to children and members of racial minorities. The unstated rationale is that children and racial minorities can’t be persuaded to avoid smoking.

A municipal ban would be only pious posturing. It would not stop city residents from crossing the city line to buy menthol cigarettes in adjacent towns. Indeed, a ban well might create another contraband market in the city. Even federal law and state law haven’t prevented deadly drugs like heroin and fentanyl from ravaging New Haven and other cities. 

Besides, a municipal ban on menthol cigarettes would be laughably hypocritical, insofar as New Haven has approved five marijuana dispensaries in the city, though marijuana presents health risks as serious as those of menthol cigarettes. But somehow marijuana has become politically correct. 

Why are New Haven’s elected officials bothering with this silliness? Probably for the same reason state legislators also spend so much time on the trivial. It distracts from their irrelevance to the big dangers of everyday life and Connecticut’s longstanding problems that are never solved as the state continues to decline.

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ANOTHER HIDDEN TAX: Electricity rates aren’t the only place where state government imposes hidden taxes. 

A recent report in the Connecticut Mirror reminded about another tax-hiding mechanism, the state’s tax on bulk sales of gasoline, which lately has been about 22 cents per gallon. Gas stations pay the tax to wholesalers and recover it from their customers at the pump, where the retail sales tax is added, another 25 cents per gallon.

Drivers have some idea of the retail sales tax, especially since state government reduced it temporarily after the gas price spike resulting from Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and the international sanctions on Russian oil. But few people know about the wholesale tax.

The wholesale tax on gas is another way state government encourages people to blame industry for high prices when government itself is largely responsible.

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

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