Chris Powell column

By Chris Powell

Nearly everyone agrees that Connecticut badly needs more inexpensive apartments. Many basic two-bedroom units in the state carry monthly rents that are as high as a home mortgage payment, and rents are still rising. As was demonstrated the other day at a state legislative committee hearing, many renters are desperate, especially with unprecedented electricity price increases coming on top of rent increases.

But no one has explained how a law restricting rents — government price control that would be exclusive to housing even as the prices of all other necessities are rising sharply as well — is going to encourage construction and renovation of rental housing. Indeed, with a rent control law Connecticut may send a powerful signal to rental housing developers to avoid the state and a powerful signal to landlords to convert their apartments to condominiums and sell them.

Rent control may help people who already have apartments but it won’t increase supply or slake demand.

Fortunately the major rent-control legislation under consideration in the General Assembly is a fraud. It would restrict annual rent increases to 4% [ITALICS] plus inflation. [END ITALICS] With the official inflation rate around 7% and real inflation closer to twice that, the legislation would hardly cap rents at all. Its main value to its advocates may be to establish the [ITALICS] principle [END ITALICS] of expropriating property without fair compensation.

Then, after a few years, other legislation might cap rent increases at 4% [ITALICS] without [END ITALICS] an inflation adjustment, and then freeze rents entirely. After all, many advocates of rent control think that [ITALICS] everything [END ITALICS] necessary should be free. Of course nothing is really free, and decisions about who should pay can be messy, since cost shifting is such a big objective of government.

Many people oppressed by their rents aren’t familiar with economics and how the real world works. But many advocates of rent control [ITALICS] are, [END ITALICS] and they know exactly what they are doing and what they are [ITALICS] not [ITALICS] doing.

They are [ITALICS] not [ITALICS] encouraging the crowd to understand inflation and where it comes from — government itself. They are not encouraging the crowd to notice that since most important prices have risen sharply, landlords aren’t to blame.

Nor are the rent-control advocates concentrating on the only solution to rising rents: increasing housing supply. No, expropriating is their objective.

There [ITALICS] are [END ITALICS] solutions to supply, but they aren’t quick and easy.

Liberalizing municipal zoning is the one most discussed. But any zoning solution will be slow and disjointed.

State government could build housing directly, exempting itself from municipal zoning, using eminent domain to obtain land, hiring contractors, and assigning construction plans, but that would risk much corruption.

Or maybe state government could exempt itself from local zoning, use eminent domain to obtain property near water and sewer lines and transit infrastructure, put the properties out to bid to apartment developers, and then exempt them from taxes as long as the properties were well maintained.

Such a policy would be sounder environmentally and possibly less controversial than putting apartments in rural towns that lack infrastructure.

But there can be no substantial construction of housing [ITALICS] anywhere [END ITALICS] without controversy. In the end the issue is a choice between the haves and have-nots. Government may try to mollify the have-nots with free bus rides, diapers, and contraceptives, but what they need most is less expensive housing.

* * *

In the meantime state government will continue to take care of itself better than anything else.

Central Connecticut State University in New Britain has just announced its hiring of former Hartford Democratic state Rep. Edwin Vargas as the new occupant of the Gov. William A. O’Neill Endowed Chair in Public Policy and Practical Politics. The job pays $69,000, pretty sweet for someone who is 74 with pension income. That’s “practical politics” for you.

Vargas won re-election last year but, betraying his constituents, declined to take office in January so he could accept the university job. His predecessor was another state legislator, former state Sen. Donald J. DeFronzo, a Democrat from New Britain.

If Republicans ever want to occupy an endowed chair in public higher education in Connecticut, they’ll have to start winning a lot more elections.

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

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By Chris Powell

Connecticut state legislators who have introduced legislation to prevent disclosure of discussions teachers have with students about “sensitive subjects” are upset that schools are facing many more freedom-of-information requests.

Responding to these requests, the legislators say, can incur great expense in school staff time.

One of those legislators, Rep. Jennifer Leeper, D-Fairfield, complains, “There is a national movement that has led a lot of people to believe that our teachers are influencing kids in dangerous and insidious ways, which has had real-world impact even here in Connecticut.”

Does Leeper really think that suspicion about what schools are doing is without foundation? For Connecticut itself is full of cause for suspicion.

Schools treating students for gender dysphoria conceal this from their parents if the students don’t want their parents to know, even as state law forbids minors from getting tattooed without parental permission.

Some school systems refuse even the most legitimate freedom-of-information requests, as in Enfield, whose school superintendent refuses to disclose how the internationally infamous “pizza sex” assignment got into a middle school class a year ago and where it came from.

Connecticut schools long have refused to disclose teacher evaluations, and under the pernicious influence of the teacher unions, the General Assembly has enacted and maintains a law exempting such evaluations from disclosure, alone of all government personnel evaluations in the state.

School systems in Connecticut sometimes have been almost as corrupt as the Catholic Church in handling teachers caught molesting students, allowing them to resign quietly and take their teaching licenses with them to positions with other school systems.

Last year Project Veritas video-recorded an assistant principal in Greenwich admitting he refused to hire Catholics and political conservatives as teachers, the better to propagandize students with liberal politics — a secret school policy on personnel.

Also last year parents exposed a teacher at Southington High School who had distributed to students a packet titled “Vocabulary for Conversations about Race, Gender, Equality, and Inclusivity” that emphasized transgenderism and racism, topics that had no relation to material being taught in the teacher’s English classes. Asserting that students might be contributing to oppression of minorities without even knowing it, the packet was political propaganda and indoctrination. When it was exposed, Southington’s school superintendent begrudgingly admitted that distributing the packet had been improper.

Of course whenever anyone questions the age-appropriateness of a book in a school library, there are shrieks of “censorship,” as if a librarian’s judgment is always right even as the library itself already has “censored” millions of books by not including them.

Representative Leeper also complains that Fairfield’s school system has gotten FOI requests about teachers and schools unrelated to the requester’s own children.

But this complaint is doubly dishonest, first because everyone in Connecticut pays taxes that support all public schools in the state, and second because everyone has an interest in exposing mistakes or misconduct in education anywhere.

Leeper notes that there may be “bad faith” FOI requests. Some may even be meant as harassment. But these can be declined, and the state Freedom of Information Commission isn’t likely to advance them.

No, the real problem behind the explosion in FOI requests to schools in Connecticut is public education’s own lack of transparency and accountability and its political bias.

The propaganda and indoctrination that increasingly pop up in public education are always of the leftist kind, which is not surprising, since the national teacher unions, the National Education Association and the American Federation of Teachers, are aggressively left-wing political organizations. Who believes that all these union members leave their politics at the classroom door?

The assistant principal in Greenwich explained it well to Project Veritas last year. He was asked: “So it’s like you present everything in a way that’s subconsciously influencing the kids to vote liberal but not doing it in such an explicit way where the parents can actually get mad at you for it?”

He replied: “Right.”

Six months have passed since then. The investigations of the assistant principal that supposedly were undertaken by the Greenwich school system and state Attorney General William Tong still haven’t reported. Presumably the scandal is expected to fade away.

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

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By Chris Powell

How can you tell that something is part of public education? That’s easy: It strives to keep the most important things secret.

That’s the lesson of the Journal Inquirer’s attempt to discover why, two years ago, the Board of Regents of the Connecticut State Colleges and Universities system set about to fire the chief executive of Manchester Community College, Nicole Esposito, only to restore her after she brought a federal sex discrimination lawsuit. The college system paid Esposito $775,000 in damages and legal fees.

Last August the JI asked the college system to provide access to the personnel files of the three system officials Esposito had cited in her lawsuit as perpetrators of illegal discrimination: Community College Regional President Robert Steinmetz, Chief Operating Officer Alice Pritchard, and Vice President of Human Resources Andrew Kripp. The newspaper wanted to know if they had been disciplined for the Esposito disaster.

While state law makes such personnel files public, the college system stalled, refusing to grant access, since the officials whose files were sought objected, claiming an invasion of privacy. But this month, as the dispute was about to be scheduled for a hearing before the state Freedom of Information Commission, the college system relented, knowing that the commission almost certainly would order disclosure because the conduct of public officials on the job is public business.

The files were made available and showed that none of the sued officials had been disciplined for anything involving Esposito.

The college system might have resolved the issue quickly long ago simply by answering whether the sued officials had been disciplined, but it refused. Indeed, the college system has never explained why it tried to fire Esposito in the first place.

So $775,000 has been paid to Esposito, and probably much more has been spent in state government personnel time, for — what? No one outside the college system is to know.

Meanwhile the three defendants in Esposito’s lawsuit remain employed by the college system at spectacular annual salaries: Steinmetz at $276,754, Kripp at $242,217, and Pritchard at $228,354. The president of the college system, Terrence Chung, is paid even more extravagantly: $360,000.

In January Chung pleaded poverty for the college system. He asked the governor and General Assembly to nearly double the system’s annual spending over the next three years, from $318 million to $597 million.

When that request gets a hearing before the legislature, Governor Lamont and state legislators should ask Chung to explain the Esposito case and its huge expense as well as the necessity of the system’s spectacular salaries. Students in the college system should ask as well. After all, the college executives claim to be doing everything for the benefit of their students, many of whom say they lack food, secure housing, and transportation and need more support from their colleges.

With a few candid answers, maybe the college system would take a step toward becoming [ITALICS] public [END ITALICS] education.

* * *

START WITH SIKORSKY: No place in Connecticut has as much untapped potential as its largest and most impoverished city, Bridgeport — located on Long Island Sound with a great harbor, superhighways leading to the east, west, and north, a major stop on the Northeast Corridor railroad line, and a city-owned airport just over the municipal line in Stratford.

But state government long has overlooked Bridgeport’s potential because no one in authority has dared to deal with the poverty of the city’s residents.

Refurbishing the airport and restoring scheduled commercial flights there could contribute greatly to Bridgeport’s revival and economic development. But predictably enough Stratford doesn’t want to cooperate. Two of its state legislators, Republican Sen. Kevin Kelly and Democratic Rep. Joe Gresko, have introduced legislation to thwart Bridgeport’s sale of Sikorsky to the Connecticut Airport Authority, essentially giving Stratford control of the airport, which would mean no improvement.

Bridgeport is too poor and ill-managed to restore Sikorsky itself. But it could be done by the airport authority, which has greatly improved Bradley International Airport in Windsor Locks. If Bridgeport is ever to be improved in [ITALICS] any [END ITALICS] respect, state government will have to do it. Let it start with Sikorsky.

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

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By Chris Powell

While it’s good that former President Donald Trump now has some official competition for the Republican nomination for president in 2024 — former South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley, who was Trump’s ambassador to the United Nation — the problem is likely to be that Trump will have [ITALICS] too much [END ITALICS] competition for the nomination, as he did when he first ran in 2016.

Back then 16 candidates of some standing ran against Trump for the Republican nomination, and they split the anti-Trump vote in the party so badly that he had a surprisingly easy path through the primaries to the Republican National Convention.

Trump retains much support among Republicans, though he is probably the weakest candidate they could choose to challenge President Biden or any other Democrat. Recent polls have suggested that Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, who is acting like a potential presidential candidate, might defeat Trump in one-on-one Republican primaries but that Trump would win if he faced more than one challenger.

Despite the incompetence of the Biden administration, there is little chance that Trump could ever carry Connecticut. Maybe no Republican candidate for president could. But surely there are potential Republican candidates for president who might do better in Connecticut than Trump and thus harm other Republican candidates here less and help restore political competition to the state.

The prospect of Trump’s renomination is an urgent reason for Connecticut to adopt ranked-choice voting, which encourages candidates to try to win by becoming more acceptable to majorities instead of by carving out the biggest and most extreme minority.

* * *

MUST MISTAKES BE FOREVER?: In a newspaper letter the other day defending the monopoly enjoyed by Connecticut’s liquor stores on sale of wine, former Enfield state Rep. William Kiner inadvertently showed not only what is wrong with the state’s liquor law but also what long has been wrong with state politics generally.

Liquor store operators, Kiner wrote, “purchased their stores with the knowledge that they alone could sell wine.” So, he continued, for state government to let supermarkets sell wine would be “changing the rules in the middle of the game when people’s livelihoods are at stake.”

That is, mistakes in policy must be preserved [ITALICS] forever, [END ITALICS] no matter how unfair and contrary to the public interest — especially if an influential special interest draws its livelihood from the mistake. Even the basic rules of a market economy, like free competition, must be suspended if they threaten someone’s profitability — the public interest be damned. That’s the Kiner Rule.

But preventing supermarkets from selling wine isn’t the only anti-competitive aspect of Connecticut law on alcoholic beverages. State law also establishes a system of minimum pricing for those beverages, a system that inflates prices, insuring the profitability of beverage distributors and retailers.

If policy is to make alcohol expensive for health reasons, state government should receive the extra revenue as a tax. Instead in Connecticut the extra revenue from the law inflating prices goes to the distributors and retailers themselves. It’s a racket that, according to Kiner, must never end.

Of course state law does not guarantee such privileges for any other business. All other businesses in Connecticut are always subject to changes in state law that may and often do diminish their profitability.

If, as many liquor store operators now admit, they can’t compete in a free market with lower prices, they should leave the business to people who can.

* * *

ONLY HUNTING MIGHT WORK: Another lobby at the state Capitol, the bear lobby, argues that Connecticut should continue to prohibit hunting of the animals because their infiltration of the state is caused by people failing to secure food and garbage outside.

But if bear food was really so plentiful outside, bears would not increasingly be breaking into Connecticut homes in search of something to eat. No, the bear population has been increasing in the state mainly because hunting them was outlawed long ago.

Yes, getting people to secure their garbage might sometimes induce bears to move along faster. But the state will never eliminate people’s negligence, and the bears are already here and causing more trouble. They won’t be leaving voluntarily.

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

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By Chris Powell

Assuming the accuracy of a recent opinion poll commissioned by various social-justice groups, Connecticut should have no trouble solving its housing shortage.

The poll claims that most state residents agree that state government should override municipal zoning that restricts housing construction, penalize towns that fail to allow a full range of housing, and even limit housing rent increases to 2½% per year.

But as many polls do, this one says exactly what its sponsors wanted it to say. So it’s not to be trusted.

For if the poll results were really so accurate, residents of Avon and Woodbridge, suburbs whose exclusive zoning protects them against poverty and its pathologies, would be clamoring for construction of tenements to house the thousands of single-parent families the mayors of Hartford and New Haven long have wanted to export.

The mayors know only too well that many people in Connecticut don’t pull their own weight and so are financial and social burdens wherever they live. And as Hearst Connecticut Media columnist Hugh Bailey noted the other day, the “not in my back yard” attitude toward new housing is prevalent even in the cities. For more housing [ITALICS] anywhere [END ITALICS] means more crowding, traffic, and the risk of fatherless kids living nearby and dragging down school performance while raising school costs.

That is, while most people may acknowledge that more housing is great in principle, practice may mean something else to them. If the housing poll had asked people to specify a location in their towns that would be good for new housing, most probably would [ITALICS] not [END ITALICS] have answered “next door.”

Zoning in Connecticut is too exclusive, city populations are far too impoverished, and racial and economic class segregation are much too severe. But even many poor people who aspire to become middle class strive to get away from the pathologies of their poor neighbors. Exclusive zoning is the predictable response to those pathologies. Reduce the risk that those pathologies will come into a neighborhood and the housing shortage will become much easier to solve politically.

First of all, ending poverty in Connecticut requires state government to stop manufacturing it, as state government does with its disastrous welfare and education policies.

* * *

LOONEY THE BODY SNATCHER: Connecticut Senate President Pro Tem Martin M. Looney, D-New Haven, is a strange sort of civil libertarian.

Fearing that the U.S. Supreme Court, lately leaning conservative, will reverse certain precedents as it recently reversed its abortion precedent, Roe v. Wade, Looney has introduced legislation to put certain civil rights into state law, including the rights to contraception and same-sex and interracial marriage; the rights to be informed of one’s constitutional rights upon one’s arrest and to be given legal counsel; and the right of illegal immigrant children to attend public school. (Connecticut abortion law already incorporates the principles of the Roe decision.)

While no one in Connecticut seems to be proposing to undo those rights, and while the state Constitution almost surely would be construed to protect them, it’s remotely possible that the U.S. Supreme Court could retreat from one of them, so there’s no harm in putting them into state law as well.

But meanwhile Looney also has proposed legislation to have state government claim the corpses of motorcyclists killed in crashes while not wearing a helmet. State government would use the corpses for organ donations, on Looney’s presumption that any motorcyclist who rides without a helmet doesn’t care about what happens to his health or his corpse.

That presumption is terribly arrogant, and while motorcyclists may be foolish for riding without helmets, even then their next-of-kin have a claim to their remains that is far superior to government’s. After all, the Fourth Amendment declares a right that Looney’s corpse-confiscation bill overlooks: “The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated.”

To the next-of-kin of a fatally injured motorcyclist, that Fourth Amendment right might be dearer than the rights Looney proposes to add to state law — and don’t even the politically incorrect, like motorcyclists and their families, have rights too?

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

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By Chris Powell

For what seems like the first time in living memory, a governor of Connecticut, Ned Lamont, has pushed back a little against the arrogance of the University of Connecticut.

Maybe the pushback won’t last long, especially if one of the university’s basketball teams wins the national tournament in a few weeks and state residents revert to thinking that UConn can do no wrong and should retain priority over everything else in state and municipal government. But prompted by the governor’s resentment of what he called the “misinformation” spread by the university’s new president, Radenka Maric, the state has a serious controversy over UConn’s budget and management.

The university claims that the governor’s budget proposal cuts UConn’s appropriations by more than $100 million. The governor says his budget, like all his previous budgets, continues to increase the university’s basic appropriation and that the money that will be missing from UConn is only emergency aid received from the federal government that is expiring with the virus epidemic, money that was to be used to cover epidemic-related losses, money UConn knew or should have known would not be recurring.

Leaders in the General Assembly, which has many members who seem incapable of asking critical questions, especially about UConn, suggest that they’ll work out the problem — that is, the legislature again will give the university whatever it wants. Yet the situation is full of critical questions that should be asked.

The university’s capacity for basic management was most notably called into question recently by its being required to pay $14 million last year to former men’s basketball coach Kevin Ollie for firing him in 2018 without giving him the balance due on his multi-million-dollar contract. UConn lost the case in large part because it had permitted Ollie to join the professors union despite a contract that raised him far above working-class status.

But far more costly has been UConn’s long failure to close the huge operating deficits at its Health Center in Farmington, deficits attributed to excessive staff compensation. The legislature grouses about the deficits but always covers them and never does anything to close them.

Now UConn is complaining about the big costs it will incur from the master state employee union contract that the governor’s office negotiated, securing the support of the unions in the recent election by raising state employee pay dramatically. It’s a fair complaint that also is being made by the administration of the Connecticut State Colleges and Universities system — a complaint that rising staff compensation is cannibalizing higher education.

But it’s a dishonest complaint because it is being made so late. It should have been made last year before the legislature ratified the contract. Anyone could have seen that higher staff costs were certain but not necessarily higher appropriations for them.

It is also a dishonest complaint because UConn long has paid spectacular salaries. According to the Hartford Courant, which last week cited data from the state comptroller’s office, the 15 highest-paid state government employees work at UConn, as do 66 of the 90 highest paid, and the university has the largest payroll of any state agency, including big ones like the correction, transportation, and judicial departments.

Some salaries in the regional colleges and universities system are spectacular too.

Meanwhile the UConn Foundation’s most recent report showed $745 million in assets — not Harvard- or Yale-level endowments but large enough to help the university through an unexpectedly difficult budget year.

Besides, Connecticut is foolish to worry so much about higher education, which is overrated and overpriced, when the state’s elementary education is collapsing, with most students never mastering high school math and English before being awarded a diploma anyway, with nearly all students being advanced from grade to grade without necessarily learning anything — a policy of social promotion — and with a quarter of those students now classified as chronically absent.

At least money may not be the problem at the elementary level but rather policy. How does social promotion persuade any student or parent of the necessity of taking school seriously?

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

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By Chris Powell

Public education in Connecticut — education that is accountable to the public — would be diminished by legislation introduced by four Democratic members of the state House of Representatives.

Bill 6192 would exempt from disclosure under the state’s right-to-know law “any communication between a teacher and a student regarding sensitive subjects, such as sexual orientation, gender identity, and race, that occurs during school-sponsored activities.”

But federal law already requires confidentiality for student records in school, even as it also requires that such records be available to a student’s parents. The proposed state legislation is about concealing something else: what teachers tell students about “sensitive subjects.” That is, job performance. Is a teacher encouraging a student to change genders? Is a teacher propagandizing students? Is a teacher berating students about their politics, as two teachers in Idaho recently got caught doing?

The public has a right to know about a teacher’s job performance, [ITALICS] especially [END ITALICS] when it involves “sensitive subjects.”

Students often turn to a trusted teacher for counseling, and teachers often provide sympathy and good advice. But such advice may not always be good or appropriate.

Since anything can be construed as “sensitive,” the legislation would deny the public access to records of [ITALICS] anything [END ITALICS] a teacher might say to a student, including improper things. Of course teachers would use the proposed law not to protect students but to protect themselves against accountability.

Indeed, some school systems in Connecticut are already concealing from parents how the schools are dealing with the sexual dysphoria of their child. This is a sort of kidnapping.

The proposed legislation would license unaccountability and worse.

* * *

Not long ago racial and economic class integration was the country’s objective in education and commerce. Progress was made. But lately segregation in schools is making a comeback, being portrayed as politically correct, especially in New Haven, the capital of political correctness.

The city again is being urged to start a public middle school for Black and Hispanic boys, partly on the silly premise that having whites and girls around impedes the boys’ education, though researchers say integrated schools cause minority students to do better.

Of course the biggest impediment to any child’s education is not racial and gender integration but parental neglect, which is chronic in New Haven and other cities.

A middle school based on another form of segregation is already scheduled to open in New Haven this year — a school for students of unusual sexual orientations. The school will be based on the premise that regular schools will never act decisively against bullying of such students and that they can never be safe in regular schools.

In approving these schools, the state Board of Education, a playpen of the far left, will be proclaiming that children will learn better if they never run into anyone different. So much for integration, and education itself.

* * *

WHO LET HIM LOOSE?: At last Connecticut knows the identity of one of the two juveniles who, operating a stolen car, ran down and killed Henryk Gudelski, 53, as he jogged along a street in New Britain two years ago.

The known perpetrator is Luis Pagan-Gonzalez, now 19, then 17, who the other day pleaded guilty in New Britain Superior Court to first-degree assault and was sentenced to seven years in prison. Because of Connecticut’s juvenile court secrecy law, Pagan-Gonzalez’s identity was withheld until he recently began to be prosecuted as an adult.

But Connecticut still doesn’t know what is most important about the case: How, when he killed Gudelski, had Pagan-Gonzalez managed to remain free despite having been arrested 13 times in the previous 2½ years on charges including assault, drugs, reckless driving, evading responsibility, car theft, robbery, and violation of probation?

Which court officials handled his cases? Which of them kept letting him loose despite his chronic criminality?

Sentencing Pagan-Gonzalez, the court offered no explanation, and the governor and General Assembly have not inquired.

No, Connecticut is supposed to be content that its prison population is down even as repeat offenders rampage through the state.

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

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By Chris Powell

Lincoln wrote that government should do what the people can’t do for themselves at all or very well. By that standard Connecticut state government’s program to provide paid leave for private-sector workers should be eliminated, doubly so because, as Connecticut Public reported the other day, a third of program applicants are being denied what is really only the return of their own money.

The program is financed by a special half-percent tax on income. Successful applicants can receive as much as 12 weeks of paid leave for parenting newborns, recovering from illness, and taking care of loved ones. But of course those are hardly all of life’s emergencies. Indeed, if your home burns down or your car is wrecked, you may have a financial problem bigger than your uncle’s back injury, but the money you have sunk into the paid leave program won’t help you.

Why are a third of applicants being rejected?

Paperwork and confusing rules are blamed, and the Connecticut Paid Leave Authority is said to be working on that. But even if those problems are fixed, people in financial distress will be denied because of the law’s mistaken premises — that only care-giving emergencies should be covered and that only government can adjudicate and administer coverage.

Discarding those mistaken premises would allow coverage to be vastly increased. State government could put worker contributions to the paid leave fund in individual escrow accounts, or require workers to make monthly contributions to special savings accounts in their own names at banks, and then be allowed access to the money, [ITALICS] for any reason, [END ITALICS] during a short period at the start of each year.

People always would be saving a half percent of their income, people with non-caregiving emergencies would not be exploited for the benefit of people with caregiving emergencies, all emergencies would be covered, government would not be interfering so much in personal lives, and all people would get all their money back eventually.

Even if the Paid Leave Authority reduces its rejection rate, it still will be turning its back on countless emergencies it is not even registering. The objective should be not just to make the program more efficient but to transform it to serve [ITALICS] everyone. [END ITALICS]

* * *

School administrators, the state Education Department, state legislators, and others are trying to figure out why the chronic absenteeism rate in Connecticut’s public elementary and high schools has been rising even though the virus epidemic is long over.

The chronic absenteeism rate for the state as a whole stands at 25%. That is, a quarter of Connecticut students are missing 10% or more of instruction time. For the schools in the most impoverished municipalities the rate is as much as twice that.

Some school systems are surveying the parents of the often-missing kids to ask what the problem is. Financial stress? Lack of transportation? Family illness, conflict, or dysfunction? Language barriers? Bullying? Something else?

Those things may explain some cases. But there is probably a bigger reason, a reason parents and students don’t want to divulge and educators and legislators don’t want to know about.

That is, some parents and students well may see no [ITALICS] necessity [END ITALICS] in attending school. After all, if chronic absenteeism carried a prison sentence for parents and students alike, the chronic absenteeism rate would fall sharply. But many parents and students easily may figure that education isn’t that important — that people can get by in Connecticut without an education.

Surely by now these kids and their parents have perceived Connecticut’s main educational policy — social promotion — and have seen that no student in the state needs to learn anything to advance from grade to grade and be given a high school diploma. Meanwhile many if not most chronically absent students live in households receiving all sorts of welfare benefits and subsidies — for housing, food, medical care, electricity, and so forth — all awarded without regard to school attendance and educational achievement.

Do social promotion and comprehensive and unconditional welfare benefits strengthen or destroy education’s appeal? The evidence is out in the open but educators have yet to tabulate it.

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

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By Chris Powell

Legislation has been proposed in the General Assembly to diminish the use of police in Connecticut’s schools, and some of its supporters suggested the other day at the state Capitol that the presence of police in schools actually [ITALICS] causes [END ITALICS] crime — that if the police weren’t there, students wouldn’t be arrested. Of course that’s not quite to say that bad stuff wouldn’t happen anyway.

“The story is simple,” said Robert Goodrich, executive director of Waterbury-based Radical Advocates for Cross-Cultural Education. “The moment police started being implemented in our schools, arrests rose dramatically, and they continue to rise. The more police we have in schools, the more likely it is that any student is going to be arrested,” especially Black and Hispanic students.

The far-left child welfare organization Connecticut Voices for Children made a similar claim a year ago.

So did boards of education request the permanent stationing of “school resource officers” to get more minority kids in trouble with the law?

Or were police requested — especially for schools in impoverished and crime-ridden cities — because schools increasingly were having trouble maintaining order with teachers and administrators alone?

Of course it was the latter. Indeed, in the days just preceding the recent clamor at the Capitol for expelling cops from schools, students were arrested for bringing guns or knives to school or brawling at school in Waterbury, Hamden, Meriden, and Manchester.

The racial disproportions in arrests in school are no more remarkable than the racial disproportions in crime and arrests everywhere, nor more remarkable than the racial disproportions in poverty, child neglect, and mental illness, which all correlate with crime.

The people complaining about police in schools don’t seem to have noticed the long rise in misbehavior by students, nor the special schools that have been established in recent years to try to educate the kids who can’t behave, nor the recent calls to put mental health clinics in schools because so many more students these days are disturbed.

The kids aren’t disturbed because of “school resource officers.” No, they [ITALICS] come to school [END ITALICS] disturbed — that is, when they come to school at all, the chronic absenteeism rate in Connecticut’s schools now being up to 25%. Most of these kids get little parenting and especially little from fathers.

Nor is it remarkable that students who behave, and their parents, favor having police in schools for protection against the kids who don’t behave.

Connecticut and the country are awash in social disintegration — from the schools to the streets and highways, where reckless driving now abounds; to crude behavior in markets and at public meetings; to shootings, including shootings at schools. Government claims misleadingly that crime is declining even as murders and shootings increase and much of the worst crime involves repeat offenders who should have been jailed for life a dozen convictions ago.

The people who blame this disintegration on cops in schools think social workers and therapists can handle it. But it already is straining the capacity of the police, as indicated by the high unsolved murder rates in the cities.

The people who blame cops in school scorn what they call the “school-to-prison pipeline.” But that pipeline is a lot longer than they acknowledge. Crucially, it starts at home.

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PRETEND PROTECTION: Another of Connecticut’s “protective orders” proved its worthlessness Jan. 31 as Traci-Marie Jones was shot to death at home in Bethel by her estranged husband, Lester Jones, who then killed himself. Traci-Marie had gotten the order from a court a week earlier.

It prohibited her killer from any contact with her and required him to stay at least 100 yards away and to give up any guns and ammunition. He didn’t, and of course nothing was done to enforce the order. Nothing is ever done to enforce such orders.

The only solutions in such circumstances are to provide the endangered person with round-the-clock police protection, move her permanently to a secret location, or arm her.

Every time a woman with a protective order is murdered, state legislators say they’ll do something about the problem. But they will do nothing. For two of the solutions are expensive and the third is too politically incorrect.

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

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By Chris Powell

Reducing state income tax rates a year from now, raising state spending by only 5.3% over two years, and preventing state government from spending all the money it can get its hands on, thereby forcing state government to save during good years, Governor Lamont’s state budget proposal is far more conservative than might be expected from a Democrat.

As a result it seems likely to be faulted if not assailed by the leftist majority of the party’s members in the General Assembly, particularly for not giving the teacher unions as much more money as they would like.

“I want a sustainable tax cut that we can support in good times and not-so-good times,” the governor said in his budget address Wednesday. “We’ve had a number of false starts — on-again-off-again tax cuts. Not this time.”

But the left wing of Lamont’s party doesn’t want tax cuts to be “sustainable.” It wants to enlarge government’s claim on the economy and to shrink the private sector, and though the governor criticized “on-again-off-again” tax cuts, his budget would again postpone repeal of the 10% surcharge on the corporation tax, which was to happen this year.

The proposed income tax cuts give the impression of prosperity for Connecticut. But if the state can afford them, it is mainly because of the billions of dollars in emergency financial aid lately received from the federal government — a major cause of inflation nationally — and because of the increase in state tax revenue that has been produced by rising prices and asset values.

That is, the proposed income tax cuts are not the result of more efficient management of state government but a small apology to state residents for inflation, which is essentially a tax.

The governor tried to conjure an image of prosperity in Connecticut. “For the first time in over a generation,” he said, “Connecticut has enjoyed strong economic and population growth.”

No, it hasn’t. Connecticut has had little economic growth compared to other states and the second worst population growth, after only Vermont.

The governor went on to undermine his image of prosperity.

“The income and wealth disparity in our country has gotten worse over the last generation,” he admitted. “Increasing the minimum wage, debt-free community college, and no-cost workforce training that allows you to get a higher-paying job in less time will all help address income disparities.”

Indeed, the governor’s many proposals for new or increased state subsidies for groups considered needy and deserving suggested a state where fewer people are able to support themselves.

There will be a big increase in the state’s earned income tax credit, money for people who have more children than they can properly support. There will be more subsidies for day care, including reimbursements to businesses that offer day care to the children of employees.

There will be more subsidies for medical insurance for the poor and for businesses that help their employees repay student loan debt — the latter subsidies constituting another confession that higher education is overrated and overpriced and that government will do nothing about having driven up the cost.

With 25% of Connecticut’s students chronically absent from school, state government will spend another $7 million trying to lure them back.

And with tens of thousands of Connecticut children not being adequately fed at home, free school lunches will become universal.

The governor also proposes a program by which state government would pay a nonprofit organization to purchase, at huge discounts, as much $2 billion in seemingly uncollectable debt owed to hospitals by former patients, and then cancel the debt. The governor did not specify who will really take the loss here. But hospital losses for what is called uncompensated care tend to be recovered through higher charges to those who do pay for the care they get — other patients and their insurers.

Polls this week reported that, despite the prosperity preached in President Biden’s State of the Union address and the governor’s budget address, most Americans believe they are worse off financially than they were a year ago. More subsidies may be urgent in certain circumstances but they won’t produce lasting prosperity.

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

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