Chris Powell column

By Chris Powell

Nothing this year is likely to illustrate the enduring corruption of politics and government in Connecticut as well as last week’s crowded six-hour hearing of the General Assembly’s General Law Committee about whether supermarkets should be allowed to sell wine, in addition to the beer they already sell.

The hearing’s focus was rather misplaced — as a conflict between two special interests, liquor stores defending their monopoly on wine against competition from the supermarkets.

While the supermarkets have the far superior case, they feel obliged to pretend that the additional competition won’t work against the liquor stores, as if competition doesn’t always work against those who oppose it instead of rising to meet it.

Lost in the battle of the special interests is the far bigger question: Why, even as Connecticut plunges into the marijuana business, does the state need so much regulation of the sale of alcoholic beverages?

Of course there is a public interest in preventing alcohol sales to minors and sales at times when drunken driving may be especially facilitated. But pursuing that public interest does not require restricting sales to particular retailers. [ITALICS] Any [END ITALICS] retailer is perfectly able to comply with the age and hour rules, as supermarkets already do with beer. So why not let them sell wine and liquor as well? Other states allow that and have survived.

Indeed, why not let liquor stores sell everything supermarkets sell? Why not let [ITALICS] all [END ITALICS] retailers sell [ITALICS] everything? [END ITALICS] What is the need for liquor licenses at all, or the need to limit licenses?

Liquor store operators used to claim that forbidding competition, including price competition, was needed for public health — to make an intoxicating substance more expensive. But of course the extra money was taken not by the government but by the store operators themselves.

The “need” for anti-competitive regulation is only to create and sustain a special interest that feeds on government patronage. For this regulation long has given the state high prices for beer, wine, and liquor and an absurd number of small stores with lousy product selection. Classical economics calls them rent seekers — an industry that survives only through government favoritism.

At least some of the liquor store operators and their tools in the legislature now acknowledge that the real issue here is whether the price of alcoholic beverages in Connecticut should continue to be propped up by government, and consumer choice diminished, to maintain the profitability of a small and uniquely privileged class of people.

That is, the small liquor stores can’t compete, so competition should be forbidden and its benefits forfeited.

Almost 50 years ago state Sen. Robert D. Houley, D-Vernon, not only saw how contrary to the public interest this was but also realized the issue’s political potential. Houley waged a campaign to repeal minimum prices for alcoholic beverages and to inject competition into the liquor industry generally, and he faced down a legislative hearing bigger than the one held last week — a hearing so packed with angry “mom and pop” liquor store operators that it had to be moved from the state Capitol to the Bushnell Memorial Hall across the street.

Houley had been a Marine and few legislators had his courage. Most legislators found his pursuit of the public interest quaint and sided with the special interest, figuring that pandering to the dozen or so store operators who reside in every legislative district would be better for them politically. So Houley’s legislation failed. But many people were watching, and though his district had been politically competitive, Houley became unbeatable.

That’s why the liquor issue is so distressing.

There is no good reason for letting the special interest continue to determine public policy at such expense, and the public remains largely persuaded in favor of change, as it was when Houley pressed the issue long ago. But today as then, if some special interest stands in the way, most legislators lack the courage to pursue the public interest even when they can perceive it.

So “rent seeking” prevails in Connecticut under a political rationale as old as Charles Dickens, who mocked it in one of his novels. If you make man-eating illegal, Dickens warned, you’ll starve the cannibals.

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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 a long time Connecticut has been spending billions of dollars each year on elementary and high school education, and now that the annual cost exceeds $9 billion, the leaders of the Democratic majority in the state Senate announced last week that their top priority of the new legislative session will be to discover just how all this school money is being spent.

Better late than never, but the outlines of spending on elementary and high school education in Connecticut are not and have never been so mysterious. Most of the money goes for compensation of school personnel. So does most of the extra money that is appropriated by state government each year in the name of aid to local education.

This may be why Connecticut’s airwaves are frequently full, as they are now, of television and radio commercials sponsored by the state’s largest teacher union, the Connecticut Education Association, implicitly urging their audience to make sure that state government keeps giving teachers whatever they want.

In addition to their legislation seeking to confirm the obvious about the destination of education spending, the Democratic senators last week indicated a desire to rewrite for the umpteenth time the formula for allocating state aid to local schools.

At least this latest impulse to rewrite the formula seemed to arise from a growing suspicion among even the Democrats themselves that the previous formulas have failed to make any difference in student performance, especially the performance of minority students in poor cities and towns. That performance is what the frequent rewriting of the aid formulas supposedly has been targeting since the state Supreme Court’s 1977 decision in Connecticut’s first big school financing lawsuit, Horton v. Meskill.

Yes, 46 years have passed since Connecticut officially noticed that poor minority students in poor municipalities were not performing well in school, 46 years since the state attributed their poor performance to inadequate school funding, and 46 years since that funding began to be steadily increased. And yet, speaking of those students last week, the Senate chairman of the legislature’s Education Committee, Sen. Douglas McCrory, D-Windsor, declared, “We’re not properly educating them.”

Even 46 years after Horton v. Meskill such an acknowledgment also may be better late than never. But after the failure of nearly a half century of public policy’s concentration on school financing formulas, could it be time for legislators to question whether the education problem has ever been about money at all, no matter how much the teachers clamor for more?

After all, despite the lack of sophisticated school aid formulas, a half century ago most children in Connecticut at least got to school every day. Today, according to the state Education Department, a quarter of Connecticut’s students are chronically absent, missing 10% or more of instruction time, even though the virus epidemic is over.

If children miss so much school, the problem isn’t at school but at home. So where is the investigation or the legislation targeting what has happened at home? How will paying teachers more get the kids to show up?

* * *

WHERE’S THE PROTECTION?: But state government continues to pose as the great protector of children. Legislation has been proposed to outlaw flavored tobacco products, especially because such products are attractive to young people and risk getting them addicted to a carcinogen.

Meanwhile in the name of “equity” state government is creating a marijuana retailing business as if marijuana can’t be as harmful as tobacco, if in different ways. While state law promoting marijuana forbids its sale to people under 21, of course young people were obtaining it illegally before the state got into the business and will obtain it even more easily now that their older friends can purchase it for them.

The tobacco legislation may create another contraband trade targeting adults and minors alike, and smuggling cigarettes into the state is already easy.

People already know that these substances are bad for them. Better to let them live their own lives without contraband law than for state government to make itself so hypocritical, pushing one harmful substance on them while deploring and impeding another.

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

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By Chris Powell

Connecticut is losing population and business again but its elected officials are as busy as ever deploring the awful things happening elsewhere in the country, and they may be thankful for the distraction. In recent days mass shootings in California and murderous misconduct by police in Tennessee have prompted Connecticut’s leaders to issue proclamation after proclamation deploring the incidents, as if their constituents had any doubt about their feelings, or thought that those feelings might make any difference.

Connecticut’s leaders seemed to feel the need to strike a pose — to gain publicity for their self-righteousness.

The people who do the hiring for the Memphis Police Department may have a lot to answer for, but then Connecticut has enough of its own police misconduct to answer for, misconduct captured on body-camera video just as it was captured the other day in Memphis.

A Connecticut state trooper is facing a charge of manslaughter for repeatedly shooting a young man, Mubarek Soulemane, three years ago as he sat quietly in a car that had been stopped on a highway in West Haven after a wild chase.

Five New Haven officers are facing charges of reckless endangerment and cruelty for dragging and dumping Randy Cox, whose neck had been broken during an abrupt stop in a police van last June.

The execution in West Haven and the rough treatment of the man in police custody in New Haven evoked from Connecticut’s leaders only a fraction of the indignation they have mustered for the police misconduct a thousand miles away in Tennessee.

And while elected officials should avoid prejudicing proceedings in criminal justice, Connecticut’s elected officials might do well to show more awareness of the social disintegration that police officers confront every day — social disintegration that has made recruiting officers critically difficult, especially in the cities, which have the worst crime.

As Connecticut’s elected officials were fulminating about the mass shootings in California and the police riot in Memphis, two 16-year-olds were shot on the streets of Hartford. The incident passed without official comment and nearly without any notice at all by news organizations, this kind of thing long having become typical of Connecticut’s cities, too common to deplore. Besides, any elected official who deplored what has become so common might be obliged to fix responsibility for it, a search that would lead him to some of his own constituents.

Better to deplore California and Tennessee, since nobody there votes here.

* * *

OPPRESSION IS DESERVED: Afghanistan and especially its women are getting sympathy around the world as the theocratic fascists again ruling the benighted place, the Taliban, are banning women from education and service with the international charitable organizations that are trying to prevent starvation and disease in the country.

But disgraceful as the Taliban regime is, sympathy for the Afghans is misplaced. For Afghanistan’s men and women alike had their chance during the Western world’s 20-year attempt at nation building there.

While some Afghans showed courage in pursuit of a more democratic society, most Afghans, including most Afghan women, were indifferent. Many Afghan women now realize that they won’t have much of a future without education, but they can do nothing about it — unless, of course, they want to pick up a gun, learn how to use it, and fight a revolution.

Few want to do that. Instead many will try to leave the country. Some will head for the United States, and a few may deserve consideration.

But most Afghans now deserve to live under the oppression they refused to fight, and the United States should not make that oppression any easier for the oppressors with financial or material assistance of any kind. Neither should the United States intervene to help overthrow the Taliban. No, Afghanistan should be left in peace to evolve gradually in its misery.

If Afghan women want a better life, they will have to contend for it themselves over the long term, just as women in Iran, Saudi Arabia, Pakistan, and other women-oppressing theocracies will have to.

No one will be liberating them but themselves.

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

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By Chris Powell

What an extraordinary claim the Connecticut State Colleges and Universities system made for itself last week. The system, representing the regional universities and the community colleges, declared that its institutions long have been cannibalized by employee compensation costs and so now need big new appropriations to restore their academics and make it possible for more students to attend for “free” — that is, with taxpayers paying for them.

Accordingly, the system proposes to nearly double its spending over the next three years, from $318 million to $597 million. But rather than helping students, the plan seems meant mostly to keep the institutions going amid their declining enrollment. After all, if the universities and colleges cannot induce students to pay at least something for their tuition, just what is the value of the education that is proposed to be given away for nothing?

The cannibalizing complained about by the regional universities and community colleges is not confined to higher education, Two weeks ago the state comptroller’s office reported that state employee compensation increased in 2022 at the fastest rate in years, nearly 10%, exceeding $5 billion for the first time even as state government’s workforce fell by 2,000 people, or 4%, from 51,500 to 49,500.

In any case state government’s obsession with higher education is excessive in light of the steady decline in student proficiency in Connecticut’s [ITALICS] lower [END ITALICS] education. While some of that decline results from the interruption to schooling caused by the recent virus epidemic, test results show that the decline began long before. In the unlikely event that it ever can be established that increased spending improves education in Connecticut, [ITALICS] lower [END ITALICS] education is where it should go.

* * *

ABORTION WORSHIP: Abortion fanaticism reached its highest point last week as a group of Connecticut Democratic state legislators and other Democratic officials, styling themselves the Reproductive Rights Caucus, proposed that state government establish a fund to pay the expenses of residents of other states who come to Connecticut for abortions.

Suddenly it was as if all human need in Connecticut itself had been sated and the state had achieved such prosperity that it could take financial responsibility for the rest of the country.

But even as the Reproductive Rights Caucus was staking its claim on behalf of paying for the abortions of Texans and Alabamans, other interest groups were clamoring at the state Capitol about the many unmet social, medical, educational, nutritional, and business development needs of Connecticut’s own residents.

Governor Lamont heard them and announced that state government would spend another $12 million to help poor tenants catch up on overdue rent payments. But what about medical care for illegal immigrant children? What about the thousands of Connecticut students said to be going to school hungry because their families don’t feed them at home? And how will Connecticut pay for the hundred thousand low-income apartments it is said to lack?

Will the Reproductive Rights Caucus reply to that clamor and explain why abortion is actually the highest social good in the world and should have a superior claim on Connecticut’s resources, no matter the origin of the desire for abortion?

And will any Democratic officials who participate in the clamor for Connecticut’s needy find the nerve to rebuke their colleagues who put abortion above everything else?

* * *

POLITICAL PAYOFF: State politics got even more cynical last week when the Lamont administration announced the appointment of Rob Hotaling as a deputy commissioner in the state Department of Economic and Community Development. It was said that Hotaling was appointed because he made a good impression on Governor Lamont last year as the Independent Party’s candidate for governor.

But that’s not likely the big reason why the governor thinks well enough of Hotaling to give him a job. Rather, last year Hotaling prevented the Independent Party from repeating its 2018 cross-endorsement of the Republican nominee for governor, Bob Stefanowski. Last year Hotaling kept the Independent Party’s 12,000 votes from going Republican, the only way those votes might have meant anything in the election. The supposed Independent turned out to be a Democratic tool.

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

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By Chris Powell

While state government is all geared up to distract itself with trivia, news organizations are full of reports indicating Connecticut’s worsening impoverishment, especially its child neglect. In recent days these reports have told of thousands of students coming to school hungry because their families don’t feed them at home, and of a city school system — Waterbury’s — that is making around-the-clock tutoring available to students, 80% of whom are described as “high needs,” a euphemism for neglected.

Of course poverty in Waterbury or any city isn’t a surprise, but the report about it added that more than half of [ITALICS] all [END ITALICS] students in Connecticut are now classified by the state Education Department as “high needs.”

News reports always indicate that most of Connecticut’s needy are unmarried women with children whose fathers play little if any role in their lives. But no one in authority draws a connection between this phenomenon and the poverty, child neglect, and drug abuse afflicting the schools and criminal justice.

One of the recent reports, drawing from the state Sentencing Commission, says 80% of Connecticut’s prison inmates are mentally ill or suffer from drug abuse. Those have been the circumstances in the prisons for decades, since many “high needs” children become higher-needs offenders over time.

Unless their neglect is reversed early, “high needs” children enter adulthood without a strong basic education and are qualified only for menial work, highly susceptible to the temptations of drugs and crime, and unable to contribute much if anything to society.

But there is no plan to transform the lives of Connecticut’s neglected children or even to acknowledge their neglect and its causes. Instead legislators are offering only the usual pandering and empty gestures.

State Senate Majority Leader Bob Duff, D-Norwalk, has introduced a bill to prohibit people convicted of sedition, rebellion, or insurrection from holding public office or any government job.

Connecticut hasn’t run into that problem yet, but just down the road from Norwalk, in Bridgeport, Joe Ganim has been serving his second stint as mayor after having done a long prison term for corruption committed during his first stint. No state law prevented his return to office.

Now Ganim is even seeking to recover his license to practice law.

But, like Duff, Ganim is a Democrat, so distant “insurrectionists” can be used to distract from the taint upon government close to home.

State Rep. Christopher Rosario, D-Bridgeport, proposes to authorize the two Indian casinos in the southeastern part of the state, as well as a few bars in the state’s cities, to sell alcoholic beverages as late as 4 in the morning, even as wrong-way driving has exploded in Connecticut and has just killed one of Rosario’s legislative colleagues and even as state-authorized marijuana will increase driving while intoxicated.

More pandering to the Indians comes from the bill introduced by Rep. Anthony Nolan, D-New London, to rename the Thames River as the Pequot River, after the tribe that terrorized the rest of the inhabitants of Connecticut 400 years ago, causing the European settlers and the other Indian tribes to unite to destroy them. (“Pequot” itself meant “destroyers.”)

What possibly could justify the honor Nolan proposes? Only the great wealth of the distant descendants of the Pequots who now operate one of the casinos. Government awarded them a spectacularly valuable duopoly and now humiliates itself before them.

Governor Lamont offered the most trivial proposals of the month as he claimed to be seeking “to eliminate gun violence.”

He would “invest” another $2.5 million in “community violence intervention programs,” whereby unstable young men are asked nicely to behave. He would prohibit carrying guns openly in public, as if criminals don’t already conceal their weapons until they strike. He would prohibit people from buying more than one handgun per month, as if nearly everyone who wants a gun doesn’t already have one. And he wants registration of “ghost guns,” as if criminals will comply.

Nothing proposed so far in the legislative session will impede gun violence or slow or even acknowledge Connecticut’s social disintegration.

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

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By Chris Powell

For many years Hartford’s North End, the heavily Black area of the city, has suffered extensive sewage overflows into basements from its antiquated sewer system, and the other day residents there complained about it again, this time to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency. The problem is universally acknowledged but nothing is being done about it. According to the Hartford Courant, one community leader calls it “environmental racism,” an increasingly fashionable and politically opportunistic complaint.

Yes, fixing the problem would cost tens of millions of dollars, maybe more. Yet all the responsible agencies are full of cash, from the regional water and sewer agency, the Metropolitan District Commission; to Governor Lamont’s administration, which is sitting on billions of dollars in surplus funds; to the federal government, which has created so much money in recent years, much of it in the name of infrastructure improvements, that it has drowned the world in a devastating inflation.

Even the city of Hartford itself, while on the brink of bankruptcy a few years ago, chose against fixing the North End sewers and instead decided to build a minor-league baseball stadium downtown.

This prompted a sneaky maneuver by the Democratic state administration of Gov. Dannel P. Malloy to have state government assume the entirety of Hartford’s $500 million bonded debt while doing nothing about the heavy indebtedness of Connecticut’s other troubled cities — a gesture of spectacular patronage to the city.

None of this was “environmental racism.” It was ordinary politics for which the political party that claims to be the tribune of the poor and racial minorities, the Democratic Party, is comprehensively responsible, since it has controlled all levels of government involved with the North End sewer issue — local, state, and federal.

Lately Connecticut’s two U.S. senators, Richard Blumenthal and Chris Murphy, have been voting essentially for blank checks for Ukraine in pursuit of a war against Russia whose aims the U.S. government has yet to specify. Indeed, as the North Enders renewed their complaints about the sewer issue, Blumenthal flew off to Ukraine again.

The Hartford area’s U.S. representative, John B. Larson, lately has been pressing to spend as much as $17 billion in infrastructure money not on fixing the North End’s sewers but to relocate the Hartford area’s highways and put many miles of them in tunnels.

Hartford Mayor Luke Bronin has been advancing various expensive housing and commercial projects around the city, apparently figuring that leadership on the North End sewer problem can be left to the MDC, state government, the EPA, or someone else.

The North End’s sewers never get fixed not because of “environmental racism” but because the residents there are poor, insufficiently engaged, have terrible political representation at every level, and [ITALICS] accept [END ITALICS] it.

Having just won a new four-year term, thanks in part to the usual huge plurality from Hartford, and presiding over most of the administrative assets that can fix the sewer problem, Governor Lamont should be the target of the North End’s clamor. But does anyone representing the North End even know where to find him?

* * *

EXPOSE CHILD RAPE: Having hit a homerun with their proposal for a huge and quick reduction in Connecticut’s electric rates — removing the state government charges hidden in electric bills — the General Assembly’s Republican minority now may press another good issue. Some Republican legislators propose to require parental notification for abortions performed on minors.

The legislation may not even get a hearing, since the legislature’s Democratic majority is so extremist on abortion. But at least raising the issue may show how the Democrats seek to weaken the family, just as they are striving to weaken it by concealing from parents how schools handle the sexual dysphoria of their children.

Opponents of parental notification contend that it would expose child neglect or abuse at home or elsewhere — as if such neglect or abuse [ITALICS] shouldn’t [END ITALICS] be exposed and acted against. Indeed, in Connecticut abortions for minors are arranged by their exploiters and rapists to conceal their felonies. Yet to Democratic legislators, abortion is the highest social good and so any abortion is better than exposing child sexual abuse.

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

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By Chris Powell

Could Stamford, a Democratic-controlled city, be tired of forfeiting its financial management to government employee unions?

That’s the implication of a vote by the city’s Board of Representatives — the city council — at its first meeting of the new year. The board voted 23-7 to reject a proposed contract with the school administrators union on the grounds that it is too expensive. It would have provided 10.5% raises over three years. While that would be much less than inflation, school administrators long have been highly paid.

So now, under Connecticut’s democracy-destroying government labor law, the contract will go to binding arbitration, in which, as the board was warned, the city may lose and have to pay tens of thousands of dollars in fees.

According to the Connecticut Examiner, the big majority against the contract included both Democrats and Republicans, and they meant to caution other city employee unions and the city’s Board of Education against asking for too much.

Whether Stamford’s school administrators deserve those raises isn’t the big point here. The big point is whether Stamford’s elected representatives should determine the city’s payroll. With binding arbitration, state law maintains that the special interest — government employee unions — should have power equal to or even greater than that of elected officials. This is a big reason why Connecticut is so highly taxed and expensive.

The law is a consequence of the cowardice of governors and legislators going back four decades. As government employment rose and government employee unions became more influential, governors and legislators didn’t want to get caught between those unions and taxpayers. (Most municipal officials didn’t want to either.) So ultimate control over government labor costs was transferred to arbiters, enabling elected officials to shrug at the expensive results and claim there was nothing they could do.

The argument for binding arbitration for government employee union contracts has been that it prevents strikes. This is false.

Strikes are prevented by [ITALICS] giving in. [END ITALICS] If government employees are ever dissatisfied enough with an arbitrated contract, they might strike anyway — if they want to risk breaking Connecticut’s law forbidding strikes by government employee unions. (In 1978 an illegal strike by teachers in Bridgeport prompted Connecticut’s extension of binding arbitration to teacher unions the following year.)

Some people who recognize binding arbitration law’s affront to democracy suggest repealing both the arbitration law and the law forbidding government employee union strikes. But there is no public interest in allowing such strikes, since government represents everyone but a union only a few.

It’s different in the private sector, where the public interest is much less if ever at stake.

Of course since Connecticut is controlled by Democrats and the government employee unions control the Democratic Party, the state won’t see reform of government employee labor law any time soon. But maybe someday a brave state legislator will propose the reform that would expose binding arbitration and its advocates as enemies of democracy.

Such legislation would preserve binding arbitration but elect the arbiters and put government employee union contracts to referendum.

Then the government employee unions might have to explain to the public why democracy is bad.

* * *

KEEP DEBT LIMIT: With Republicans in control of the U.S. House of Representatives, concern is growing that they won’t approve an increase in the federal debt limit and that, in freezing the debt limit, they will trigger a shutdown of the government.

This is nonsense. For the federal government could continue operating just fine without raising the debt limit. Instead it could raise taxes or reduce spending or both. So responsibility for any shutdown also would fall on those members of Congress who wouldn’t raise taxes or cut spending.

There is so much bloat in federal spending, so much special-interest favoritism in tax law, and so much inflation caused by excessive spending and debt monetization that freezing the debt limit is needed to prompt some of the auditing and economizing the federal government needs.

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

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By Chris Powell

Connecticut may have had its “All power to the Soviets!” moment the other day as more than 200 people summoned by the Democratic Socialists of America gathered on the internet to call for a law to limit residential rent increases to 2½% annually. Five Democratic state legislators have co-sponsored the legislation and thus have tainted themselves with its demagogic scapegoating, its accusation that landlords are uniquely responsible for inflation.

“Our rent increases every year and our incomes do not,” a tenants union activist said — an excellent point immediately discredited by the failure to acknowledge the wider world.

That is, real wages throughout the country long have been falling behind inflation in [ITALICS] all [END ITALICS] important respects — not just the cost of housing but also food, electricity, gas, medicine, education, and other essentials.

So where is the legislation to limit [ITALICS] those [END ITALICS] costs?

Such legislation can’t be introduced without exposing the scapegoating being done to the landlords, nor without revealing that inflation is caused by government itself as its creation of money far outstrips the production of  goods and services.

While Connecticut has a severe shortage of inexpensive rental housing, the rent-control legislation has just struck a powerful blow against efforts to get more such housing built or renovated.

For what housing developer or landlord will want to risk his money building or renovating apartments when state government may prohibit him alone from fully protecting himself against inflation?

Under the rent-control legislation, everyone else in commerce will remain free to raise prices by any amount to cover himself against inflation, and apartment tenants will be free to demand higher wages in any amount. But the rental housing business will be strictly limited to price increases far below the inflation rate.

The result of this will be still more scarcity inflating housing prices. Under rent control housing providers will be effectively expropriated by inflation.

That’s “democratic socialism” for you — diverting the blame from government without ever solving the problem government itself caused. Whom will the “democratic socialists” scapegoat next?

* * *

TEACHER UNION GREED: Guess how Connecticut’s teacher unions want the state budget surplus distributed.

It’s not to do anything compelling. No, the teacher unions want to use the surplus to increase their members’ pay, which is already nearly the highest in the country.

Connecticut does have a problem with teachers, as it does with police officers. As social disintegration worsens, especially in the cities, fewer people want to teach where as many as half the students are chronically absent and many misbehave, and fewer people want to work in law enforcement where respect for law has collapsed.

As a result many teachers and police officers in the cities have been leaving for jobs in the suburbs, where social disintegration isn’t as bad and they are paid more for easier work.

But that is no reason to increase compensation for teachers [ITALICS] generally. [END ITALICS] It is a reason to increase salaries for teachers where more teachers are most needed [ITALICS] particularly [END ITALICS] — and not just in the cities but in particular subjects.

Typically teacher union contracts won’t allow that. So any new state money addressing the teacher shortage should be exempt from union contract restrictions.

Any new money also should come with audit requirements to determine if the money improves student performance, which is so bad in the cities that no additional spending is likely to accomplish anything unless it hires parents for the kids.

* * *

UNREAL BRIDGEPORT:The Board of Education in Bridgeport, whose schools long have been in turmoil and whose students perform terribly, wants to hire a public relations company. According to the Connecticut Post, the company would “manage the district’s reputation, provide risk mitigation and consultation services, develop a crisis response plan, and train administrators in crisis communications.”

It’s as if the board has never heard that to change the image, it’s necessary to change the reality. But then all Connecticut seems to have given up on changing the cruel reality of its cities.

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

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By Chris Powell

Seldom does the New York Times pay attention to Connecticut unless it involves something edible, and so it was again the other day when the newspaper identified New Haven as one of 52 places around the world that everyone should visit this year for “food, culture, adventure, and natural beauty.”

Certainly for adventure, since in the first eight days of the new year New Haven endured four shootings, three of them fatal, which didn’t make the national newspaper of record even as the city’s pizza did. Nor, for that matter, were the shootings noted at the state Capitol. They never are.

Yes, go out to a great dinner in one of New Haven’s many wonderful restaurants and then keep your head down as you return home to the suburbs, putting safe distance between yourself and the social disintegration that long has afflicted that city and others and now is creeping out into the rest of the state.

But as reported by the New Haven Register, at least a flicker of insight about the shootings came from Mayor Justin Elicker and Police Chief Karl Jacobson. Acknowledging the city’s spike in violent crime, the mayor and the chief said a small group of repeat offenders is responsible for most of the trouble and that the city will ask the General Assembly to legislate higher bonds or longer sentences for them.

This may have been the first official acknowledgment of what Connecticut long has most needed in criminal justice: an incorrigibility law, whereby repeat offenders, upon a sufficient number of convictions, would be sentenced to life terms. Instead for years now Governor Lamont and other leading Democrats in the state have boasted about the decline in the state’s prison population even as repeat offenders have run wild.

Also while New Haven’s mayor and police chief were recognizing the necessity of putting repeat offenders away for good and readers of the Times were deliberating whether to pursue Italian, Spanish, or Thai dinner in the city, the Register reported the 48th arrest of a particular New Haven resident, this time for robbing a bank in Fairfield.

The accused already has three convictions for bank robbery and many encounters with the law for burglary, theft, and drug crimes.

The heck with a “three strikes” law. Even a “20 strikes” law might have put this criminal away by now.

Will Connecticut let him get to 50 arrests? If he does, will he win a prize? Why was he still on the loose?

As the Times, the governor, state legislators, judges, and prosecutors might say: Who cares? Let’s eat!

* * *

Connecticut’s high school students may be pretty dumb, insofar as half never master high school math and English before being given their diplomas and encouraged to apply to a state college. But the students probably aren’t as dumb as state Rep. Holly Cheeseman, R-East Lyme, seems to think they are.

Cheeseman has introduced legislation to require teen-agers applying for a driver’s license to take a course of at least four hours’ duration about the dangers of driving while intoxicated from marijuana, which state government has just purported to legalize, though its possession remains a violation of federal law. State law already requires young license applicants to take a similar course on the dangers of driving after consuming alcohol or other drugs.

But even high school students who have failed math and English already know perfectly well that they can get intoxicated from marijuana.

For of course that’s exactly [ITALICS] why [END ITALICS] they smoke or eat the stuff — to get intoxicated. It’s the same with everyone else who indulges.

Cheeseman’s legislation may forestall intoxicated driving by the kids by all of four hours, the time it takes them to complete the marijuana class. To her credit, she opposed putting state government into the marijuana business.

But the only deterrent to driving while intoxicated from [ITALICS] anything [END ITALICS] is more serious criminal prosecution than what Connecticut imposes for first offenders — a few hours taking a “drug and alcohol education course” in which people also are told what they already knew but chose to disregard. Such a light penalty doesn’t deter many people, but so many people drive while intoxicated that most legislators don’t want much punishment.

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

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By Chris Powell

Only one practical proposal has been offered for immediate reduction of Connecticut’s electricity prices, the highest in the continental United States. But the practical proposal is the least publicized one.

The practical proposal is [ITALICS] not [END ITALICS] the legislation offered by state Rep. Christine Conley, D-Groton, to give the General Assembly the authority to decide on rates charged by electric and natural gas utilities. Under political pressure, such a system would become the expropriation of utility companies, requiring them to sell their products below cost.

The current rate regulation system, operated by the Public Utilities Regulatory Authority, puts some distance between rate setting and politics, on the premise that the public interest requires keeping utility companies financially sound.

If the legislature is to set utility rates directly, the only fair way of doing it would be for state government to purchase and operate the utilities. That would not be cheap.

Connecticut’s largest utility company, Eversource Energy, is a public company with a market capitalization of more than $29 billion. Not all of that value arises from Connecticut, since the company also serves Massachusetts and New Hampshire. But the fair market value of the Eversource operations in Connecticut is certainly well above $10 billion and acquiring them would require state government, already the highest indebted per-capita, or close to it, to make a bigger mess of its finances and debt burden.

Even then anyone might guess what would happen: State government would start transferring electricity costs and hiding them in other accounts in the state budget to camouflage its inability to control costs any better than the former utility companies did. Indeed, even under the current system of purportedly nonpolitical rate regulation, state government long has been shifting its own costs into electric rates.

That’s where the one practical proposal for an immediate reduction of rates comes in. It was made by state Sen. Tony Hwang, R-Fairfield, in a recent essay in Connecticut’s Hearst newspapers.

“A fresh look at the various camouflaged costs on our monthly utility bills is in order,” Hwang wrote. “A significant portion of those bills does not actually pay for electric generation and distribution.”

That is, state government has enacted various social and environmental policies and programs that have substantial costs but has shifted those costs to the electric companies, which add them to customer bills. The companies get the blame for these costs and elected officials take the credit for whatever good the policies and programs accomplish.

United Illuminating, Connecticut’s second largest electric utility, declines to discuss the camouflaged costs, apparently fearing political retaliation. But, when pressed, Eversource has estimated them as constituting as much as 20% of electric bills.

That is, if Connecticut electric customers had a clue about this cost shifting, they could be lining up behind — or preferably in front of — the teacher unions and other special interests at the state Capitol that are clamoring for a share of the state budget surplus Governor Lamont and many legislators boast about. If electric rates are really as burdensome as the governor and legislators contend, why aren’t they taking state government’s costs out of electric bills and moving them into the state budget where they belong?

The governor and legislators are ignoring Hwang’s hint because they don’t want to lose the political advantages of shifting and camouflaging costs and blaming the utilities for costs that are really the government’s own — and not just the costs of state government’s policies and programs but also government’s impairment of domestic energy production.

This racket could end sooner if journalism ever exposed it.

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SUDDENLY SILENT: A few weeks ago Connecticut U.S. Sen. Richard Blumenthal denounced Southwest Airlines for breakdowns that caused thousands of customers to be delayed or stranded for days. Since then the U.S. Federal Aviation Administration’s air-traffic control system has broken down twice, once in Florida, once nationally, delaying or stranding many more travelers than Southwest did.

But the senator, usually so vocal and indignant, had nothing to say about it.

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

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