Chris Powell column

By Chris Powell

Frank Capra’s 1946 film, “It’s a Wonderful Life,” to be broadcast again tonight at 8 by NBC television, is loved most for its personal message of discovery at Christmas: that its hero’s life has been, unbeknownst to him, crucial to his family, friends, community, and even his country.

Such general encouragement may seem more needed than ever these days; indeed, this may be, sadly, the cause of the film’s popularity. But “It’s a Wonderful Life” may be more important still for its overlooked lesson in democratic economics, a lesson arising from the struggle for survival of a combination credit union and savings bank, the Bailey Building & Loan in the Everytown of Bedford Falls.

The Building & Loan’s founder and chief executive, Peter Bailey, has died and its board of directors is deciding the institution’s future. The richest man in town, Potter, a misanthropic banker, ruthless landlord, and board member, played by Lionel Barrymore, proposes dissolving the Building & Loan, and his callousness angers Bailey’s elder son, George, played earnestly by Jimmy Stewart, who has been working as assistant to his father.

[BEGIN ITALICS]

POTTER: Peter Bailey was not a businessman. That’s what killed him. Oh, I don’t mean any disrespect to him, God rest his soul. He was a man of high ideals — so-called. But ideals without common sense can ruin this town. Now you take this loan here, to Ernie Bishop. You know, the fellow who sits around all day on his … brains, in his taxi. I happen to know the bank turned down this loan. But he comes here, and we’re building him a house worth $5,000. Why?

GEORGE BAILEY: Well, I handled that, Mr. Potter. You have all the papers there — his salary, insurance. I can personally vouch for his character.

POTTER: A friend of yours.

BAILEY: Yes, sir.

POTTER: You see, if you shoot pool with some employee, you can come and borrow money. What does that get us? A discontented, lazy rabble instead of a thrifty working class. And all because a few starry-eyed dreamers like Peter Bailey stir them up and fill their heads with a lot of impossible ideas. Now I say. …

BAILEY: Now hold on, Mr. Potter. Just a minute. Now you’re right when you say my father was no businessman — I know that. Why he ever started this cheap, penny-ante building-and-loan I’ll never know. But neither you nor anyone else can say anything against his character, because his whole life was. … Why, in the 25 years since he and Uncle Billy started this thing, he never thought of himself. Isn’t that right, Uncle Billy? He didn’t save enough money to send Harry to school, let alone me, but he did help a few people get out of your slums, Mr. Potter. Now what’s wrong with that? Why, you’re all businessmen here. Doesn’t it make them better citizens? Doesn’t it make them better customers? You said that … what did you say a minute ago? “They have to wait and save their money before they even think of a decent home.” Wait? Wait for what? Until their children grow up and leave them? Until they’re so old and broken-down that they. … Do you know how long it takes a working man to save $5,000? Just remember this, Mr. Potter: that this “rabble” you’re talking about, they do most of the working and paying and living and dying in this community. Well, is it too much to have them work and pay and live and die in a couple of decent rooms and a bath? Anyway, my father didn’t think so. …

[END ITALICS]

At the board’s insistence, George Bailey takes over in his father’s place to keep the Building & Loan going, and soon he forestalls a run on it, part of a general financial panic, by putting up the money he has saved for his honeymoon and by preaching to a mob of frightened depositors about how they should not withdraw their money but instead have faith in the institution, because their money isn’t kept in cash in the safe but rather is invested in the houses, the mortgages, the very lives of their neighbors.

Of course this is Capra’s metaphor for politics and the world: that there is progress when everyone is given a chance, a little capital and credit, when people play by the rules, look out for each other, and don’t take too much more than they need, and that selfishness is the ruin of everything.

Something like this — more or less a policy of helping to make middle-class everyone who aspired to it and would indeed play by the rules, a policy of democratizing capital and credit — made the United States the most prosperous country and the most successful in elevating the human condition.

But for a few decades now the price of obtaining and maintaining those “two decent rooms and a bath” and the middle-class life to go with it has risen as real wages have stagnated, largely under the pressure of government’s unrelenting taxes in the name of services that have not really been rendered, a welfare system that has subsidized what somehow is not permitted to be called the antisocial behavior it is, and a plutocracy that has gained control of the economy and both major political parties.

There seem to be more people who, if too confused or demoralized to be dangerous, are still closer to being a “rabble” than the country saw even during the Great Depression.

Even at its best now Christmas is seldom more than an itinerant charity that, necessary as it may seem, tends to suppress the great political question of the day [ITALICS] after [END ITALICS] Christmas, the question of how things can be organized to ensure that everyone has a good chance to earn his way in decency. But the great joy of Christmas is that the answer has been given, that we are [ITALICS] not [END ITALICS] lost, that the country has been shown the way and can recover it — that society [ITALICS] can [END ITALICS] work for all, that it really [ITALICS] can [END ITALICS] be a wonderful life if enough selfless people make it a political one.

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

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By Chris Powell

Was Governor Lamont serious the other day when he said, as he had said during his campaign for re-election, that he wants to repeal the part of the state’s gun law permitting people to keep the military-style rifles they owned before the state banned their possession and sale?

The governor, a Democrat, might not have much support for such an initiative in his own party in the General Assembly. New Haven Sen. Gary Winfield is skeptical. Betraying the assurances that were made to rifle owners to pass the original legislation would be a problem, Winfield told the Connecticut Mirror. While the senator is no partisan of gun rights, he agrees with gun rights advocates who note that gun crime almost always involves handguns and rarely involves military-style rifles or any rifles at all.

Rifles “grandfathered” by the law are registered with the state, making their use in crime even less likely. While the grandfathering doesn’t cover rifles that might be brought into the state by criminals, criminals wouldn’t be obeying any gun laws anyway and no Connecticut law is going to stop out-of-staters determined to commit crimes with such rifles here.

Then there would be the challenge of confiscating the rifles that have been grandfathered. The state police are already badly under strength, so would the governor send them knocking on the doors of the many thousands of registered rifle owners or going to court for search and seizure warrants and subpoenas?

Some rifle owners might grudgingly surrender their guns upon passage of such a law, but many also might hide them or move them out of state or claim to have done so, inviting state government to sue or prosecute them.

Some rifle owners might commence litigation themselves, especially since the U.S. Supreme Court has become more supportive of Second Amendment rights and the rifles at issue are widely owned nationally, strengthening a claim that the amendment protects their ownership, even in Connecticut.

The continuing obsession with military-style rifles on the political left serves as a distraction from state government’s ineffectiveness in the face of Connecticut’s worsening violent crime and social disintegration. At least as a matter of politics, doing something irrelevant may play better than doing nothing at all.

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Journalism today increasingly euphemizes to propagandize under cover of news reporting. The latest example seems to be the term “gender-affirming care,” which has replaced “sex-change therapy.” The old term is traditional, literal, apolitical, and accurate. The new term is politically correct but deliberately inaccurate to mislead.

For “gender-affirming care” would not be undertaken if people were not dissatisfied with the gender they already have and were not seeking to displace something bothering them.

“Gender-affirming care” is being used to pretend that gender has no physical manifestation and is entirely a state of mind that can be changed at will. That’s not true. Gender has physical and biological manifestations, and “gender-affirming care,” just like sex-change therapy, may involve both surgery and drugs that can cause irreversible physical and mental changes that people sometimes come to regret.

Erasing this aspect of sex-change therapy from the public mind seems to be the propagandistic intent of the euphemism — to give the impression that nothing questionable is going on, that all is sweetness and light, just ordinary medical care.

But that’s not true either. Sex-change therapy for minors is fairly challenged on the old principle that minors are not qualified to give consent to irreversible things and that certain things with minors should wait for them to achieve their majority.

There [ITALICS] is [END ITALICS] a serious argument here. But as various totalitarians are said to have observed, “If you label something well enough, you don’t have to argue with it or about it.”

George Orwell concurred in his dystopian novel “1984,” wherein a functionary of the totalitarian state remarks about the government’s comprehensive censoring of the language:

“Don’t you see that the whole aim of Newspeak is to narrow the range of thought? In the end we shall make thoughtcrime literally impossible, because there will be no words in which to express 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

Having gathered hundreds of people at Weaver High School in Hartford the other night, the Greater Hartford Interfaith Action Alliance called for a state law to limit housing rent increases to 3% annually. This was presented as social justice. Like so much else presented as social justice, it was actually just pious posturing and, worse, scapegoating.

The presumption of the clergy group’s proposal is that landlords cause inflation and, because they cause it, they exclusively should bear its financial burdens — as if, amid inflation, a landlord’s costs for energy, employee wages and benefits, building services, and taxes don’t rise with everyone else’s.

Landlords don’t cause inflation. Inflation is caused largely by government when it increases the money supply out of proportion to the economy’s production of goods and services — which is of course exactly what the federal government has been doing in recent years, exploding the money supply while curtailing production or making it more expensive.

But the clergy group favors more and more government and isn’t likely to achieve its objective if it starts complaining about government’s responsibility for inflation. So the clergy group will blame landlords instead as then presume to teach the public about the morality required by God.

The clergy group didn’t stop with rent control. It also called on state government to spend hundreds of millions more dollars on city school systems in the name of improving education there, as if increasing spending on city schools hasn’t been Connecticut policy for almost 40 years without ever improving student performance. But calling for more government spending on education is a lot easier for the clergy members than telling their parishioners that the primary cause of educational failure is their own childbearing outside marriage and the resulting child neglect.

The clergy group’s third idea is to have state government spend another $20 million in the name of “violence prevention” programs, as if the violence and social disintegration that long have been worsening in the cities are not also consequences of family breakdown.

Religious vestments may inspire respect and even intimidate but they don’t substitute for critical thinking or vindicate scapegoating.

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NO, HE’S NOT: Darien’s Board of Education thinks that reading “Julian Is A Mermaid” to second-graders, as recently was done at Royle Elementary School as part of the “social and emotional learning” curriculum, is necessary to teach tolerance. It’s not necessary at all. But it may be a good way of putting transgenderism into impressionable little minds that are easily confused.

The book tells the story of a little boy who sees a parade of female impersonators, wraps a curtain around his waist, and joins them in aspiration of becoming a sea creature of the other sex. Presumably the book was read to the second-graders in part because some cannot yet read themselves. If so, the problem is not exclusive to Darien, since this month the state education commissioner reported more scary details about the long collapse of student proficiency in Connecticut.

Kids can be cruel and so do need to be taught to behave decently. But teaching them does not require transgender metaphors. Instead schools can be frank and candid. Schools can tell students that Julian is [ITALICS] not [END ITALICS] a mermaid but is afflicted with gender dysphoria, an unfortunate mental condition, but that in a free country like theirs, people can be different in their personal lives, that in school these differences must be respected, and that students who taunt, bully, or belittle their classmates will be punished. (That is, required to spend hours being lectured by a diversity, equity, and inclusion social worker.)

Such a policy can be put in print and students can be given two copies and compelled to sign and return one to acknowledge their receipt and understanding of it — and then school staff can enforce it.

If that’s not enough for a school system, then the system has a sinister agenda and people should mobilize to change 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

Maybe the economic recession that has begun will loosen up Connecticut’s housing market, but it will take a while even as the poor get poorer. The housing shortage is already making life desperate for many of the poor. But state government doesn’t yet consider it an emergency, not even in the face of what seems about to happen in Danbury.

For the two years of the virus epidemic a former hotel building in Danbury has been operated as a shelter for the homeless by a social-service organization based in Stamford, Pacific House. The organization got state financing to purchase the building for use as a shelter but Danbury’s zoning board has refused to approve it. The shelter has stayed in operation only because of one of Governor Lamont’s emergency orders arising from the epidemic, but those orders expire Dec. 28.

The former hotel is adjacent to Interstate 84 and few residences are nearby, so the shelter is no more of a nuisance than the hotel was. While it is far from medical and commercial facilities and thus not the most convenient location for the homeless, Pacific House can bring services to them or help them get where they need to go as they work to gain self-sufficiency.

If state government really cared about the poor and troubled, it would pass a law exempting shelters from zoning regulations just as it has exempted group homes for the mentally handicapped.

Danbury lacks any facility that can accommodate all the people now being housed at the former hotel. Most may be out on the street at the end of the month just as the dead of winter sets in. Surely state government can put aside less essential matters until it solves the emergency housing problem.

CROOKED GUARDS: Connecticut’s Correction Department lately worsened the state’s housing problem. It was inadvertent but predictable.

Since prison guards work in tightly confined spaces and were at more risk of contracting Covid 19, the department used federal epidemic emergency money to let them rent hotel rooms so they might avoid infecting their families.

But, the Connecticut Mirror reports, state auditors found that the program was badly abused. Correction Department employees, the Mirror says, “used the program to book hotel rooms during a wedding, to celebrate New Year’s Eve, and to live full-time in the hotels with their families. … Others booked rooms in multiple hotels on the same days, and at least one correction officer used the program while he was on military leave.” Some employees used the program to live in hotels for five months or more.

There were rules again this kind of thing but since this was an emergency, no one was hired to enforce them. Some employees who abused the program suffered short suspensions but it seems that no one was fired or prosecuted.

Of course much federal emergency money has been defrauded throughout the country, just as it was defrauded by the corrupt city government in West Haven, where more than a million dollars was stolen or misdirected by a City Council aide who was also a state representative.

The lesson seems to be that any emergency’s first order of business should be to hire extra auditors.

WHAT PROTECTION?: Another Connecticut woman who had a protective order was murdered last week, apparently by the former boyfriend she got the order against. Julie Minogue of Milford was battered to death with an ax after her ex had harassed her with hundreds of text messages. An arrest warrant application for the harasser had been pending, left incomplete, for weeks.

The Connecticut Coalition Against Domestic Violence says there have been 12 intimate partner murders in the state so far this year.

The only way to stop them is to require police, prosecutors, and courts to give priority to domestic threats and violence and to impose heavy penalties upon conviction, even for first offenses. Here too state government is always doing many less important things.

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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

What does it mean that, as Dan Haar of Connecticut’s Hearst newspapers notes in a recent column, all of Connecticut’s 19 cities have white mayors though most of them have large populations of racial or ethnic minorities?

There has been no “voter suppression,” and many members of racial minorities hold other elected office in the cities. In recent years Hartford and New Haven each have had two Black mayors, and Hartford has had two Hispanic mayors as well.

Some say the lack of minority mayors diminishes trust in local government. Maybe, but that presumes some racism among members of minority groups themselves — a belief that only fellow members of minority groups can honestly care for them in high elected office.

For several years the Connecticut Conference of Municipalities and Yale University have been undertaking a program to encourage members of minority groups to get involved in politics and government in the state. Perhaps intimidated by history or tradition, minorities may need this special encouragement. But then politics and government need more attention from everyone — especially from those who don’t mean to draw their livelihoods from government.

After all, mayors from minority groups are not any more inherently virtuous than white mayors. A recent minority mayor of Hartford was convicted of corruption, while the most recent minority mayor in New Haven was not especially competent, raised city property taxes atrociously, and was soundly defeated for re-election by a white man.

Bad consequences can arise from minority mayors in big cities through no fault of their own. That’s because Connecticut treats its cities mainly as repositories of the poor and the government and welfare classes and could hardly care less about the results of its urban policies. The steady decline of living conditions in the cities has given the impression that the cities and their inhabitants are hopeless, when what [ITALICS] really [END ITALICS] is hopeless is [ITALICS] state policy [END ITALICS] toward the cities — a policy of throwing money at them only to placate their most vocal dependents.

While Hartford’s current mayor, Luke Bronin, a white man, is the city’s best mayor in many years, his relative successes — financial stability and some downtown development — are mainly functions of state government financing, as with the state’s extraordinary assumption of the city’s enormous bonded debt, a favor not granted to other cities, and state government’s financial underwriting of city projects. Without that heavy support from state government, Hartford almost surely would have continued sinking during Bronin’s administration too.

So without profound changes in state policy, what would more Black and Hispanic mayors do for Connecticut’s cities other than rearrange local patronage? The big challenge is not to change the race of the mayors but to change state policy toward the cities.

* * *

MORE COMPETITION LOST: Just months after the controversial acquisition of People’s United Bank by M&T Bank, more competition in Connecticut’s banking industry is about to be lost. New York-based NBT Bancorp plans to acquire Salisbury Bancorp and its 14 offices in the northwestern part of the state, southwestern Massachusetts, and east-central New York.

NBT Bank already has more than 135 banking branches in Connecticut, New York, Pennsylvania, Vermont, Massachusetts, and New Hampshire.

When M&T, another New York bank, moved on People’s United, based in Bridgeport and having more than 400 branches in Connecticut and elsewhere in New England, the acquiring bank gave assurances that layoffs and branch closings would be minimized. Of course they weren’t. Elected officials harrumphed and pretended to get tough with the bank but they didn’t either.

People’s United was already a big, full-service bank and its acquisition by M&T brought no gains to the public, only gains to the bank’s owners from the reduction in competition.

Will the public gain anything from the loss of Salisbury Bank? Almost certainly not. But will Connecticut’s attorney general, William Tong, and the U.S. Justice Department bring antitrust law to bear against the continuing destruction of competition in banking in Connecticut? If they do, it will be a first.

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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 the third time in four years, Connecticut’s state auditors have chided the state police for the excessive overtime paid to many troopers and even dispatchers. The most recent audit surveyed the records of 25 state police employees and found that 20 of them were earning more in overtime than in base pay and 16 were working an average of 13 hours per day in 14 consecutive days.

Apart from the financial inefficiency, this is a recipe for burnout and poor performance. This was famously demonstrated two years ago when a state trooper was video-recorded exploding, unprovoked, into crazed rage at a motorist he had stopped in New Haven, screaming that he hated his job and the crummy civilians he had to deal with and couldn’t wait to retire. It turned out that he too had been working far too much overtime.

But as the state government employment system does generally, the trooper employment system encourages excessive overtime, with troopers eligible to retire with full pensions after only 20 years and with their pension pay calculated as half the average of their three highest-paid years. Thus a trooper can retire at age 45 with an annual pension of $100,000 or more and have another 20 years to build a second career.

This incentive to work overtime is perverse for the public interest. It would be far better financially and for upholding standards of service to hire more troopers and remove overtime pay from pension calculations.

The state police have expressed concurrence with the last three audits about excessive overtime. The Lamont administration acknowledges that state police ranks are much lower than authorized and that it means to get to full strength. But somehow it never happens, and state legislators don’t make a fuss over it. They too seem not to take the auditors’ work seriously.

ELECTRICITY SHELL GAME: Electricity prices in Connecticut are going up because energy prices worldwide have gone up. Since the state’s electric utilities have been barred from the generation business for more than 20 years, elected officials can’t as easily resort to their usual scapegoating.

Since most of Connecticut’s elected officials are Democrats, they don’t want to do the most [ITALICS] relevant [END ITALICS] thing — press the national Democratic administration to reverse its insane policy against domestic production of conventional energy.

So now Connecticut’s elected officials are contemplating more mere [ITALICS] shifting [END ITALICS] of electricity costs among users or throughout society generally, along the lines of what the state Public Utilities Regulatory Authority already is doing by requiring the electric utilities to reduce rates for the poor and raise them for everyone else — to make electricity rates part of the tax and income redistribution system.

Progressive taxation — higher tax rates on higher incomes and greater wealth — can be sound policy to an extent if it is forthright. But hiding taxes and other social costs in electricity bills is not forthright — it’s a shell game. Nor is it really fair, since poverty is not automatically a virtue and sometimes is the result of vice. Should irresponsible people get a discount on electricity and responsible people get a surcharge?

At a certain point government’s cost shifting not only misleads people but also distorts and corrupts the entire market economy, which is a far more efficient and far mechanism for distributing production of goods and services than government is.

The French economist and statesman Frederic Bastiat may have seen Connecticut coming two centuries ago. “Government,” he wrote, “is the great fiction by which everybody tries to live at the expense of everybody else.”

PRONOUN DISTRACTION: What’s the most pressing problem in Bridgeport’s schools?

It’s not the awful academic performance, what with more than 70% of students lacking proficiency in reading and nearly 90% lacking proficiency in math.

Instead of solving that problem Bridgeport’s Board of Education is developing a policy on the pronouns to be used for transgender and gender-ambivalent students, lest they be “misgendered” — that is, addressed as members of their biological gender.

Will the kids even be able to spell their new pronouns? Like the chronic excessive overtime for the state troopers, that’s an old challenge Connecticut seems to keep declining.

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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

Student performance and even attendance in Connecticut’s public schools are crashing, but not to worry. With Governor Lamont presiding, the state Education Department and the state’s five officially recognized Indian tribes announced the other day that they will create a model curriculum in Native American studies. The curriculum will be offered to the schools, where, if it is used, it may crowd out basic academic teaching, as “social-emotional learning” already is doing.

Indeed, the Native American studies curriculum may be especially useful for distracting from the crash of public education. Everyone in authority can keep looking busy while carefully avoiding relevance to the disaster.

Of course if students ever managed to read at grade level, it would be great to have a more accurate and comprehensive account of the country’s history, overcoming what kids pick up from cowboys-and-Indians theater. But such an account is not likely to emerge from anything assembled by the Education Department and the Indian tribes. The curriculum probably will be constructed to rationalize perpetual grievance, victimhood, and privilege. After all, legislation to create the curriculum was proposed by state Sen. Cathy Osten, D-Foxwoods.

A news report about the curriculum suggested that the history of the Indian tribes and the European settlers who founded Connecticut is such a sensitive subject that it will be uncomfortable to relate, apparently because some think that imputing guilt will be necessary.

Nonsense. For the Connecticut history to be taught here is only the history of mankind — tribalism and the struggle to overcome it, with the peculiarly American denouement whereby, as society began to overcome it, tribalism was seen as an excellent mechanism for delivering political patronage and so was restored and embedded in law for perpetuity.

In early Connecticut there were more than two tribes, the Europeans and Indians. There were [ITALICS] multiple [END ITALICS] Indian tribes with shifting alliances, and the peace was broken as much by the Indians as the Europeans. The Pequots, whose remote descendants today claim entitlement to perpetual victimhood because of the tribe’s near-extermination in a battle in Mystic in 1637, oppressed other Indian tribes and so were hated by them. The name “Pequot” meant “destroyer.”

So the Mohegans, Narragansetts, and Niantics joined the Europeans to destroy the Pequots themselves — men, women, and children alike, an atrocity far greater than the atrocities that had been inflicted by the Pequots on their enemies, atrocities that had prompted the war.

The Pequot chief Sassacus, who was away with a raiding party at the time of the Mystic massacre, fled to the west and was killed not by the Europeans but the Mohawks, who sent his severed head and hands to the Europeans in Hartford as an offering of friendship.

Of course the extermination of the Pequots was not quickly followed by an age of equality, light, and happy assimilation. Indian lands were bought or expropriated, more easily because the Indians did not share the Europeans’ concept of private property. Hewing to its old ways, Indian culture faded under the burden of discrimination.

But over the decades intermarriage and vast new immigration hastened assimilation of Connecticut’s ethnicities, and eventually, though only a half century ago, full equality under the law, if not quite in actual living conditions, was established. Now the descendants of the old tribes and the various ethnicities were trying to make a living more or less in the same culture.

Whereupon government, in its endless thirst for revenue, contrived to dress up casino gambling as a form of ethnic reparations for ancient wrongs that lacked surviving victims. In southeastern Connecticut certain people who lived in raised ranches and worked at Electric Boat like everybody else suddenly could claim to be oppressed on behalf of their distant ancestors. In the name of this ancestry state government gave them a casino duopoly and thus perpetual wealth to be inherited by their descendants at the expense of the rest of society.

Almost as quickly as it had arrived in Connecticut, equality under the law was undone. As a political matter this new ethnic privilege will require perpetuating the false impression of victimhood. Hence the Education Department’s new curriculum.

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

By Chris Powell

Despite Connecticut’s high housing costs and severe shortage of housing, Connecticut’s Hearst newspapers reported last week that half the federal government housing vouchers issued in the state in the last three years have expired unused. That’s about 3,000 vouchers.

The federal government estimates that about $1.6 million in available housing subsidies is going unspent in Connecticut each month, money that might cover shelter for about 1,700 families.

Meanwhile homelessness in Connecticut has begun to rise again after declining for years under state government’s effort to provide more of what is called supportive housing — small apartments linked to social services. With many troubled people, getting a secure room with some privacy is the crucial first step toward recovery of their mental and physical health.

Of course part of the problem with the unused vouchers is Connecticut’s general shortage of housing. Even when they receive vouchers, poor people in Connecticut have great difficulty finding suitable housing they can afford in the areas where they need to reside. Many vouchers are valid only in the towns that issued them, though housing in nearby towns might suffice. Federal, state, and municipal rules for voucher use can be complicated and discouraging. And some landlords are reluctant to accept vouchers, in part because of delays in processing them, but also because poor people are less desirable tenants.

A woman cited in the Hearst report said she ended up moving to Ohio when her six-month effort to use her housing voucher in Connecticut failed.

This problem with housing vouchers would seem to call for urgent legislative investigations at both the state and federal level. Could vouchers be made redeemable everywhere, not just in the city or town whose housing authority issued them? Could the government create and maintain a master regional registry of rental housing openings where vouchers are accepted? Could voucher rules and processing be streamlined? And, of course, what can Connecticut do to increase housing construction generally?

Maybe Connecticut U.S. Sen. Richard Blumenthal, a Democrat just re-elected to a third six-year term, could look into helping people get housing with government vouchers when he’s not so busy helping people get Taylor Swift concert tickets.

* * *

West Haven’s scandal with the embezzlement of $1.2 million in federal virus epidemic relief money jumped to Ansonia last week. Former Democratic state Rep. Michael DiMassa, who was simultaneously a West Haven city government functionary who ran the embezzlement and who has pleaded guilty to federal charges, testified in court in Hartford that he arranged for some of the relief money to be paid to three women with whom he was having romantic relationships. He said one was his colleague in the General Assembly, Rep. Kara Rochelle, D-Ansonia, who got a city government check for $5,000, supposedly for consulting work about a new city firehouse.

Rochelle insists that she was qualified to do the consulting. But the Valley Independent Sentinel reports that Rochelle was given no contract or written description of her responsibilities, that her work for West Haven lasted only two months, that the city also employed a New York company for consulting on the firehouse project for much more money, $180,000, and that the project was canceled.

Rochelle’s evasion of the central question — whether she had an intimate relationship with the man who got her the money he embezzled from West Haven — undermines her indignation about being questioned. She says, “I will not stand by while politically motivated gossips use the oldest sexist tropes in the book to attack me.”

But there is nothing “sexist” in pursuing how and why embezzled government money was spent. Nobody would be asking about Rochelle’s personal life if it wasn’t tangled up with that money.

Besides, state legislators should be wary about drawing income from municipalities, lest they seem to be using their office for personal gain.

Despite Rochelle’s evasiveness, Democrats in her district are standing by her, and the party’s leadership in the state House of Representatives is looking the other way. After all, the next legislative election is two years off.

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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

Ever since terrorism descended on the United States 21 years ago, government has urged Americans: “If you see something, say something.” A recent incident in New Jersey that extended into Connecticut suggests that keeping your mouth shut may may be a lot better.

In the town of Caldwell a 9-year-old girl went out walking along her street spraying something on trees and sidewalks. A neighbor saw her and was puzzled and concerned and so, in accordance with government policy, he called the police on their non-emergency line and reported what he had seen.

An officer responded and found that the little girl had been following government policy too. She was spraying spotted lanternflies, invasive insects that cause serious damage. Agriculture departments have been encouraging the public to eradicate them.

Confronted by the officer, the little girl was afraid she was in trouble. But having heard her explanation, the officer assured her she wasn’t, and the neighbor who called the police was told that there was no problem, for the little girl was doing a good deed.

So far, so good. Little girl, caller, and police officer all had done what they should have done.

But the little girl and her mother are Black, and the mother was offended by the call to the police and complained about it at a town council meeting, accusing the caller, who is white, of racism.

The accusation of racism caused the incident to start getting national publicity, prompting a Black professor at Yale University to invite the little girl and her mother to visit the university to learn more about science and see how the university welcomes Black students. The visit produced more publicity suggesting that a racist wrong had been committed.

But according to the lawyer for the man who called the police, the man twice apologized to the little girl’s mother and explained that if he had realized who the little girl was and what she was doing, he would not have called. The lawyer says the mother refused the apologies.

The less-reported angle of the story is that the mother is a local Democratic Party official and her target is a local Republican official. The Republican says he is being defamed and getting threats. But at least now he may realize that as racial politics convulses the country, if you see something strange involving someone of a different race, saying something can be dangerous. For some people today [ITALICS] want [END ITALICS] everything to be racist, seeing it as an opportunity.

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BAIT AND SWITCH: If Connecticut state government was subject to the rules it applies to others, it would have to prosecute itself for a big bait-and-switch. For during the recent election campaign Governor Lamont and Democratic state legislators promised to pay $1,000 each to employees of essential businesses who stayed at work during the worst months of the recent virus epidemic.

But state government didn’t appropriate enough money to fulfill the promise. Many more people applied than expected, so last week during a special session of the General Assembly the program was amended to reduce its payments, many of them by 80% or more.

No matter to the Democrats, since the election is over, they won big, and defaulting so heavily on their bribe saves money that might be used to buy more votes in the next election, when people probably will have forgotten about this year’s default.

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PRICE REGULATION FAILS: This year Connecticut’s Insurance Department played chicken with medical insurer ConnectiCare. Last week the department lost. So did the public.

ConnectiCare had requested an increase of 29% for its small group medical insurance policies but the department approved only 15%. So ConnectiCare has decided to leave the small group policy business. The company says it has lost tens of millions of dollars in the last year as demand for medical services and prescription drug prices soared.

Now about 20,000 state residents will have to find other insurance.

A few months ago Harvard Pilgrim also quit Connecticut’s small group medical insurance market, so now only four insurers covering small groups remain in the state.

State government does not seem to realize that vigorous competition is better than price regulation.

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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

Now that loony ideology is trumping biology and the country is entering an age where merely wishing or thinking is supposed to make it so, why stop with transgenderism? If boys and men can be girls and women, and vice versa, even for competitive sports and bathroom use, thereby nullifying Title IX and sexual privacy, how can age restrictions be fair anymore?

If you’re really only as old as you feel, mandatory retirement ages must go. So must age group rules in sports.

If wishing or thinking makes it so, who has the right to tell any 40-year-old that he can’t play on a Little League team and enjoy hitting a 12-year-old’s pitches out of the park or knocking over the 13-year-old trying to tag him as he slides into third base?

For a few years Connecticut has been nervously humoring this nonsense with the rationale offered by Governor Lamont — that it hasn’t happened much, just famously in high school girls cross-country meets. This is only to say that it doesn’t matter because it has happened to [ITALICS] someone else’s [END ITALICS] daughters. To object risks being called a “transphobe” or worse, though no one is denying the right of people to impersonate the other sex outside of competitive sports and bathrooms.

Similarly, people in Connecticut are being mocked or worse just for arguing that schools should not press topics like transgenderism on the youngest children.

Lacking good argument, the transgender cultists rely heavily on intimidation, because it works better. So the nonsense may not end in Connecticut until the women’s basketball teams at Stanford or Tennessee recruit some 6-foot-9, 275-pound transgender forwards who leave UConn players writhing on the court with ACL tears or worse.

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MORE UNPUBLIC EDUCATION: New London High School’s football coach says he has been forced to resign because of an insignificant incident during a game with Ledyard High. According to The Day of New London, the school’s athletic director refuses to explain because, he says, it’s a personnel matter.

That’s public education in Connecticut, again resorting to the oldest non-sequitur of government — that there never can be any accountability with personnel, so go away. Unfortunately most people do go away.

But the law does [ITALICS] not [END ITALICS] say that personnel matters in government cannot be reviewed and discussed in public. To the contrary, while teachers enjoy a special-interest exemption for their annual performance evaluations, the law makes public other records of school employment and particularly records involving misconduct.

A request to New London’s school superintendent for access to all records involving the coach might show the public what happened with him and let the public make an informed judgment about it. If the superintendent refused that much accountability, the city’s Board of Education could be appealed to, and then the state Freedom of Information Commission.

School administrators might be able to delay accountability for a year or two — probably not forever. But stalling accountability for a year or two is usually enough for public education to avoid being public.

Public education won’t really be public at all until the “personnel matter” non-sequitur is challenged whenever it is cynically trotted out.

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LET WINE JOIN BEER: Supermarkets in Connecticut have renewed their campaign to persuade the General Assembly and governor to change state law to allow them to sell wine. That certainly would be a convenience. While supermarkets already are allowed to sell beer, anyone who would buy wine or liquor has to make a separate trip to a liquor store.

There is no good reason for this trouble, only a bad reason — Connecticut’s long subservience to the retailers and distributors of alcoholic beverages, accomplished through laws sharply limiting alcoholic beverage retailing permits and prohibiting price competition, essentially turning the alcoholic beverage business into political patronage and what is called rent seeking. As a result Connecticut has unnecessarily high alcoholic beverage prices.

Supermarkets should be allowed to sell beer, wine, and liquor just as liquor stores should be allowed to sell groceries — that is, if government ever means to serve the public interest rather than the special interest.

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

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