Hospital rescues promise far higher medical costs

By CHRIS POWELL

Someone had to be found to take over Waterbury Hospital, Manchester Memorial Hospital, and Rockville General Hospital in Vernon as they wallowed in bankruptcy after being looted by their private-equity owner, Prospect Medical Holdings. Connecticut couldn’t afford to let the hospitals go out of business and leave major population centers without service. The dislocation of patients and the burdening of the remaining hospitals would have been disastrous.

Wesleyan’s vegetarian plaque may become more persuasive

Connecticut designs itself to prohibit affordability

Report on state’s homeless mocks housing legislation

But the resolution of Prospect’s bankruptcy presents its own serious problems.

Waterbury Hospital is to be acquired by the University of Connecticut Health Center in Farmington — that is, by state government. UConn Health is also planning to acquire two other troubled hospitals, Bristol Hospital and Day Kimball Hospital in Putnam. 

Meanwhile Manchester and Rockville hospitals are to be acquired by Hartford HealthCare. 

This means a big reduction in competition in the hospital business, since UConn already holds a large share of the market between Farmington and Waterbury and Hartford HealthCare operates not just Hartford Hospital but six other hospitals in the state.

Hundreds of millions of dollars probably will have to be spent to put the former Prospect hospitals back into decent condition. But UConn Health long has run big deficits and often has turned to state government for supplemental appropriations to cover them. 

Further, while Waterbury Hospital is to be operated as a subsidiary of UConn Health, not as a state agency in its own right, the hospital’s unionized employees will strive to become de-facto state government employees with compensation increased to state-employee levels. 

So UConn Health’s acquisition of Waterbury Hospital probably will deepen the money pit UConn Health has become and create an empire of expensive political patronage unless Governor Lamont and the General Assembly want a different result and pay close attention to operations. Of course since the governor and the legislature are Democratic, their inclination will be to maximize the patronage and expense, especially since medical care is already essentially a big racket of cost shifting and camouflaging that makes it impossible for the public to assign responsibility. 

Indeed, the governor and the General Assembly have just authorized UConn Health to issue its own bonds and acquire hospitals beyond Bristol and Day Kimball, potentially creating a statewide government-operated hospital system. As the Yankee Institute’s Meghan Porfolio writes, “UConn Health can now buy hospitals, borrow money to expand them, and pass the debt to taxpayers.”

No oversight is in place for any of this. Of course there’s hardly any oversight in place for any state government operations, but the governor and legislature seem not to have given a thought to the need for oversight, even though Waterbury, Manchester, and Rockville hospitals were run into the ground in large part because state government provided so little oversight. 

While Hartford HealthCare doesn’t have state government standing behind it, it hasn’t had the chronic financial trouble UConn Health has had. But Hartford HealthCare also may come under strain as it rehabilitates the Manchester and Rockville hospitals. 

So prices to insurers and patients at all hospitals connected with these transactions are likely to rise along with the direct costs to state government from UConn Health’s expansion.

Waterbury, Manchester, and Rockville hospitals had to be kept going, and Bristol and Day Kimball hospitals must be kept going too. But the cost almost surely will be far higher than it should be and soon will be considered unavoidable when it wasn’t unavoidable at all.

NOT ENOUGH CHOICE: How strange that New York City had ranked-choice voting for its political party nominating primaries for mayor this year but not for the mayoral election itself, whose outcome might have been different if potential candidates and voters knew that ranked-choice voting would be available.

Socialist Democrat Zohran Mamdani won barely 50% of the vote in the election, even though his leading opponent was New York State’s disgraced and unlikeable former governor, Andrew Cuomo, who had been compelled to resign four years ago for sexually harassing women.

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

Wesleyan’s vegetarian plaque may become more persuasive

By CHRIS POWELL

Wesleyan University in Middletown often rivals Yale University in New Haven for nutty political correctness, and that’s how many people perceived its most recent news. A group of Wesleyan students, faculty members, and alumni has asked the university to erect a plaque outside the university’s dining hall to memorialize all the animals killed for the food eaten inside.

Connecticut designs itself to prohibit affordability

Report on state’s homeless mocks housing legislation

State government endures three more scandals in a week

Such a plaque would be a rebuke not just to meat eaters on campus but to the university itself, so it’s hard to see how Wesleyan could erect it without also taking meat off the dining hall menu and formally converting the campus to vegetarianism. Once the plaque was erected, anything less would be hypocrisy.

Such a plaque also might make the university’s priorities seem strange, what with poverty, homelessness, child neglect, and other human ills worsening throughout Connecticut, often within sight of the university.

Even so, the plaque concludes: “There will come a time when we will look back on this treatment of our fellow animals as indefensible. We will recognize that all animals feel, think, love, and strive to live — even those who do not look or behave exactly as humans do — and that their lives are as precious to them as ours are to us.”

This is not so nutty insofar as society has already conceded some of it in principle with laws against gratuitous cruelty to animals. But vegetarianism is up against all history, starting with animals themselves, many of which have no scruples against eating each other. 

In Genesis the Bible conveys divine approval for eating meat: “And God said, Let us make man in our image, after our likeness: and let them have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over the cattle, and over all the Earth, and over every creeping thing that creepeth upon the Earth.”

Indeed, without the meat industry many animal species and breeds, being raised primarily for food, might virtually disappear. Who would go through the trouble and expense of raising beef cattle just for the sake of biodiversity?

But guilt about eating meat is not peculiar to Wesleyan. There is much ethics-based vegetarianism in Hinduism, and some American Indian tribes offered prayers of thanks to honor the animals they hunted for food, though whether this was sincere respect or just rationalization for participating in the kill is arguable. Few people ordering hamburgers have to witness the prerequisite slaughtering and butchering of the animals their meat comes from. Witnessing such spectacles in the stockyards and meat-packing factories can depress appetites.

Of course vegetarianism does not automatically confer goodness. Taking a break from plotting mass murder in November 1941, Hitler assured his dinner companions, “The future belongs to us vegetarians.” 

It’s still better that he lost the war.   

But the case for vegetarianism, or at least for greater respect for animals, is getting stronger for new reasons.

The companion animals, particularly dogs and cats, long have been famous for their sometimes uncanny ability to communicate with and protect people. But in recent years home videos posted on the internet have proven what had been mainly anecdotal — the astounding intelligence and ability to communicate with humans possessed not just by dogs and cats but even by wild animals, farm animals, and birds as well. 

Amelia Thomas, a journalist, animal scientist, and farmer in Canada, has detailed this in a fascinating new book, “What Sheep Think About the Weather: How to Listen to What Animals Are Trying to Say.” 

“There’s no us and them,” Thomas says. “Rather, infinite varieties of us.” 

Having worked a little with chimpanzees, some of whom have learned American sign language, Thomas quotes the primatologist Mary Lee Jensvold: “The more you appreciate what thinking beings they are, the more you also understand the depth of their suffering.” 

There are no chimps on the menu at Wesleyan, but if the vegetarian plaque is erected there, over time it may get harder to argue with.  

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

Connecticut designs itself to prohibit affordability

By CHRIS POWELL

Perhaps taking a hint from socialist Democrat Zohran Mamdani’s successful campaign for mayor of New York City, whose slogan was “A city we can afford,” politicians in both parties in Connecticut are taking “affordability” for their own platforms, this state being nearly as expensive as its western neighbor.

Report on state’s homeless mocks housing legislation

State government endures three more scandals in a week

Can Democrats ever deliver ‘a city we can afford’?

Some Connecticut Democrats, including Governor Lamont, have even attributed their party’s success in this month’s municipal elections to a supposed commitment to affordability. This is laughable. Far more votes were probably pushed toward the Democrats by the political chaos in Washington than by any achievement in “affordability” in Connecticut, though the six-week partial shutdown of the federal government was an entirely Democratic stunt, not President Trump’s doing. 

Yes, Connecticut’s Democratic state administration hasn’t raised taxes much lately, but municipal property taxes still go up because state law and policy determine much of how municipalities spend their money. These days there’s not much difference between state and municipal finance.

Greenwich state Sen. Ryan Fazio, a candidate for the Republican nomination for governor next year, pressed the “affordability” theme in response to Lamont’s declaration of candidacy for a third term. 

“Governor Lamont’s first eight years in office,” Fazio said, “have seen Connecticut’s electricity rates rise to the third highest in the nation, and our economic growth plummet to fourth worst in the country. Families are struggling to make ends meet, while people and jobs are leaving our state. … I am running for governor to make our state more affordable and safe and create opportunities for all.”

Connecticut’s increasing unaffordability has been caused to a great extent by the explosion of federal spending and debt, for which the state’s members of Congress, all Democrats, share responsibility.

But much of Connecticut’s unaffordability is also caused by the state’s own law and policy. Indeed, state law and policy virtually prohibit affordability by preventing ordinary efficiency in government, and affordability will never be achieved if this isn’t spelled out. 

For example, Connecticut didn’t enact collective bargaining for government employees and binding arbitration for their union contracts in pursuit of affordability. Collective bargaining and binding arbitration for government employees were enacted to drive government’s costs up, relieve elected officials of difficult responsibility, and sustain a powerful special interest that serves as the army of the majority party, the Democrats. These laws forbid ordinary democratic control and accountability in public administration.

Connecticut didn’t enact its minimum budget requirement for school systems in pursuit of affordability. The minimum budget requirement, which virtually prohibits economizing in school systems even if student enrollment falls substantially, was enacted to ensure that any financial savings in schools would be transferred to school employees, particularly teachers, rather than refunded to taxpayers. 

Nor did Connecticut enact its “public benefits charges” — essentially taxes on electricity — to make life in the state more affordable but to conceal the costs of welfare and “green” energy programs in electricity bills so people would blame the electric utilities for electricity’s high cost, though the utilities, at the command of state law, stopped generating electricity years ago and now only distribute it. 

At least Republican state legislators, a small minority in the General Assembly, recently made an issue of the “public benefits charges” and the majority Democrats found them hard to defend, so some were removed from electric bills. But they were not eliminated. Instead state government now is paying for the “public benefits” with bond money, which will cost state residents even more in the long run.

The “public benefits charges” were an easy target. The special interests dependent on them, welfare recipients and self-styled environmentalists, are not so influential. But collective bargaining and binding arbitration for state and local government employees have huge special-interest constituencies, as does the minimum budget requirement for schools. 

Those anti-affordability laws are far more expensive than the “public benefits charges,” and no politician is likely to criticize them, though there will be little affordability in the state until they are repealed or reduced in scope.

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

Report on state’s homeless mocks new housing legislation

By CHRIS POWELL

Last week Governor Lamont and state legislators congratulated themselves for reaching a compromise on the housing legislation the governor vetoed in June over concerns that it would have weakened municipal zoning too much. The new legislation aims to get municipalities and state government working together to set housing goals, tinkers with zoning regulations like those for parking spaces for multi-family housing, and offers subsidies to municipalities that make room for new residents.

State government endures three more scandals in a week

Can Democrats ever deliver ‘a city we can afford’?

Tantrum by Democrats isn’t worth hobbling government

But under the new legislation, responsibility for getting housing built would remain scattered, shared between state government, municipalities, zoning boards, and developers. Neither state government nor municipal governments would be required to get housing built by a certain time. So it will be surprising if, in the first year after its enactment, the legislation prompts construction of even a thousand inexpensive housing units more than would have been built without it.

Indeed, the legislation seems pathetic in the face of what has been called Connecticut’s housing “emergency,” the state’s urgent need for an estimated 125,000 housing units immediately to drive down costs.

While the governor and legislators were negotiating the new legislation, more than 20 reporters and photographers for Connecticut’s Hearst newspapers traveled across the state to put faces on the people for whom the lack of housing is indeed an emergency rather than an abstract political problem. As the governor and legislators were congratulating themselves on the new bill, the report of the Hearst journalists was published, consisting of short profiles of a score of the state’s homeless. 

The report made the legislation seem almost irrelevant.

About 800 people are estimated to be sleeping outdoors in Connecticut at any one time — on benches, in underbrush, in tents in woods, or under overpasses. Another 3,000 are said to be using homeless shelters. Many others are bouncing from motel rooms to cars to the couches of friends. Others are on the verge of eviction and soon to be homeless.

Just about any new housing will help a little. But the Hearst report showed that the problem of the homeless and the near-homeless goes far beyond the shortage of housing.

That’s because many if not most of the people who were profiled may be incapable of living on their own and supporting themselves under any circumstances. Many are mentally ill. Many have or are recovering from drug problems. Some have criminal records that hobble their chances of getting jobs and housing. Some have physical disabilities or are too old. Some are healthy but lack work skills. Some are generally incompetent. A few may be slackers. Then there are the homeless teenagers, parentless or runaways.

Social workers say 132 homeless people have died in Connecticut so far this year, their situations almost surely having been aggravated by homelessness.  

State government’s emergency telephone line for help for the homeless isn’t always answered and is often of little help even when it is answered, since shelter space is so scarce.

With winter coming on, homeless shelters are where a serious response to the emergency should start, with shelters and barracks built urgently and managed and policed by state government. Connecticut has much vacant commercial real estate that could be converted quickly. There should always be a shelter with vacant cots and toilet and bathing facilities within easy driving distance from every point in the state.

Addressing the emergency should continue with state government’s construction and management of more “supportive housing,” studio apartment buildings with a medical clinic. They should be operated by state government like the town farms of old, with their tenants required to work to cover their rent and food. Nothing should be free except for the disabled, since perpetual welfare is demoralizing and people should accept their obligation to support themselves.

And then the state could use another mental hospital or two, since some people aren’t going to get better.

Not all the homeless are blameless. But all are still “the least of these my brethren” and so are owed a chance to get off the street.   

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

State government endures three more scandals in a week

By CHRIS POWELL

According to records obtained by the Connecticut Mirror and published last week, state government officials knew two years ago that state Sen. Doug McCrory, D-Hartford, was steering state anti-poverty and community development grants to his girlfriend. But those officials and their superiors apparently failed to recognize and act on the conflict of interest and corruption.

Can Democrats ever deliver ‘a city we can afford’?

Tantrum by Democrats isn’t worth hobbling government

‘Nip’ bottle fees don’t recover their cost in litter and drunken driving

Of course the officials, who worked for the state Department of Economic and Community Development, might have thought that, as McCrory himself has suggested, there is nothing illegal about state legislators steering state grants to people with whom they have intimate relationships. Government is a great repository of political patronage where connections often trump merit — especially in regard to programs in the name of economic development and alleviating poverty, since results there are seldom audited.

Even so, disclosure that state officials didn’t stop a Democratic senator’s exploitation of his office and state funds is another blow to the integrity of Governor Lamont’s administration, especially since it comes just days after the federal bribery and extortion convictions of the governor’s former deputy budget director, Konstantinos Diamantis, who awaits another trial on additional corruption charges.

The grant-steering scandal continues to be investigated by a federal grand jury, since state prosecutors have little interest in pursuing corruption and state Attorney General William Tong is too busy obstructing enforcement of federal immigration law.

While the Mirror was publicizing the McCrory documents, the Yankee Institute’s Meghan Portfolio was disclosing that a state police lieutenant, Robert Hazen, was paid last year almost as much in overtime — $122,000 — as his regular salary, $137,000, and lately has been allowed to authorize much of his own overtime, apparently because he has become chief of staff to a lieutenant colonel.

So far this year Hazen already has received another $32,000 in overtime.

Apparently no one in the state police has been watching Hazen’s overtime any more than anyone in the state budget office was watching Diamantis’ extortion and no one in the General Assembly was blowing the whistle on the grant steering done by McCrory and other legislators, though there is no evidence that the grant steering done by other legislators has involved favors to romantic partners or relatives, just political supporters.

A spokesman for the state police says they are striving to reduce overtime and already achieving some success — a reduction of 8% in the last fiscal year. Part of the overtime problem is a shortage of state troopers, a problem also being worked on. But if Hazen has been authorizing his own overtime, much correction remains to be done.

Elected officials often prattle about the poor. They don’t seem to understand that the best service to the poor is to reduce excess, corruption, and political patronage in government so that more resources can be made available to the poor. Not everyone who advocates efficiency in government is hateful, even if anyone pursuing efficiency risks such accusations from the prattlers, who have not yet noticed that poverty is worsening despite the increased appropriations in the name of reducing it.

Still another scandal was reported last week. The state Education Department announced that most students in Connecticut failed the state’s physical fitness test in the 2024-25 school year. The test is given in fourth, sixth, and eighth grades, and once to students during their high school years.

Various factors are blamed for the poor results, including the recent virus epidemic, the obsession young people have with social media, and reductions in school athletic and extracurricular programs.

The results of the physical fitness tests seem to correlate to some extent with community demographics, as poverty weighs on physical fitness as it does on academic performance.

Little can be done about it short of requiring parents to start paying more attention to their children’s physical fitness. But with chronic absenteeism of Connecticut’s students standing at 17%, and at 25% or more in the  cities, parental responsibility isn’t being pressed as it should be. State government doesn’t yet dare get that politically incorrect — and relevant.

——

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

-END-

Can the Democrats ever deliver ‘a city we can afford’?

By CHRIS POWELL

Maybe the most effective slogan for Zohran Mamdani’s campaign for mayor of New York City was “A city we can afford.” Indeed, New York long has been famous for being horribly expensive, part of why people often said, “It’s a nice place to visit but you wouldn’t want to live here.”

Tantrum by Democrats isn’t worth hobbling government

‘Nip’ bottle fees don’t recover their cost in litter and drunken driving

Connecticut’s contradictory ideals: local control vs. equality

Of course the whole country is a lot more expensive lately because of inflation, generated in large part by uncontrolled federal government spending and borrowing that has allowed the country to live far beyond its means. Both major political parties are responsible for that.

But the federal government is no more responsible for New York City’s expensiveness than it is for the expensiveness of the rest of the country. The expensiveness of New York City is mainly the responsibility of city government and New York State government.

Mamdani, a Democrat and a socialist, wants to tax the rich more to create a socialist paradise, but New York City’s income tax is determined by state government, not city government, and the rich already pay a hugely disproportionate share of taxes in the state and are notoriously mobile. That narrows the possibilities for making New York “a city we can afford.”

Housing costs in New York City have been driven up by unchecked illegal immigration, a Democratic policy Mamdani supports. 

Mamdani wants more rent control in the city, which will help a few people at the expense of the many by discouraging housing construction and pushing up housing prices even more.

Mamdani wants less enforcement of criminal law in the city and has denounced its police department though crime increases the expense of city living for everyone.

Most city government expense is a matter of the compensation of its employees. New York City’s government workforce is heavily unionized, politically active, generously compensated, and difficult to hold accountable. Making the city more affordable requires making its government more efficient and getting more value from its employees. But the government employee unions are a big component of Mamdani’s party, they embody socialism, and they aren’t likely to cooperate with efficiency.

New York City spends $40,000 per pupil in its school system and yet half the students still fail to meet basic proficiency standards. Graduating so many uneducated young people doesn’t help them earn the income needed to live in an expensive place. 

The city’s transit system, operated jointly state government and city government, is often exposed for fraud, incompetence, goldbricking by its employees, poor maintenance, and generally excessive costs, even as most city residents must rely on it. It long has resisted reform.

Making city bus service free to passengers, as Mamdani would like to do, isn’t such a crazy idea in principle. But it is crazy while the city’s transit system remains so badly managed. Free buses should be financed from transit system efficiencies. 

New York State has had Democratic governors since 2007. New York City hasn’t had a genuinely Republican mayor since Rudy Guiliani left office in 2001. (His successor, billionaire Michael Bloomberg, was nominated by the Republican Party but was actually a Democrat at heart and soon formally became one.)

Since Democrats have been unable to control the cost of living in New York City, a Democratic socialist isn’t likely to do any better without changing some of his premises.

Of course Connecticut is also too expensive and for some of the same reasons New York City is.

Government’s subservience to the government employee unions may be even more demeaning in Connecticut than in New York. Connecticut columnist Red Jahncke reported this week that some retired state employees are receiving pensions much higher than the salaries they earned.

Taxes in Connecticut are high, economic growth is low, education is failing the poor, housing is expensive, poverty and homelessness are worsening, and the Democrats who run the state are advocating rent control as they haggle over zoning legislation that, even if enacted, won’t get much housing built.

So is “democratic socialism” to be Connecticut’s fate as well?    

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

Tantrum by Democrats isn’t worth hobbling government

By CHRIS POWELL

Food subsidies for the poor and disabled are being used as political weapons by both Democrats and President Trump.

Democrats in Congress have shut down much of the federal government, including food subsidies, by withholding the votes needed for ordinary appropriations to pass the Senate. The Democrats seek to force the Republican majorities in Congress to address federal medical insurance subsidies sooner than the Republicans want to. 

‘Nip’ bottle fees don’t recover their cost in litter and drunken driving

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Corrupt ex-official’s trial evokes musical comedy

President Trump has pushed back, refusing to use emergency funds to keep the food subsidies flowing, hoping to pressure the Democrats to vote to reopen the government if they want to restore the food subsidies. 

The Democratic position is unpersuasive, since feeding people is more urgent than any particular level of medical insurance subsidies. Indeed, the normal functioning of the entirety of the government is infinitely more important than any particular level of insurance subsidies. Democrats in Congress, including Connecticut’s entire delegation, are saying, in effect, that much of government should cease and federal employees should do without their pay so that Democrats get their way on one issue. It’s a catastrophic tantrum.

Democratic senators, including Connecticut’s Richard Blumenthal and Chris Murphy, should stop what is essentially their filibuster against normal government operations. Republicans haven’t put food subsidies at risk; Democrats have.

But food subsidies present a bigger issue yet to be addressed: Are all 42 million people receiving them, 12% of the population, really unable to feed themselves and their families? Are they all really disabled or destitute? Are they all really deserving?

Of course not. Though their children must be fed in any case, many recipients are unmarried single parents with more children than they ever reasonably could have considered themselves able to support. Some view their anti-social behavior as an entitlement. Many recipients are recent immigrants whose ability to support themselves was not considered when they were admitted. Many recipients use food subsidies to buy inessentials. Many could work for a living but don’t.

In 1974 only 6% of the population received food subsidies. Now it’s double that. Has poverty really doubled in 50 years?  

Now that the federal government deficit exceeds $38 trillion and is rising quickly, are there to be no limits?    

The country long has been living far beyond its means, with these deficits causing terrible inflation, especially for food, and the rest of the world is losing its enthusiasm for supporting the richest country by buying its bonds. That promises more inflation.

Democrats should vote to reopen the government and try to economize.

TOO MUCH DISTRACTION: Should people be allowed to stage protests on highway overpasses and attach signs to overpass fencing to gain attention from the motorists traveling below?

The state Transportation Department says this is against its regulations but a Superior Court judge recently dismissed charges against a woman who was arrested for such a protest. She was accused of trespassing but fairly asked how one can trespass on public property — a roadway or sidewalk — that is open to everyone.

Signs and banners are often waved and affixed on highway overpasses without prompting police action. There is suspicion that the woman who was cleared in court the other day was targeted because she was protesting the Trump administration. Politics should have no bearing on law enforcement.

But the regulation against such displays is justified even if, because it lacks standing as criminal law, it cannot be enforced. Signs and banners on overpasses are meant to distract motorists, who shouldn’t be distracted, especially on the high-speed, limited-access highways where most of this protesting occurs. Additionally, signs and banners affixed to overpass fencing can fall onto the highway and cause more distraction and damage vehicles.

Of course people often gather on local roadsides to hold signs and banners to distract motorists there. This is tolerated because traffic is not as fast. 

But if a criminal law is needed to prevent the commandeering of highway overpasses, it should be enacted. Protesters still will have many ways to make their point.

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

‘Nip’ bottle fees don’t recover their cost in litter and drunken driving

By CHRIS POWELL

Next time you come upon empty and discarded “nip” bottles — the tiny plastic containers of liquor sold in abundance at Connecticut’s liquor stores but neither returnable for deposits nor recyclable — Larry Cafero wants you to be thankful.

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Cafero, executive director of the Connecticut Wine and Spirit Wholesalers, announced the other day that the 5-cent de-facto tax on nip bottles has generated more than $19 million since it began four years ago, with the money distributed by the state to municipalities in proportion to the number of “nips” sold in each. Municipal governments are to use the money for environmental cleanup purposes.

The problem is that only a little of the money is used to recover the discarded nip bottles themselves. Such an undertaking would be extremely labor-intensive. Instead municipalities use the money to run recycling centers or other programs to reduce litter or protect the environment.

So the nip bottles keep defacing streets, parks, and the countryside, being collected only partially and put in trash cans by people who go for nature walks and are disgusted by Connecticut’s policy of letting nature be defaced so a special interest can keep making money off a product that has only pernicious effects — the strewing of unbiodegradable trash throughout the state and the facilitation of drunken driving and underage drinking.

Other than gratifying the liquor industry, there is no need for this stuff. Connecticut could forbid the sale of nip bottles, as alcoholism-riddled New Mexico does, or impose on them a cash deposit high enough to induce their buyers to return them to the liquor stores or induce everyone else to pick them up and return them for the deposits. 

Instead of a “nickel a nip” a dollar a nip might work beautifully.

But while the liquor stores use the “nickel a nip” program to pose as civic-minded, they don’t really want to reduce the litter they cause. They complain that their taking the empty nip bottles back and refunding deposits would take up too much space in their stores and require too much additional labor. The liquor stores want littering, drunken driving, and underage drinking to remain profitable for them but costly for society.

Cafero says it would be unfair to change anything about nips because liquor store owners got into their business on the presumption they could sell the products. But that’s a rationalization for prohibiting all changes involving business, changes involving taxes, pollution control, consumer protection, public safety, wages, and protections for labor. No other businesses in Connecticut have such privilege. All other businesses are always subject to new laws that change business conditions.

Besides, Connecticut’s liquor industry already enjoys outrageous privilege — state law establishing minimum prices for alcoholic beverages, a law that protects liquor stores against the ordinary competition all other businesses face. The law against price competition in liquor long has given Connecticut some of the highest liquor prices in the country. It is essentially a tax whose revenue goes not to state government but to the liquor stores and wholesalers themselves.

Why does Connecticut allow such exploitation of the public? 

It’s all special-interest politics. 

Most legislative districts have a dozen or more liquor stores profiting from this exploitation and the stores have an active trade association. With Cafero the liquor stores have hired a former legislative leader, and, if their privileges are ever threatened, store owners and their employees will show up at hearings or rallies to intimidate legislators. 

Meanwhile news organizations, in financial decline, won’t investigate and report the sordid details of the liquor business in Connecticut lest they risk losing liquor advertising, and the public, ever more impoverished by inflation and other failing government policies, seems increasingly content just to drink itself silly at home or, worse, on the road.

All this littering, drunken driving, and underage drinking should be worth a lot more to state government than $19 million in four years, or less than $4 million per year. Its cost is much higher than that and it’s nothing to celebrate.

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

Connecticut’s contradictory ideals: local control vs. equality

By CHRIS POWELL

Will Connecticut ever realize that two of what it professes to be its highest ideals of public policy, local control and equality of opportunity, are contradictions?

State government was reminded of this again the other day by another report from the Equable Institute, a nonprofit organization that seeks to improve government employee pensions. Connecticut’s state teacher retirement system, the institute notes, does much better by teachers in wealthy municipalities than those in poor ones, because teacher pensions are calculated from their salaries. Wealthy municipalities pay more so their teachers get bigger pensions. 

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Hamden’s leaders come out in support of open borders

‘This is what democracy looks like’? God help us!

Indeed, Equable says state government pays twice as much for the pensions of teachers in some wealthy municipalities than it pays for the pensions of teachers in some poor ones.

Additionally, because of the higher salaries they pay, wealthy municipalities suffer less turnover in their teaching staffs and retain better teachers longer than poor municipalities do.

Equable says the disparity in pension contributions is responsible for some of the disparity in student performance between wealthy and poor municipalities. That stands to reason, but pension disparities surely matter far less to educational results than the disparities in the household wealth of students and the amount of parenting they get. 

As usual liberals and teacher unions like to attribute all the deficiencies of public education to inadequate spending, even though Connecticut has been raising education spending steadily for almost 50 years, improving teacher salaries and pensions without improving student performance.

Per-pupil parenting has always been the main determinant of student performance, but politics prohibits addressing the parenting problem. No elected official or candidate dares to note the strong correlation between single-parent households and child neglect and abuse, student educational failure, poor physical and mental health, and general misbehavior. Acknowledging that correlation would impugn the entire welfare system and the perverse incentives it gives the poor, and it would show where so much social disintegration is coming from.

But everyone admires teachers as individuals, so finding public money for satisfying them and their unions is easy and doesn’t cause the political problems that examining the causes of poverty would.

It’s no wonder that teachers prefer to teach well-parented, well-behaved, attentive, and curious kids rather than poorly parented, ill-behaved, and indifferent or demoralized kids. It’s no wonder that teachers in impoverished cities, like police officers there, can get worn down quickly and seek to pursue their careers in municipalities with less poverty and dysfunction. This is just another aspect of the flight to the suburbs, which has been caused by government’s failure to solve poverty in the cities.

Maybe state law should arrange for all teachers to be paid directly by state government according to the same salary schedule so their pensions would be equalized. No adjustments for union contracts or individual merit could be permitted, since they would generate inequality. 

Such an egalitarian system likely would reduce salaries and pensions in wealthy and middle-class municipalities and increase them in poor ones. But of course teacher unions would never give up bargaining power over wages and benefits, not in the pursuit of equality or anything else.       

Or maybe teachers in the poorest municipalities should be paid at least $100,000 per year more than teachers in the highest-paying municipalities. They might not all be good teachers but most might deserve more money just for having to deal with so many indifferent and misbehaving students.

While that might be fairer to those teachers, who are part of the constituency the Equable Institute is trying to help, Connecticut’s long experience would still be that school spending is almost irrelevant to educational performance, and the presumption of increasing teacher salaries and pensions would still be that the job satisfaction of teachers is more important than education itself and ending generational poverty.

But even the long failure to end generational poverty isn’t the biggest problem here. The biggest problem here is simply Connecticut’s failure to care much about it. As a political matter paying off the teachers is the most we can do.

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

Most child neglect in Connecticut involves public-schooled children

By CHRIS POWELL

Abuse of children who are purportedly being home-schooled in Connecticut is an issue again. The case of a boy allegedly kept prisoner by his stepmother in his room in Waterbury for 20 years, which broke in February, has just been followed by the case of an 11-year-old girl who was allegedly killed by her family in Farmington and whose corpse was discovered in New Britain after her family moved there.

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There was inadequate checking about the boy by child protection and school authorities after he was removed from school. But court documents indicate that the girl was killed while she was still enrolled in public school, a month before her family filed notice to home-school her. According to police, the girl suffered physical abuse and malnourishment for a long time — apparently while still a public school student and while child-protection authorities were involved with her family. 

Whatever the details of the girl’s death, abused and neglected children remain a serious issue and the General Assembly and Governor Lamont should have acted on it during the legislature’s regular session this year, since part of the solution is obvious: to require home-schooled students to be presented for an annual interview with school or child-protection authorities.

But the issue is being used to mislead. For the child abuse and neglect problem is overwhelmingly a problem of children who are public-schooled.

Most home-schooled children get far more attention from their parents than most public-schooled kids do, insofar as their households have more money and can spare a parent to do the teaching instead of working full-time outside the home. Meanwhile 17% of Connecticut’s public-schooled children are chronically absent. In the cities, where poverty and parenting are worst, the rate is 25% or more.

If, for example, the 13-year-old boy who shot and killed a 15-year-old boy in New Haven a few weeks ago was home-schooled, opponents of home schooling probably would have made sure that Connecticut knew about it by now. The Hartford girl who last September disclosed to the Connecticut Mirror that she had just graduated from high school though she was illiterate wasn’t home-schooled either. She was the product of Hartford’s public schools. 

Indeed, the little standardized testing Connecticut allows in its public schools suggests that most high school graduates in the state never master what used to be considered basic English and math before they are sent into the world to fend for themselves.

There is hardly more checking on these public-schooled kids than there is checking on home-schooled kids.

The 11-year-old girl’s case provides a telling detail. Police investigation suggests that the girl’s household was full of psychosis and delusion and that her father long had abandoned her and wasn’t around to protect her.

About a third of Connecticut’s children live without a father in their home. In the cities it’s most children. Fatherlessness correlates strongly with poverty, educational failure, physical and mental illness, misbehavior, crime, and unhappiness.

Yet Connecticut hardly notices this problem. Public policy presumes that it’s less expensive just to keep throwing money at single people who have children they can’t afford and thus to subsidize childbearing outside marriage and fatherlessness. This practice and social promotion in public schools guarantee generational poverty and crime, but no one in authority dares to ask where Connecticut’s worsening poverty is coming from unless it already has been decided to blame President Trump. 

Maybe the latest case of child abuse will mistakenly prompt state government to require an annual census and interview of home-schooled children. But there probably aren’t more than a few thousand of them. 

Meanwhile there are tens of thousands of abused or neglected children in the state’s public schools, many of them soon to become seriously disadvantaged young adults. As children or young adults, many of these die prematurely every month in criminal incidents that are considered routine, the natural order of things. They are far more deserving of more child protection and yet they are not even on the state’s agenda.

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