Chris Powell column

By Chris Powell

Another day, another study finding that Connecticut state employees are paid so much better than private-sector workers. The latest study was done by a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, Andrew Biggs, who holds a doctoral degree from the London School of Economics.

Biggs’ conclusion matches that of similar studies in recent years — that the nominal salaries of state employees are a little smaller than those of private-sector workers in comparable positions, by about 6%, but their fringe benefits — pensions and medical care — are more than three times greater than what private-sector workers get, an average of $44,000 per year against $13,000.

Until recently state government kept mostly under control the part of state employee compensation that was easily discerned — the salaries — while incurring enormous long-term obligations that few would see and that were not funded adequately, or at all.

The state employee unions knew very well what was going on, for they formally consented to it via their contracts. Their tools in the government figured that when the long-term obligations exploded, they would be someone else’s problem.

Lately pension liabilities have been devouring the state budget. Biggs estimates that equalizing state government compensation with private-sector compensation could save $2 billion a year.

Such studies are always questionable in some details. The Connecticut Examiner quotes an economics professor at Eastern Connecticut State University, Brendan Cunningham, who questions job comparability. Cunningham asks: “In what sense is there a comparable private-sector judge? The same with state police: What’s the private-sector version?”

But even there the excesses are plain.

Superior Court Judge Alice Bruno hasn’t shown up for work for more than two years but still has been paid $340,000 while the Judicial Department wonders what to do about her.

Over at the state police, in 2019 Sgt. John McDonald got drunk at a retirement party in Oxford and drove off and crashed a state police vehicle into another car, seriously injuring its two occupants. He was charged criminally and his police powers were suspended. But for two years he remained on the payroll doing administrative work, collecting tens of thousands of dollars in overtime even as he was serving the criminal probation of a plea bargain. McDonald resigned last November while under investigation for unrelated misconduct but the income he earned while on criminal probation counted toward his pension credits.

Yes, as Professor Cunningham notes, sometimes there is little comparison between government and private-sector jobs, but the public is still cheated. For what private-sector employer would tolerate situations like Bruno’s and McDonald’s as state government tolerates them?

Even when government and private-sector jobs in Connecticut are not so comparable, there is still little discipline in state government employment, and this lack of discipline constitutes a theft of services from the public even if its cost is not calculated in monetary terms.

These outrages are indefensible and the state employee unions know better than to confront them. Instead they try to change the subject, clamoring to raise taxes on the rich, figuring that the public will resent the outrages less if someone else is paying more for them.

As he begins his campaign for re-election, Governor Lamont, a Democrat, has decided to let the outrages continue and to increase their cost. He has offered the unions a luxurious new contract with big raises and even cash bonuses, since the unions are his party’s political army.

The governor says the raises and bonuses are necessary to keep state government’s workforce reasonably intact, since many state employees are expected to depart over the next year.

But those employees are leaving not for better-paying jobs in the private sector but because state government’s retirement benefits are so luxurious and will be slightly curtailed in the future.

The expiration of the current state employee union contract presents an opportunity for state government to serve the public better at much less cost. That opportunity won’t be seized. Indeed, even Connecticut’s opposition party may be too frightened by the unions to acknowledge it.

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Chris Powell has written about Connecticut government and politics for many years.

By Chris Powell

Connecticut may be paying the Sikorsky helicopter division of military contractor Lockheed Martin as much as $250 million to keep its facilities in the state for the next 20 years — an average of more than $12 million per year — if the company gets major new helicopter contracts from the U.S. Defense Department.

Governor Lamont has struck such a deal with Sikorsky, similar to one struck by his predecessor, Dannel P. Malloy. While the General Assembly would have to approve it, legislative leaders of both parties seem to favor it because Sikorsky, based in Stratford, already has about 8,000 employees and 250 suppliers in the state and with the new contracts might hire thousands more.

Even with the subsidy from state government, Sikorsky could relocate to a state that made a better offer, though it might have to repay whatever it had taken from Connecticut.

Under the circumstances the subsidy may be good policy. But it is still corporate welfare, and smiling through it are Connecticut’s members of Congress. Instead they should be advocating legislation to prevent recurrence of this kind of thing not just in Connecticut but throughout the country.

States should compete with each other to draw businesses and residents. But the federal government shouldn’t take sides in this competition. The federal government should prevent military contracts from being used as leverage to extort corporate welfare from state and municipal governments.

That is, federal law could forbid military contractors from obtaining corporate welfare that is conditioned on the award of a military contract, like the corporate welfare Connecticut plans to give Sikorsky.

With the Sikorsky arrangement, the leverage of the federal government will be used not for public gain but for corporate gain. What President Eisenhower called the military-industrial complex has enough power, influence, and wealth already.

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YALE’S BAD MANAGEMENT: Yale University in New Haven is as renowned as any institution of higher education in the world. But recent events suggest that Yale is overrated.

In recent years Yale has become a center of political correctness as much as education, and on March 10 this political correctness turned again to fascism as more than a hundred students at the university’s law school besieged what was supposed to be a forum on civil liberties.

The students interrupted the forum, stood up and held signs, blocking sight lines, and shouted and jeered in objection to the participation of one of the invited speakers, a representative from the Alliance Defending Freedom, which supports the civil liberties of conservatives. Police were needed to escort the speakers away.

While the young fascists are law students, Yale will not punish them, apparently because they noisily left the assembly room and congregated disruptively outside before they were given a fourth warning, a threshold set in student conduct rules.

Neither will Yale give any thought to how such people are getting admitted to the university, nor to why the atmosphere at the university is so intolerant of political disagreement.

Then last week a former finance director of Yale’s School of Medicine pleaded guilty to federal charges that she stole $40 million from the university over 10 years through the fraudulent purchase and sale of computer equipment and programming.

Yale also has a School of Management, but the student thuggery and colossal theft at the university suggest that it doesn’t have nearly enough management.

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CUTENESS IS FADING: Legislation to allow farmers to get state permits to shoot bears and other predatory animals that damage crops and kill or injure livestock failed last week in the General Assembly’s Environment Committee on a vote of 18-13.

Connecticut already allows deer hunting to protect agriculture and deer don’t attack livestock as bears do, so it is hard to understand the opposition to protecting agriculture against bears.

The bill that was rejected did not authorize a general bear-hunting season in Connecticut. But unless bear hunting is authorized soon to some extent, the continuing explosion in the bear population will put at least several bears in every town. Their cuteness is already wearing off fast.

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Chris Powell has written about Connecticut government and politics for many years.

By Chris Powell

Everybody in state government seems to love this tax-cutting stuff — first the temporary suspension of Connecticut’s 25-cents-per-gallon gasoline tax, and then a week of lifting the sales tax on most clothing purchases. The public will love it too.

But how happy will everybody be on July 1, as the election campaigns for governor and the General Assembly are intensifying, when the gas tax returns to the pumps with a bang? Even if there is peace in the world and gas prices have fallen substantially by then, there will be no hiding the big increase in taxation. Inflation, now running at perhaps double the government’s heavily massaged official rate of 8%, may be declining by July as well, but it’s likely to remain painful and the return of the gas tax may be doubly resented.

Meanwhile state government still will have enough cash on hand to afford extending the gas tax suspension to, say, Wednesday, November 9 — the day after the election.

Extending the suspension beyond July might help some campaigns, but it also might cause people to start thinking that cutting taxes indefinitely isn’t so bad.

Four years ago the Republican candidate for governor, Bob Stefanowski, who is likely to be renominated this year, was ridiculed by most right-thinking people and journalists for aiming to repeal the state income tax. But though Stefanowski was a neophyte to politics, his idea resonated anyway and he came much closer to winning than was expected, insofar as Connecticut is a heavily Democratic state.

Four years ago hundreds of thousands of benighted people seemed to think that the state income tax was not as much a boon as their betters thought it, and even thought that state government itself is not the comprehensive blessing the tax implied. Many of the benighted voted for Stefanowski even as they understood the impracticality of his position. They figured that his position might produce only limited results, but results nonetheless.

Repealing the income tax is not part of Stefanowski’s platform this year. Instead he proposes cutting the sales tax, which, at 6.35%, is both high and regressive — that is, more burdensome to people of lower incomes. So reducing the sales tax might appeal to liberals, if liberalism in Connecticut had not sunk to a mere rationalization for policies and programs that don’t achieve their nominal objectives but at least sustain government’s payroll.

In addition to being “progressive” — favoring people of lower incomes — cutting certain taxes indefinitely rather than merely suspending them for a few months or a week would have a big advantage. For reducing its revenue pressures government to become more efficient, and cutting taxes makes raising them again more difficult. Unlike repealing the income all at once, tax cutting can be done incrementally and steadily, easing government’s adjustment to efficiency.

Cutting taxes incrementally but steadily also might eventually induce people who are most sensitive to serious but unaddressed human needs to become the most vigorous enemies of inefficiency and excess in government. That is, cutting taxes might revive true liberalism.

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POLITICAL BLACKMAIL: Should personal tax returns remain confidential short of court proceedings? (But of course not for Donald Trump, against whom anything goes.)

At least four of Connecticut’s most liberal Democratic state legislators — Reps. Josh Elliott of Hamden, Kate Farrar of West Hartford, Jack Hennessy of Bridgeport, and Michael Winkler of Vernon — would end confidentiality. They have introduced legislation to allow eight legislative leaders to obtain individual tax returns from the state Revenue Services Department, supposedly to assist the legislators in studying Connecticut’s tax system.

Several legislative leaders who would gain access to tax returns via the bill oppose its disclosure provision. But Senate President Pro Tem Martin M. Looney, D-New Haven, is sympathetic. He says enough privacy could be retained if certain identifying information on returns is redacted.

Disagreeing, the leader of the House Republican minority, Vincent Candelora, R-North Branford, notes that even with the redaction of names, many returns might be identifiable from their details, like sources of income.

The legislation seems intended mainly to facilitate political blackmail.

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Chris Powell has written about Connecticut government and politics for many years.

By Chris Powell

Even as state government purports to be rolling in money, much of it emergency aid from the federal government, Connecticut is trailing the country in still another economic measure: income growth. The U.S. Bureau of Economic Analysis says personal income grew nationally by 7.4% last year but in Connecticut by only 5.8%.

Government in Connecticut grows more prosperous, with plenty of raises and even bonuses for its employees. But the state’s private sector, from which taxes are drawn, is still struggling. Recent events in the General Assembly provide some explanation.

State government owes the federal government about $800 million for principal and interest on money borrowed to pay unemployment compensation during the virus epidemic. Ordinarily the debt would be paid by raising unemployment fund taxes on businesses. But having been badly hurt by the epidemic, many businesses are not rolling in money, so they want state government to help repay the unemployment fund loan.

After all, businesses didn’t cause the spike in unemployment during the epidemic. That was caused by government’s own closing orders.

But the president of the Connecticut AFL-CIO, Ed Hawthorne, opposes using state government’s surplus to pay off the unemployment fund debt. He is urging the legislature to increase unemployment insurance taxes and spend state government’s surplus on hiring more government employees, most of whom are members of AFL-CIO-affiliated unions and thus organized against the government and the public.

State government’s hostility to the private sector was also manifested last week when the legislature’s Labor and Public Employees Committee, dominated by extreme-left Democrats, approved bills to award unemployment compensation to strikers and to prohibit employers from replacing strikers with permanent new hires.

Unlike other recipients of unemployment compensation, strikers have not lost jobs through no fault of their own. They left work voluntarily. Additionally, strikers are not available for long-term work elsewhere, a traditional requirement for unemployment compensation. Unemployment compensation for strikers pays people not to work.

After excessive taxation, subsidizing strikes may be government’s best way of inducing business to leave.

The striker bills will challenge Governor Lamont’s posture as a moderate.

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CONGRATS FOR NOTHING: State government last week congratulated itself for establishing a new program to do for people what they easily could do for themselves at no cost — set up an individual retirement account, or IRA.

The program is called MyCTSavings and will be a retirement savings plan employers will be required to offer if they are not already offering one. Employees will be enrolled in the plan automatically but allowed to opt out.

Of course saving for retirement should be encouraged, but no one needs state government to provide the savings mechanism. Banks and brokerages long have offered IRA-funding mechanisms to employers and employees without charge, with automatic deductions from the paychecks or bank accounts of participants, making retirement saving almost effortless.

MyCTSavings is touted for saving time and money for employers in processing IRA contributions. But the same payroll deduction processing has to be done in MyCTSavings as in an employer’s own retirement savings plan. An employer’s plan costs more only when it offers more benefits than the simple payroll deductions that MyCTSavings will arrange. And to start an IRA no one needs an employer’s retirement savings program any more than anyone needs MyCTSavings. People can do it on their own.

Since it provides nothing people can’t easily arrange for themselves, MyCTSavings resembles state government’s new paid leave program, which is only self-insurance financed by a special half-percent income tax. People could have put that money aside in a savings account all by themselves and used the money for any emergency. Instead state government takes their money and sharply restricts how they can reclaim it. Most won’t be able to.

The idea with both programs seems to be for state government to inject itself into more personal business, hiring more employees in the process, even as government doesn’t manage its own business very well.

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Chris Powell is a columnist for the Journal Inquirer in Manchester, Connecticut.

By Chris Powell

Renovating the state’s child-protection agency isn’t the only issue Connecticut has just taken 32 years to resolve in court. The same amount of time has just elapsed with the resolution of the Sheff v. O’Neill lawsuit over de-facto racial segregation in Hartford’s schools.

The child-protection case plodded along in federal court while the school case moved glacially in Connecticut’s own courts. The cases raised important issues, even if they failed to address the big underlying problems, and they settled some big state government policies. But they did so without much involvement of the General Assembly and thus without much ordinary democracy.

With the child-protection case, eventually governors and the legislature decided to appropriate more and more for the Department of Children and Families until increases in its social worker staff outran increases in neglected and fatherless children. But the legislature never undertook any inquiry into the causes of childbearing outside marriage, despite its overwhelming correlation with poverty.

The settlement of the Hartford school segregation case requires state government to appropriate tens of millions of dollars in the years ahead to build more regional schools and operate more school choice programs until all the Hartford students so desiring can get out of their largely segregated and poorly performing neighborhood schools. But this month both houses of the General Assembly decided not to vote on the settlement, letting it take effect by default.

Legislative votes on the settlement were denied even though some Black legislators wanted to question its shortcomings and the Senate chair of the Appropriations Committee, Cathy Osten, D-Sprague, wanted its financial commitments to come before her committee for review.

In comments to the Hartford Courant, House Speaker Matt Ritter, D-Hartford, even implied that subverting democracy was necessary if the Sheff case was to be settled at all. “If you involve us and the Senate leadership,” Ritter said, “before you know it, that’s a bill, not a legal settlement.”

But a bill is democracy, lawmaking by the people’s elected representatives. A court settlement is lawmaking by the unelected — and an argument for electing judges.

Maybe such disdain for democracy is to be expected from a legislature that for two years until recently forfeited its authority to the governor in the name of an “emergency” that long outlasted the definition of the word.

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ABUSIVE ZONING: Surely South Windsor’s Planning and Zoning Commission has heard the clamor over exploding prices for food, gasoline, and housing. For various reasons there are now shortages of all three necessities.

So this month the commission did what might be done by any zoning commission in an exclusive suburb. The commission voted 4-3 to impose a one-year moratorium on most new housing in town — single-family housing subdivisions of more than two lots and duplex and multi-family housing.

Several housing developments in town that already have been approved won’t be impeded, but the town has room for much more housing than that. Additionally, the commission’s rationale for the moratorium is the tired excuse often used to defend exclusivity: to provide time for a general review of zoning regulations. The commission will pretend that it can’t review the regulations without a freeze on housing.

This sort of obstructionism is exactly what is fueling proposals in the General Assembly to strip discretion from suburban zoning commissions.

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LEAVE RABBITS ALONE: Animal lovers are upset that the state Agriculture Department is proposing legislation to facilitate the mass farming and slaughtering of rabbits for meat. It may be hard to oppose the legislation on principle, since Connecticut already has many slaughterhouses and meatpackers. After all, is it any more objectionable to raise, kill, and eat rabbits than cattle, pigs, chickens, and fish?

But in the name of humane treatment of animals it also may be fair to ask whether Connecticut really needs more animal slaughter and meat. Rabbit meat is already available from out of state. But because of Russia’s war against Ukraine, wheat and corn may be in desperately short supply for years. Agriculture in Connecticut would do much better to try to seize that opportunity and leave the rabbits alone.

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Chris Powell has written about Connecticut government and politics for many years.

By Chris Powell

President Biden nominated Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson to the Supreme Court to fulfill a campaign promise to give the court its first Black woman. But this week Jackson told the Senate Judiciary Committee that she can’t define “woman” because “I’m not a biologist.”

So how could the president have been so sure as to what constitutes a woman? He’s no biologist either.

And how could the Democratic senators supporting Jackson, also no biologists, be so sure even as they are trying to push her through the confirmation process before her judicial and political philosophies are explored too much?

When the hearing on Jackson’s nomination began, “woman” was in the dictionary, and had been for a long time.

But Jackson’s evasion on the woman question was a strong hint that if she makes it to the court she will assist the extreme political left in promoting transgenderism and erasing any recognition of gender differences, particularly in regard to women in sports.

Of course for many years all Supreme Court nominees have been evasive about their views on legal and political controversies. But this evasion never has been taken as far as Jackson took it this week.

The Senate should not accept such evasion. It should tell the president that if he wants to nominate a Black woman for the court, he should find one who at least isn’t afraid to admit knowing what a woman is.

MORE UNEDUCATED KIDS: According to a Rasmussen poll this week, 58% of likely U.S. voters think the public schools are getting worse, with only 13% thinking they are improving.

Of course the virus epidemic’s interruption of schooling has damaged education terribly. But education already had been declining for years and is probably even worse than the 58% in the poll believe. A report in the New Haven Independent this week may not have been surprising but still should have been horrifying.

Quoting the city school system’s data, the Independent reported that the performance of 45% of New Haven students is two grades behind where it should be and the performance of another 44% of students is one grade behind. Only 11% of New Haven students are performing at grade level.

Since most of the city’s children are fatherless and impoverished, New Haven is worse in this respect than Connecticut generally, but statewide student performance should horrify as well. The last time Connecticut’s high school seniors were formally tested for subject proficiency was in 2013 by the National Assessment of Educational Progress. While Connecticut’s seniors performed best in the country, half still had not mastered high school English and two-thirds still had not mastered high school math.

Even so, contrary to the Rasmussen poll, most people in Connecticut seem satisfied with their public schools. At least there is no movement to improve schools academically or seriously examine student performance.

Maybe opinions about schools are like opinions about Congress, where most people think Congress is corrupt and taking the country in the wrong direction even as most people like their own congressmen.

After all, there’s some comfort in thinking that while schools are declining generally, one’s local schools are still great and that, as in Lake Wobegon, all local students are above average. Such thinking relieves parents of any responsibility to take note of public education’s transition from academic learning to “social and emotional learning” with a dollop of political indoctrination — schooling without the inconvenience of proficiency test scores.

INCURIOUS ROBOTS: Connecticut’s Hearst newspapers this week published a remarkable news item produced by an outfit called United Robots, whose computer programs process raw data and put it into prose.

This particular item, drawn from property records, said a “spacious and historic house” in Bridgeport with three stories, 3,700 square feet, seven bedrooms, three bathrooms, and a detached garage had been sold for a mere $2,000. A photograph showed the house looks intact and secure.

But the “robots” didn’t explain the low price, so incongruous amid Connecticut’s housing shortage. Bridgeport is a troubled city but residential property there is not worthless. There must be a reason for the giveaway price of that house but the “robots” apparently lack the curiosity of a live reporter.

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Chris Powell has written about Connecticut government and politics for many years.

By Chris Powell

Success and failure alike were marked last week as Governor Lamont visited Connecticut’s Department of Children and Families.

The governor congratulated the department for being on the verge of release from federal court supervision, which began in December 1989. The department has hired more social workers, reduced to about 15 the number of cases each social worker handles, and has sharply reduced foster care placements and sharply increased placement of children with relatives when their home isn’t safe for them.

Most families involved with DCF now are visited by a social worker twice a month, so cases of repeated abuse and neglect have been much diminished.

The failure marked last week was that it has taken state government 32 years to transform DCF from a horror show to relative competence — a failure for which past governors and legislatures, far more than the department itself, are responsible.

In a larger sense the failure endures, quite without any attention from the governor and legislature, insofar as increasing DCF staff isn’t the only way of reducing child neglect and abuse. Neglect and abuse also could be reduced by reducing the self-inflicted and government-encouraged and -subsidized poverty that still abounds in Connecticut, where policy presumes that social worker visits are adequate substitutes for parents and that it is OK that a third or more of the state’s children, and most children in the cities, grow up without a father in their home.

* * *

Meanwhile last week the General Assembly doubled down on its irrelevance to criminal justice for juveniles.

Democratic legislators want to throw more social services at troublesome kids, as if that long hasn’t been state government’s prescription for them. Republican legislators advocate more social services too, apparently differing with the Democrats only insofar as they would divert from juvenile court to adult court the few juveniles accused of the most serious felonies.

Neither Democratic nor Republican legislators would make it possible for themselves or the public to discover what is really going on with juvenile justice. That is, no one proposes to make juvenile court public to comply with the state Constitution, which requires: “All courts shall be open.”

So under what is passing for juvenile justice reform, there will be no telling whether any new social services actually work, just as there is no telling whether any work now. There would continue to be no accountability for both juvenile offenders and the administrators of juvenile justice. As now, no one will ever have to answer for the juvenile crime outrages that occasionally break through the secrecy.

Most of all, there will be no putting the crucial question to any authorities in government or to the governor and legislators themselves: Where are all the messed-up kids coming from?

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Almost as difficult as running a child-welfare agency is running a school system as it tries to recover from the catastrophic damage to education done during the virus epidemic.

According to the state Education Department’s annual report on the condition of public education in Connecticut, issued two weeks ago, school enrollment in the state fell sharply last year, by 3%. While enrollment long has been falling, until last year it had been taking five years to fall by that much.

Apparently many kids just don’t go to school anymore. Chronic absenteeism rose from 12.2% to 19%, most involving racial minorities and the poor.

Predictably enough, students who got “remote” learning instead of in-person learning didn’t learn much at all, and performance on college and career readiness tests fell sharply, with just 36% of students meeting standards.

The high school graduation rate rose slightly to 89% but this means nothing amid social promotion, since everyone who just hangs around graduates. Far more telling about the future is that the percentage of students earning basic credits by ninth grade was the lowest in seven years. But they’ll all graduate anyway, educated or not.

This disaster will harm minority and poor children most, since the report says fully half of Connecticut’s students now are from racial minorities and 43% are from poor households.

But at least school employees needn’t worry. Despite the collapse in enrollment and performance, school spending is sure to keep going up.

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Chris Powell has written about Connecticut government in politics for many years.

By Chris Powell

Judging from the poses being struck by Governor Lamont and state legislators of both parties, Connecticut might think that happy days are here again in what just happens to be a gubernatorial election year. Among other things the governor and legislators are plotting property tax relief, increasing the earned income tax credit, suspending gas and sales taxes, and spending more on popular programs.

And yet, as the Connecticut Mirror’s Keith Phaneuf reported the other day, state government is becoming more indebted than ever. How come?

First it is because Lamont’s administration and that of his predecessor, Dannel P. Malloy, repeatedly refinanced the state’s debt, stretching out its duration, thereby reducing near-term payments at the expense of long-term payments so that the present generation may spend more and future generations will have to pay more for spending that benefited their ancestors.

Second it is because state government recently was shamed into reducing from 8% to 7% its estimate of the average annual growth in its pension fund investments over coming decades. Both estimates are wishful thinking that presumes there will never be a serious decline in the stock market. But even that small step toward realism greatly inflates the calculation of the state’s pension liabilities, which are largely unfunded and therefore debt.

So Connecticut’s total state government debt, now estimated at $95 billion, is 30% higher than it was six years ago.

That’s not progress but regression, and Connecticut is now the most indebted state in the country on a per-capita basis, with each resident’s share of the state debt estimated at $62,500 — more debt than most residents have incurred for their personal purposes.

About a quarter of the state budget already goes for government employee pensions and debt repayment and thus is unavailable for the services state government is expected to provide.

Of course this isn’t entirely the fault of the people in office now. It is more the negligence and opportunism of those who preceded them. But the goodies being plotted by the people now in office to improve their election chances represent the same irresponsibility that their predecessors committed, the irresponsibility that has made Connecticut so expensive and unattractive to new residents and businesses.

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So much political discussion in Connecticut is pious posturing, as with the frequent declarations that people shouldn’t have to choose between medicine and food or between a job and taking care of a sick relative.

Yes, everything desirable should be free, or at least someone else should pay for whatever you want. But as has been noted by politicians who have painfully graduated to statesmanship, to govern is to choose, and, indeed, life itself is always a matter of choosing.

So last week at a hearing of the General Assembly’s Planning and Development Committee, Alan Cavagnaro, 20, a member of the Planning and Zoning Commission in South Windsor, made himself part of the tedium. He was supporting legislation to force more housing into towns with exclusive zoning, noting that the high cost of living in Connecticut is driving the state’s own young people away.

Whereupon he was challenged by Rep. Kim Fiorello, R-Greenwich, a ferocious defender of exclusive zoning. She demanded of him: “Is housing a right? Are you entitled to the housing you want?”

When the young man took the bait and affirmed that housing should be a right, Fiorello rebuked him nastily. “Housing is not a right, because housing is built by other people,” Fiorello said. “You don’t have a right to other people’s labor.”

True, but not true enough. For while housing is not a right, it is a necessity, and a responsible government must facilitate the production of necessities to increase the prosperity of its people.

After all, the young man wasn’t asking to live in Fiorello’s town, where residential property typically costs $3 million. Essentially he was protesting the devastating explosion of housing prices in Connecticut, where exclusive zoning sharply restricts supply.

Fiorello cynically evaded this bigger point. She may not realize that property is respected and safe only where it is reasonably distributed. If it’s not, Fiorello’s own constituents may have the most to lose.

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Chris Powell has written about Connecticut government and politics for many years.

By Chris Powell

For many years the case for raising the pay of Connecticut state legislators has been solid in principle.

Their base annual salary is $28,000. Representatives get another $4,500 and senators $5,500 annually for expenses they don’t have to document. There is a mileage allowance. Legislators may get a few thousand dollars more if they are appointed to “leadership” positions, and, predictably enough, while most leadership positions are only nominal, they are so numerous that many legislators get one.

But the average legislator is being paid only $35,000 per year and legislators have gotten no raise since 2001, even as inflation is high.

While legislative sessions seldom last more than six months, those sessions often run from morning to late at night. Quite apart from their work at the Capitol, legislators typically are on duty most of the year dealing with constituents and interest groups. Many legislators attend civic events when they’re not on the telephone hearing pleas for help, favors, or patronage.

As a result being a state legislator is not a practical option for most people, as it offers part-time pay for what is often more than full-time work even as it requires most to hold other jobs to support themselves and their families.

In the old days the Hartford insurance companies and major law firms would give legislative leaders jobs with highly flexible schedules, even “no-show” jobs, though that practice diminished as the conflict of interest was recognized. But still, if legislators are not wealthy or financially comfortable in retirement, they need second jobs with flexible hours. For most, legislative office really is public service, no matter how well or poorly they perform.

So as a practical matter service in the General Assembly is not really open to everyone. Lawyers, financial company employees, and retirees are disproportionately represented in it. Factory workers, truckers, nurses, and barbers aren’t.

Theoretically, higher and effectively full-time legislative salaries would be more democratic and draw more capable and qualified people to the General Assembly. Legislators often offer such reflections upon their retirement.

But few legislators planning to seek re-election take that position, at least not in public, since they assume that voters would hold it against them and could not be persuaded by any argument in favor of raises.

Indeed, many voters probably would not even understand that the state Constitution prevents legislators from voting to raise their own salaries — that legislators can’t get a raise unless voters re-elect them to it.

But legislative pay raises aren’t the only issue that fails to be addressed because of a lack of political courage. State government seldom addresses any issue with courage.

For many years state government has been mainly an exercise in distributing money to the loudest and most numerous bleaters, even as Connecticut’s biggest problems — generational poverty, educational failure, racial segregation, housing prices, criminal justice, and such — have not been alleviated, government’s only response to them being to do and spend more on what doesn’t work, as long as what doesn’t work employs people who will support the regime at election time.

A legislator who merely acknowledged that state government’s expensive policies toward those enduring problems don’t work might be more courageous than all his colleagues.

Of course Connecticut isn’t peculiar in this respect, just maybe worse because its prosperity has insulated it somewhat from failure. A century ago the writer H.L. Mencken saw the tendency everywhere in government.

“Laws,” Mencken wrote, “are no longer made by a rational process of public discussion. They are made by a process of blackmail and intimidation, and they are executed in the same manner. The typical lawmaker of today is a man wholly devoid of principle — a mere counter in a grotesque and knavish game. If the right pressure could be applied to him, he would be cheerfully in favor of polygamy, astrology, or cannibalism.”

That’s why better pay for state legislators might not change anything. For legislators don’t elect themselves. Their constituents usually elect and re-elect them without ever noticing their policy failures. To get a better public life you need to get a better public.

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Chris Powell has written about Connecticut government and politics for many years.

By Chris Powell

Maybe the best that could be said about Connecticut U.S. Sen. Chris Murphy after his speech to the Senate last week is that he is Russian President Vladimir Putin’s unwitting tool.

Murphy scorned assertions that producing more oil and natural gas in the United States is necessary for the country’s energy independence and defense.

“The oil industry doesn’t drill to be patriotic,” Murphy said. “They drill to make money, and there’s never a guarantee that that oil or that gas stays in the United States.” He added: “You know how you do make this country energy independent? Investing in renewables.”

But the big argument for more production is not that the oil and gas industry is patriotic but that the national interest requires more production, especially now that this country’s European allies are at the mercy of supplies from a totalitarian Russia waging aggressive war.

Indeed, just a few weeks ago the leader of Murphy’s own political party, President Biden, was urging the Organization of Petroleum-Exporting Countries to produce more oil so the United States could keep striking politically correct, environmentally friendly poses as Murphy does.

Yes, the oil and gas industry strives to make money — but of course so does every industry, including the renewable energy industry. No industry is inherently virtuous. Maybe Murphy has forgotten, but when he was in the U.S. House of Representatives in 2011 a solar power startup company called Solyndra went bankrupt after receiving a federal government loan guarantee, costing the government more than a half-billion dollars. Solyndra is only one of many failed “green” power startups on which the federal government has lost hundreds of millions of dollars without making the country energy independent via renewables.

Yes, oil and gas are easily exported, unlike solar and wind power. But Congress and the president could always enact a law forbidding their export, just as a law could be passed to tax whatever might be called the oil and gas industry’s “excess profits” or to raise the government’s mineral rights royalties. Forbidding energy exports, as Murphy seemed to endorse, would support Putin’s control of the energy supply of this country’s allies.

Of course Europe’s energy problem is its own fault, since Europe crippled its conventional energy and nuclear power industries long before renewable energy could replace them substantially.

That seems to be the policy Murphy wants for the United States.

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Connecticut’s senior U.S. senator, Richard Blumenthal, wasn’t much more impressive last week on a different issue — the acquisition of Bridgeport-based People’s United Bank by M&T Bank of Buffalo, New York, which received its final necessary approval, from the Federal Reserve Board in Washington.

M&T said the combination will reduce People’s United’s Connecticut employment by 28%, 747 people.

Blumenthal said he was “deeply disappointed” by the impending layoffs. He added: “M&T Bank is off to a bad start in Connecticut, putting profits ahead of people. I will continue to press the bank to reconsider these job cuts.”

This was the ineffectual cant that is usual from Blumenthal. After all, any business that doesn’t “put profits ahead of people” will soon be out of business, and anti-competitive combinations of big banks like these are subject to anti-trust law and banking regulations. That is, the government could restrict or prohibit them if it was so inclined.

Blumenthal, who this year is seeking election to a third six-year term, could scare the big banks more if he proposed such legislation. Additionally, any day now he may be voting on President Biden’s nominees to the Federal Reserve Board. While Blumenthal is not a member of the Senate Banking Committee, he still could ask those nominees where they stand on the constant consolidation of the banking industry, publicize their responses, and discuss their positions with his Senate colleagues before they vote.

Instead, as soon as he expressed his disappointment about the bank layoffs, Blumenthal flew off to Poland to be photographed with Ukrainian refugees, as if that would change anything more than was changed by his expression of disappointment in the bank merger.

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Chris Powell has written about Connecticut politics and government for many years.