Chris Powell column

By Chris Powell

Chicago has just thrown out an incompetent, arrogant, and far-left Democratic mayor who presided over an explosion of crime and the collapse of the city’s schools, only to elect a mayor pledged to even more extreme leftism with higher taxes and lower educational standards. The new mayor is a former lobbyist for the teachers union.

It’s as if Chicago voters thought the city’s decline has been a matter of mere personalities rather than policies too.

State government in Illinois, also under Democratic administration, is in no better shape itself, scaring business and residents away with backbreaking taxes and overwhelming government employee pension obligations — kind of like Connecticut.

Chicago and Illinois show the future of cities and states that cannot put the government employee unions back into a subordinate position and put the public interest ahead of the special interest.

It can be done, or at least it could be done 45 years ago when Ed Koch, then a U.S. representative, ran for mayor of New York City as what he called “a Democrat with sanity.” The city was falling apart amid crime, incompetence, corruption, and failing schools while being cannibalized by the city employee unions.

As the other candidates for the Democratic mayoral nomination ran to the left, Koch ran to the right, toward the center. Several of his 1977 mayoral campaign’s television commercials are archived on the internet, and today they are stunning for their candor and detail and relevance to the circumstances in which Chicago, Illinois, and Connecticut find themselves.

In one commercial Koch said: “The Board of Education spends almost $3 billion of our money but we don’t control how it’s spent. All we know is that we graduate children from high school who read at the 8th-grade level. We pay teachers $26,000 in salary and benefits to work 161 days a year, and the Board of Education wastes millions of dollars. The next mayor of New York must get control of the money spent in our school system and he must set higher standards for our students and teachers.”

In another commercial Koch challenged the city police department: “We pay the average police officer $30,000 a year in salary and benefits to protect us. But of 25,000 police in the city, only 1,500 patrol the streets on an average shift. More cops than that call in sick every day. Obviously we need more police on the streets and we can do it without spending more money — by better use of the police force we already have. That may mean taking on the police bureaucracy and the PBA [Police Benevolent Association]. But that’s what a mayor has to do.”

A third Koch commercial struck the most powerful blow: “My record in Congress is strongly pro-labor but our municipal unions consider me anti-union. They don’t like the fact that I want city employees to live in the city, that I want educators to account to the mayor for schools that don’t teach, and that I don’t want patrolmen to get two days off with pay for donating a pint of blood. There’s no point in getting angry at [teacher union leader] Al Shanker or [New York City AFSCME President] Vic Gotbaum. They’re doing the jobs they were elected to do. It’s time we had a tough bargainer on our side of the table.”

Running on this platform Koch unexpectedly won the 1977 New York Democratic mayoral primary and the election and then won re-election twice with more than 75% of the vote.

It would be nice if state government in Connecticut had a “tough bargainer” for the public interest. But under Governor Lamont state government remains mainly a pension and benefit society pretending to be proud of schools whose student proficiency has been crashing for many years and cities that are drowning in poverty, shootings, and unsolved murders.

Can any Democrat in Connecticut tell people the truth about anything that matters? If not, can any Republican?

—–

Chris Powell is a columnist for the Journal Inquirer in Manchester, Connecticut. (CPowell@JournalInquirer.com)

-END-

By Chris Powell

While former President Donald Trump long has been mainly a grifter, his indictment by the district attorney for Manhattan is not justified by the cant coming from Democrats in Connecticut and around the country: the cant that “no one is above the law.”

To the contrary, criminal prosecution is almost always largely a matter of prosecutorial discretion.

The Manhattan district attorney himself, who ran for office pledging to prosecute Trump for something, anything, and has now charged the former president with 34 felonies, has been routinely reducing felony charges to misdemeanors for offenders who are not named Trump.

Federal and other state prosecutors declined to press against Trump charges like those now being pressed in Manhattan because those other prosecutors considered the evidence too weak.

Bill and Hillary Clinton both broke criminal law while in office but received prosecutorial discretion, both being considered above the law.

Connecticut is full of prosecutorial discretion. The state long has put illegal immigrants above the law, facilitating their breaking of federal immigration law and obstructing its enforcement by federal agents. Lately Connecticut also has been putting marijuana users and sellers above the law, pretending that federal drug law — which, rightly or wrongly, continues to criminalize the drug — is nullified by the state law that actually has put state government itself into the marijuana retail licensing business.

Indeed, U.S. Attorney General Merrick Garland has formally stated that President Biden’s Justice Department has decided that enforcing federal marijuana law in states that don’t want it enforced would not be a good use of the department’s resources — still more prosecutorial discretion that puts people above the law. So much for the Constitution’s command that the president “shall take care that the laws be faithfully executed.”

Connecticut’s law against murder does not seem to be enforced in New Haven, Bridgeport, and Hartford as well as it is in Woodbridge, Easton, and Avon. About 80% of the murders in the last several years in New Haven remain unsolved. There is plenty of discretion as to where the state allocates its police resources.

Sometimes prosecutorial discretion may serve a more cosmic form of justice. Sometimes prosecutorial discretion is political opportunism. But someone everywhere is [ITALICS] always [END ITALICS] above the law.

*

Just as its men’s basketball team was winning the national college championship and putting the University of Connecticut in the spotlight across the country, dozens of students rioted on the campus at Storrs, pulling down lampposts, breaking windows, and starting fires, discrediting the university at what should have been its most glorious moment in years. Fourteen people, most of them students, were arrested, and 16 others were injured badly enough by the mayhem to be hospitalized.

The university’s admissions department has a lot to answer for. How do such thugs get into something that calls itself higher education?

Of course the thugs have even more to answer for than the admissions department does. Having been arrested, some may actually be prosecuted, though most criminal charges in Connecticut these days are so heavily discounted in court that the law has lost deterrence. Most of the young rioters probably will be penalized in court with nothing more than probation.

The university promises its own vigorous internal discipline of the rioters, including possible expulsion. UConn should regularly update the public about that process — to reassure the public and deter any other thugs on campus. The basketball team, its coaching staff, its fans, and everyone else in Connecticut deserved far better, and the state needs to be shown that, at least at UConn, nobody is above the law.

*

A reader offers what might strike most people as a good idea: that each criminal court in the state should issue a weekly report of cases concluded and their outcomes, and that newspapers should publish the reports. But it won’t happen because the General Assembly, with a far-left political majority obliged by Governor Lamont, lately has been ordering the erasure of criminal records.

Most legislators and the governor think the public knows [ITALICS] too much [END ITALICS] about criminal justice.

---

Chris Powell is a columnist for the Journal Inquirer in Manchester, Connecticut. (CPowell@JournalInquirer.com)

-END-

By Chris Powell

What’s the big deal about the federal debt ceiling? The controversy in Washington suggests that the federal government won’t be able to spend as much money if it can’t keep borrowing to do so.

That’s nonsense. Quite without incurring more debt the federal government has plenty of access to money.

For the government can simply [ITALICS] create [END ITALICS] money, instructing the Federal Reserve to create it electronically, in whatever amounts the government wants, and deposit it in government bank accounts, whereby the government can spend it however it wants. The Treasury Department can be authorized to print infinite amounts of paper currency and mint infinite amounts of coinage.

The government also could get plenty of money through higher taxes or through not spending as much. In recent years federal spending has exploded without the imposition of any tax increases — so much so that during this time members of Congress and presidents have proposed all sorts of additional spending without giving a thought as to where the money is to come from, nor without a thought as to where the production of real goods and services to underwrite the money creation is to come from.

The government might create a lot of money through the infamous mechanism of minting a platinum coin with a face value of any fantastic amount — like a trillion dollars — and then depositing it with the Federal Reserve and instructing the central bank to create and distribute an equal amount of dollars.

Such a mechanism could be used to [ITALICS] eliminate [END ITALICS] the federal debt — problem solved.

In their recent endeavors to spend ever more money than is backed by the economy’s production, members of Congress and presidents have been emboldened by the failure of the public to wonder what causes inflation, the devaluation of their money. For inflation is the main danger with money creation, and the country and the world are already suffering an inflationary disaster.

This disaster is largely of this country’s making, since the United States long has enjoyed what a French finance minister called the “exorbitant privilege” of issuing the world reserve currency, the dollar — the privilege of paying the country’s debts in its own currency, currency it can create for free while the rest of the world has had to do real work to produce and sell real goods and services to earn the dollars needed to participate in international trade.

On top of this, the dollar’s reserve status has long induced other countries to store their hard-earned dollar surpluses in U.S. Treasury bonds and other U.S. government debt, which additionally helps the United States live far beyond what its earns from its own economic production.

That’s really what the debt ceiling controversy is about. If the United States can’t keep borrowing more from the rest of the world — money that will never really be repaid, since the debt keeps growing and is used to repay earlier debt — the country will have to start living within its means. Or else the government will have to create so much more money that inflation will increase many times more than the current official and already much underestimated rate of 6%.

Other countries increasingly perceive how they are being exploited by the current financial practices — how the supposedly richest country is living at the expense of most other countries, including the poorest.

Many of these other countries are reducing their purchase of U.S. government debt, trading less in dollars and more in their own currencies, and, it appears from gold purchases by their central banks, preparing to switch back to gold as the reserve currency or as a large component of a new reserve currency, a reserve currency controlled by no single nation.

The concern in Washington isn’t really about the chance that the United States will default on its debt. The debt already is being defaulted upon through inflation and through its steady increase during which interest on the debt is being paid by more debt.

The concern in Washington is really about the possibility that the country might have to start paying for itself and making financial choices few in politics are prepared to make.

—–

Chris Powell is a columnist for the Journal Inquirer in Manchester, Connecticut. (CPowell@JournalInquirer.com)

-END-

By Chris Powell

By now nearly everyone who pays attention to Connecticut news knows of the state legislator who last year stood up to speak at the Capitol when she was drunk and lapsed into incoherence and who, a few weeks ago, was driving drunk when she crashed her car nearby.

The legislator has become so well known in large part because television stations have delighted in broadcasting video of her failing a sobriety test and getting arrested. There was nothing remarkable about the video. It was just like all failed sobriety test videos except for the office of the person being arrested. She was hardly known before her public intoxication; she was what in Parliament would be called a back-bencher. But now she is famous for being humiliated, and her legislative committee assignments are suspended.

Of course she should have gotten treatment for her drinking problem before crashing her car and putting others at risk. But after the crash she quickly apologized publicly and began treatment. Beating an addiction is not easy; all may hope she succeeds.

But the repeated broadcast of her arrest was only prurient and may not make it easier for her. It was as if the TV stations thought she was Donald Trump.

Yes, after a long career as a grifter and four years of unprecedentedly disgraceful conduct in the nation’s highest office, Trump may be irremediable. But the state legislator is just an ordinary person without bad intent who has a character weakness shared by many others, including others in elected office. There are many other things Connecticut should be more ashamed of, but viewers of the state’s TV news probably don’t know.

* * *

HIDDEN TAXES AGAIN: Governor Lamont and Democrats in the General Assembly again are attempting to raise fuel taxes surreptitiously.

They are pushing legislation that would authorize the commissioner of the state Department of Energy and Environmental Protection to commit the state to interstate agreements requiring fuel businesses to purchase and compete for a limited number of “carbon credits.”

The cost to the businesses would be passed along in higher prices to retail fuel customers, who would blame energy producers and distributors, not the real culprit, state government.

The “carbon credits” scheme might be less objectionable if the legislature had to vote on such interstate compacts directly as ordinary legislation, if the governor had to sign it before it took effect, and if in doing so they were candid with the public about the inevitable result and explained why higher fuel costs were worth the supposed progress against “climate change.”

But no. The Democrats want to pander to the climate extremists in their party without taking responsibility with everyone else.

If the governor and legislators want to raise fuel prices, they don’t need any interstate compact. They can just raise fuel taxes in the open, as they have done before, though such taxes in Connecticut are already high.

* * *

FIND AN ALTERNATIVE: According to the Washington Post, the No Labels political organization, which includes former Connecticut U.S. Sen. Joe Lieberman, aims to try to put its own candidate for president on the ballot in all 50 states in 2024.

No such candidate has been designated but the idea is to draw the likely major-party candidates in 2024 — President Biden for the Democrats and former President Donald Trump for the Republicans — back toward the political center and away from their pandering to the left and right. Such movement might cause No Labels to endorse one or the other or to refrain from offering its own candidate.

Biden supporters are said to be most afraid of the No Labels plan. One says: “The only way you can justify this is if you believe it doesn’t really matter if it is Joe Biden or Donald Trump.”

No, there is plenty of other justification. A third-party candidate can be justified if people believe, as many well may, that Biden and Trump are equally catastrophic, if in different ways.

To ensure their victory in 2024 the major parties need only to nominate a presidential candidate who is competent, moderate, relatively honest, sane, and sentient.

They don’t yet seem to have noticed that Biden and Trump aren’t.

—–

Chris Powell (CPowell@JournalInquirer.com) is a columnist for the Journal Inquirer in Manchester, Connecticut. 

-END-

By Chris Powell

Wokeness, the new model of political correctness reigning supreme in Connecticut, holds that all racial disproportions are caused by “structural racism” and must be eliminated by policy that awards favoritism by race.

State traffic stop data has shown that Black and Hispanic motorists are stopped somewhat more often than would be suggested by their proportion of Connecticut’s population. So legislation is advancing in the General Assembly to prevent police from stopping motorists for “low-level” violations, like broken or unused headlamps, taillights, and turn signals, obstructed windshields, excessively tinted windows, and expired registrations. Motorists still could be ticketed for those violations but only if an officer stopped them for something more serious.

The legislation’s approach may be politically satisfying but its assumption that racial prejudice is the main cause of the disproportion in stops is beyond simpleminded. It’s as if the legislation’s advocates have never examined criminal-justice data, which shows that [ITALICS] all [END ITALICS] crime is racially disproportionate, with members of minority groups committing more of it.

Fortunately few people still believe that this disproportion arises from an innately baser character of racial minorities. The evidence is that the disproportion is largely a matter of poverty, which has been racially disproportionate since the country’s founding.

Of course Connecticut could not begin to count all its traffic stops where the only offense was “driving while Black.” A young Black man driving or walking through a wealthy white suburb or rural town is likely to evoke suspicion no matter how innocent he is. The situation is improving but eliminating it will require much more housing and school integration.

But many motorists may put off fixing their headlamps, taillights, and turn signals, and making other car repairs because they don’t have the money. If it is enacted the legislation forbidding police from stopping motorists for “low-level” violations will in effect nullify the regulations and proclaim that safety on the road isn’t important anymore — especially with members of minority groups.

These days society’s disintegration may be most evident on the road, where there is ever more speeding, reckless and distracted driving, road rage, and bad manners. Police misconduct rightly gets plenty of attention but police remain more sinned against than sinning by a factor of a thousand to one, and they are more inclined to let violations pass rather than risk being so easily accused and disbelieved, even with dashboard and body cameras.

So while it is getting easier to imagine a state without accusations of police racism, it well may be a state with much less law enforcement.

* * *

PROJECT VERITAS VINDICATED: After almost a year of paid leave, Assistant Principal Jeremy Boland will resign from the Greenwich school system on June 30, even as five agencies — the school system, town government, the state attorney general’s office, the state Education Department, and the Commission on Human Rights and Opportunities — purport to be continuing to investigate him.

But Boland’s departure confirms that despite all the contempt heaped on it by the political left, the guerilla journalism of Project Veritas portrayed Boland with perfect accuracy in his own words, captured on surreptitiously recorded video. Boland admitted that he disqualified political conservatives, Catholics, and people over 30 from teaching positions so it would be easier to indoctrinate students with liberalism and thereby get them to vote Democratic when they grow up.

Establishment journalism in Connecticut, which, like Boland, leans heavily left, missed the indoctrination story and then resented its being told.

Something important is also shown by the long delay in Boland’s departure. Greenwich’s school superintendent says firing Boland outright would have been too expensive and time-consuming — a common complaint about pursuing accountability in public education in Connecticut, even accountability with nominal managers.

As a practical matter there is little management in public education, since nearly everyone but school superintendents is unionized and protected by so much due process that wrongdoing must be long indulged even when, as with Boland, it is caught on video and broadcast to a scandalized world.

—–

Chris Powell is a columnist for the Journal Inquirer in Manchester, Connecticut. (CPowell@JournalInquirer.com)

-END-

By Chris Powell

Being the source of all sorts of politically correct nuttiness even as its violent crime is atrocious and its schools don’t work (because few of their students have competent parents), New Haven may be criticized for its new experiment with released prisoners. The city is awarding 20 of them a guaranteed income of $500 per month for a year to help them re-establish themselves on the right side of the law.

But the money is coming from a philanthropic grant, not from government, and only a big detail of the program is amiss, not the objective. Indeed, the objective is compelling. The program should be adjusted and implemented by state government throughout Connecticut.

With its largely impoverished, uneducated, unskilled, fatherless, and welfare-dependent population, New Haven is a hub of crime, as Connecticut’s other cities are. Every year the state prison system releases about 900 offenders back to the city as they complete their sentences. On average within three years about half of them are convicted of more crimes and sent back to prison. The true failure of rehabilitation in criminal justice is worse than that, since many released offenders commit more crimes but aren’t caught.

That this “recidivism” has been so bad for so long does not make it any less of a disaster and excuse government’s failure to do much about it. But this disaster is inevitable when uneducated, unskilled, and demoralized men are returned to society without financial resources, a job, housing, and medical insurance even as they carry the heavy handicap of a criminal record.

What’s faulty about the experiment in New Haven is that the guaranteed income for the former prisoners is not linked to a guaranteed job, medical insurance, and rudimentary housing. It’s welfare when it should be work.

The Correction Department should be funded to provide much more job training to prisoners within two or three years of their likely release. But government should be able to find work even for the uneducated and unskilled.

For starters, Connecticut’s roadsides, parks, railroad lines, and other public areas are full of litter strewn about by slobs. A few dozen released prisoners could clean up a whole city in just a month and might feel pretty good about it if they were being paid, appreciated, and free of the fear of having no housing and medical insurance.

Connecticut’s manufacturers are struggling to fill thousands of skilled positions and might provide internships and job training to former prisoners who showed an interest. Hospitals might too. Churches, especially those in the cities, surely would assist a campaign to employ former prisoners.

With its guaranteed income program New Haven has had its pick of the seemingly most rehabilitated and motivated former prisoners. Reintegrating other former prisoners will be much harder, and the public’s reaction to former prisoners working visibly in public places, sometimes near children and the elderly, might not always be welcoming. So government will have to explain patiently why society must help former prisoners make something good of themselves. Many people will understand.

Of course there would be failures in such a program — [ITALICS] but not as many as there already are with released prisoners. [END ITALICS] Indeed, compared to the present disaster, the success of such a program would be virtually certain.

Then maybe state government could turn its attention to getting rid of its policies and practices that have turned the cities into poverty factories.

* * *

BRIDGEPORT FAILS AGAIN: Why has state government yet to see much progress from its longstanding policy of throwing ever-more money at Connecticut’s impoverished cities and especially their schools?

There may have been a hint the other day from Bridgeport, where videographer Steve Ronin posted on the internet a long video taken during his recent tour of the city’s former Harding High School. Though the school was closed five years ago, it remains packed with valuable furnishings and equipment as if it is still operating.

The video shocked city officials. They thought the school board had relocated the furnishings and equipment for continued use. But what should have been obvious wasn’t done.

What’s more shocking is that state officials still seem to consider Bridgeport capable of self-government.

—–

Chris Powell is a columnist for the Journal Inquirer in Manchester, Connecticut. (CPowell@JournalInquirer.com)

-END-

By Chris Powell

Judging by legislation they are advocating, Democrats in the General Assembly think, for the moment anyway, that minors are not capable of fully understanding and making decisions that may be life-altering. The Democrats would raise from 16 to 18 the age at which Connecticut allows marriage. They also would increase the parole eligibility of offenders who committed their crimes before age 25.

Of course most marriages of minors are likely to involve unplanned pregnancies and a desire to provide the babies with their natural parents. But such “shotgun” marriages are not especially likely to endure. Besides, nothing prevents an underage couple from supporting each other before marriage, and adoption and abortion are always available. Marrying off a girl to someone who may have mainly just exploited her can wreck her chances in life.

The premise for increasing parole eligibility for younger offenders is more questionable. While the legislation’s advocates say young offenders often don’t know what they’re doing, evidence that breaks through the secrecy of Connecticut’s juvenile courts suggests that many young offenders know exactly what they are doing and laugh at the law, knowing also that there is little will to punish them.

But if the marriage and parole bills are enacted and thereby confirm that young people are not fit to make important decisions, Connecticut may face some cognitive dissonance. For under other state laws the same minors who will not be competent to get married before 18 and not fit to be held fully responsible for serious crime will remain free to have abortions and even get sex-change therapy in school without parental consent or awareness.

There is no logic to this inconsistency. It’s just that abortion, leniency with crime, and sex-change therapy for minors are considered virtuous in the sort of liberalism that animates Connecticut’s Democratic Party, which controls the legislature. The objective of the marriage and parole legislation is not really to protect young people but to be politically correct.

* * *

ACCOUNTABILITY DIES: As much as accountability is work and a pain, it is a fundamental obligation of democratic government. But on both the state and municipal levels, government in Connecticut often disagrees.

A few weeks ago the state’s chief public defender, TaShun Bowden-Lewis, who is Black, leveled an accusation of racism against the commission responsible for her and the rest of the Division of Public Defender Services. Bowden-Lewis complained that the commission was “hyper-scrutinizing” her work and should not have differed with her about an appointment. She said the commission’s disagreement with her was “discrimination.”

Responding to the politically opportunistic charge, four of the five commissioners, two of them Superior Court judges, simply resigned rather than explain themselves.

No one responsible will answer questions about what’s going on. Governor Lamont, state legislative leaders, and Judicial Department leaders were stuck with finding new commissioners willing to be called racist for disagreeing with a Black official who is supposed to report to them.

Usually when a government executive can’t get along with his supervisors, the executive has to go. Here, instead, the entire mechanism of accountability blew up.

Meanwhile state government’s “quasi-public” agencies — agencies that were created by state government but prefer to operate as private businesses — are opposing the request of the State Contracting Standards Board to be given jurisdiction over them.

At the moment the board has jurisdiction over just one “quasi-public,” the Connecticut Port Authority, whose incompetence and corruption have run up the cost of the New London State Pier project and delayed its completion. The 16 other “quasi-publics” don’t want anyone looking over their shoulder. They claim that they need to be more “nimble” than ordinary state agencies.

Yes, oversight can slow things down. That’s the rationale for totalitarianism.

Government in Connecticut has little oversight and auditing generally but is no more effective for being so “nimble.” So the jurisdiction of the Contracting Standards Board probably should be expanded, or else every state agency should be given its own oversight board. The office of Connecticut’s two state auditors can’t even begin to keep up with it all.

—–

Chris Powell is a columnist for the Journal Inquirer in Manchester, Connecticut. (CPowell@JournalInquirer.com)

-END-

By Chris Powell

For years now Connecticut’s Department of Children and Families has presumed that when parents are unfit to care for their kids, it is better to place them with relatives, since then the kids will not feel as lost and the foster parents will have a closer connection to them. Ordinarily this is probably right, but it sure wasn’t in the case of the child lately being identified as Baby Dylan.

In 2015 when Baby Dylan was just a year old the department placed him with a couple related to his parents. The child was already suffering from developmental impairments and they got far worse with his foster parents. During five months in their custody he was given little food and no medical care, and the department’s social workers were prevented from checking on him but failed to do anything about it.

Eventually the department saw his mistreatment and found new foster parents for him, but he now has permanent disabilities. His first foster mother pled guilty to risk of injury to a minor but her sentence was only probation.

Connecticut’s child advocate, who investigates such cases, has reported that adequate background checks were not done by the department’s social workers — that they failed to discover that the first foster mother already had been accused more than once of neglect of her own son, the foster father had a criminal record, the couple had little income, and their driver’s licenses had been indefinitely suspended.

So Baby Dylan, now 8 and said to be in a home with great new parents who have adopted him, has just been awarded $12 million, apparently the biggest personal damage award ever against Connecticut state government. He’ll need the money for a trust fund to see him through a life with disabilities.

The moral seems to be that relatives can’t be merely assumed to be better foster parents and that the Department of Children and Families, while much improved, will always be at high risk of negligence.

* * *

NO PROTECTION OFFERED: Despite some recent horrible murders and assaults, Connecticut can forget about providing better protection to victims of domestic abuse this year.

The relevant legislation advancing in the General Assembly would do little more than forbid payment of alimony to domestic abusers and authorize electronic monitoring for them.

Domestic abusers seldom receive alimony and in any case courts already can deny it. And no ankle bracelet, even one monitored every minute of every day, is going to stop a crazed abuser from attacking his victim with a gun, knife, ax, or some other weapon.

Apart from around-the-clock guards, the only serious protection state government could provide to people threatened by an abusive former spouse or partner is speedy prosecution and long imprisonment of abusers.

State government is starting to consider faster and more serious prosecution of gun offenders, many of whom are repeat offenders but have never been put away for good. The same should be done with domestic abusers. Connecticut’s prisons now have plenty of room for such criminals, so many other criminals having been released early or never imprisoned at all.

An alimony ban and electronic monitoring will just be more of the empty posturing typical at the state Capitol.

* * *

ENOUGH NULLIFICATION: Will helping drug addicts shoot up under medical supervision break their addiction and regain their health?

That’s the idea of “harm reduction clinics,” which is being tried here and there around the world and is being put into legislation pending in the General Assembly. Such clinics may reduce overdoses, which are killing people in Connecticut every day, connect addicts with rehabilitation services, and take a bite out of the illicit drug trade.

Such clinics may be worth an experiment in the state, but not until they are allowed by federal law, which criminalizes them. State government’s effort to take over the marijuana trade is already violating federal law, a politically correct form of nullification, like state government’s obstruction of federal immigration law.

Enough nullification already.

Feeding drug addictions should always make public-spirited people cringe a little, and finding a location for a “harm reduction clinic” without outraging its potential neighbors will be difficult.

In the meantime state government may do best just by providing more free addiction treatment.

—–

Chris Powell is a columnist for the Journal Inquirer in Manchester, Connecticut. (CPowell@JournalInquirer.com)

-END-

By Chris Powell

Just as you needn’t ask the barber if you need a haircut, you needn’t ask a political action committee run by government employee unions, leftist academics (maybe that’s a redundancy), and bleeding-heart clergy members whether government should raise taxes. But the political action committee called A Better Connecticut Institute figures that its name conceals its underlying interest enough to allow it to be taken seriously.

The other day the institute issued a study maintaining that contrary to the concerns of Governor Lamont, extremely rich people will not leave Connecticut if state government raises their taxes, so their taxes [ITALICS] should [END ITALICS] be raised.

There is some logic to the belief that the super-rich won’t move so easily if they are very happy where they are. For the more money people have, the less important any particular dollar is to them and the more they can afford higher taxes.

But the super-rich also might be just as comfortable in some other nice place, and they already pay so much in taxes in Connecticut that the departure of even one of them could cost state government many millions of dollars. The super-rich and the merely ordinarily rich already pay most of the state income tax.

Whether higher taxes would push the super-rich out of Connecticut is mainly speculation. But it is fair speculation, and it cannot be disputed that high taxes are discouraging. Nobody relocates in the hope of being taxed more.

For many years highly taxed states in the Northeast, including Connecticut, have been losing prosperous and self-sufficient people to the rest of the country. Connecticut’s population growth and economic growth are nearly the worst among the states. Whatever their cultural drawbacks, which are in the eye of the beholder, Florida and Texas have been growing rapidly, and they don’t impose income taxes.

Many Connecticut residents have moved there in recent years but even those who have moved to the Carolinas, which do have income taxes, report saving money, especially on property taxes, while enjoying comfortable lifestyles and milder winters.

Raising taxes on the super-rich might be good policy if there was some assurance that it would markedly improve living conditions in Connecticut. But the state has been raising taxes since it enacted its income tax in 1991, and where is the evidence?

The state’s cities are still dysfunctional, maybe more so.

Student proficiency has crashed despite the everlasting cycle of raising teacher salaries that began with the Education Enhancement Act in 1986.

Crime generally is said to be down lately but murders are up and even city mayors now admit that most shootings are being committed by repeat offenders — that is, people state government already has had many chances to deter but failed to.

Practically every week brings the disclosure of gross but uncorrected mismanagement in state government to which the governor and General Assembly are indifferent.

Maybe no one in authority cares about those things right now because state government is sitting on so much “emergency” federal financial aid, aid that has generated much of the inflation that is crushing not just the poor but the middle class too. The U.S. Census Bureau’s February “Household Pulse” survey found 44% of Connecticut residents struggling to pay their bills.

An argument for higher taxes on the super-rich might be made if the revenue was to be used to reduce taxes on everyone else. While the governor doesn’t support raising taxes on the super-rich, he [ITALICS] has [END ITALICS] proposed reducing income taxes on the middle class, which is more than advocates of raising taxes on the super-rich propose.

No, those advocates want the extra money only so state government can spend it, and the composition of A Better Connecticut Institute shows how most of it would be spent. For the institute’s board includes the executive director of the Connecticut Education Association, the state’s biggest teacher union, and the political director of the Connecticut AFL-CIO, which is composed largely of state and municipal government’s own employees. Most state and municipal tax revenue is spent compensating those two groups.

And what do many members of those groups do when they retire? Of course they move south, where the cost of living is lower and their Connecticut government pensions go farther.

---

Chris Powell is a columnist for the Journal Inquirer in Manchester, Connecticut. (CPowell@JournalInquirer.com)

-END-

By Chris Powell

According to an assistant secretary of the U.S. Health and Human Services Department, Rachel Levine, who spoke the other day at the Connecticut Children’s Medical Center in Hartford, “gender-affirming care” — the euphemism for sex-change therapy — will be common and considered normal before too long.

Levine may be right but no one should hope so.

For it would signify profound national unhappiness if many people were so uncomfortable in their own skin that they would want to undergo physique-altering drug treatments and even mutilation. The law should prohibit this kind of thing for minors, for the same reason it prohibits minors from making contracts and should prohibit minors from marrying, as is increasingly being urged. Minors aren’t prepared to make such decisions.

Children may grow out of gender dysphoria, as they grow out of many other things, and evidence that sex-change therapy increases the long-term happiness of those who undertake it is lacking, even as the therapy may have irreversible effects.

While it does not seem to have been noted, the rise in gender dysphoria among children corresponds with the explosion of mental illness generally among the young. This may not be a coincidence.

After all, about a third of children in the United States live in a home without two parents and thus with less parenting and support than most children used to get. Many of those children are living in poverty. In cities the percentage of children living in poverty without fathers approaches 90%.

Meanwhile school performance is crashing throughout the country.

The explosion in youthful mental illness (and mental illness in the adult population as well) would seem to invite government to inquire urgently into its cause.

Indeed, the mental illness epidemic may be more damaging than the recent virus epidemic was. But no.

Instead Assistant Secretary Levine remarked in Hartford that sex-change therapy for minors has the “highest support” of the Biden administration.

If such an administration remains in power, the assistant secretary’s prophecy that sex-change therapy for children will become normal could be self-fulfilling, whether such therapy is really needed or not and though the country won’t be any saner for it.

* * *

MORE URGENT THAN BONUSES: While state government has begun paying $45 million in bonuses to 36,000 of its “essential” employees, a couple of sad news reports related to government finance were largely overlooked.

The housing authority in Bridgeport is evicting about a fifth of its households, 502 of 2,500, because they haven’t been paying rent and are already about $1.5 million in arrears. In New Haven a longstanding camp of homeless people in a city park, considered a sanitation and fire hazard, was dismantled and bulldozed by city employees.

The city governments didn’t mean to be cruel. They are striving to find other accommodations for the people being displaced, some of whom of course have drug and other mental problems. Even so, people living in a homeless camp are probably not in a condition to support themselves, just as people who can’t cover the rent in government housing for the poor probably aren’t either.

That doesn’t mean that with some temporary support, rehabilitation, and training these people couldn’t support themselves eventually, but their present is desperate. They need shelter immediately, and in Connecticut shelter is scarcer and more expensive than ever.

Governor Lamont is not indifferent to the problem. His administration has just given $2.45 million to Pacific House, a social-service organization that operates emergency shelters, for construction of 39 inexpensive apartments to become “supportive housing” in Stamford. But as the evictions in Bridgeport and New Haven show, that housing will not be nearly enough for immediate needs.

So Connecticut should consider opening a few emergency shelters like the field hospitals the National Guard set up quickly during the virus epidemic. Much vacant retail, school, and church property might be adapted for this purpose. Of course supervisory staff would have to be hired, and rules devised and enforced to keep the facilities clean and orderly, but such a project would not be complicated, except maybe for assuaging the neighbors.

—–

Chris Powell is a columnist for the Journal Inquirer in Manchester, Connecticut. (CPowell@JournalInquirer.com)

-END-