Chris Powell column

By Chris Powell

Governor Lamont could have found worse things to do with the $75 million in federal emergency aid he ordered distributed last week as a bonus to poor households receiving the state’s earned income tax credit. On average those households probably have suffered more financially from the long virus epidemic, since many of their breadwinners hold, or held, the service-sector jobs that were the first to be cut back or eliminated.

Complaints from Republicans that the bonuses mainly will reward a constituency of the governor’s party, the Democrats, as his re-election campaign begins are not so compelling. For nearly everything government does rewards some political constituency, and state law already had identified the earned income tax credit constituency as deserving. If Connecticut ever again has a Republican administration, it will be unusual if Republican-leaning constituencies — if only ordinary taxpayers — are not rewarded too.

The governor’s dispensing that $75 million is troublesome for different reasons, starting with the disregard for democratic procedure.

The governor’s office says the federal law that sent the emergency money to the state authorizes his administration to spend it on expenses incurred because of the virus epidemic. But the state has been paying its earned income tax credit obligations all along. No payments by the government were cut because of the epidemic. While many recipients surely suffered losses because of the epidemic, it’s unlikely that all did, and no one receiving the bonus will have to show evidence of such losses. The expenses to be reimbursed here are merely being assumed.

Additionally, $75 million is a lot of money for state government to dispense out of the blue at the command of just one official, an amount never formally appropriated by the General Assembly. Indeed, as Republican legislators note, state law already had determined how much was to be spent on the tax credit. The bonus created by the governor overrides that legislation.

Since he still exercises — at least until February — emergency powers to rule Connecticut by decree, the governor presumably could have rewritten the tax credit law by himself to authorize the bonus. But he did not do so, perhaps because it might have emphasized his gathering unnecessary power to himself.

Republican legislators note that Connecticut faces many other compelling needs apart from those of the tax credit recipients and that ordinary democracy first would have summoned the legislature or legislative leaders to discuss how to spend the $75 million. That’s why the governor’s high-handedness here is another argument for letting his emergency powers expire.

Having continued for two years, the virus epidemic is no longer an emergency. While the epidemic will wax and wane as epidemics do, government is fully aware of what combating it may require. Most of all, combating it may require more medical facilities and staff, and thus, to finance them, fewer raises for government employees, fewer stupid imperial wars, and that $75 million that instead will be spent to expand the tax credit.

That money might build a few hospital wards and hire more doctors, nurses, and auxiliary staff. It might buy and distribute antivirals and vitamins.

If the tax credit bonus can be construed as an expense of the epidemic, surely expanding medical capacity and services could be construed similarly. With so much free money flowing from Washington, the federal government probably wouldn’t object if Connecticut chose to get more relevant.

After all, unlike the tax credit bonus, increasing medical capacity might benefit everyone who got sick.

Meanwhile government’s frantic efforts to distribute home testing kits for the virus and the public’s frantic efforts to obtain them seem misplaced.

Surely quite without a test most people can tell if they are sick with symptoms like those attributed to the virus, and surely most people with such symptoms might have enough sense to get to a doctor or hospital quickly, especially since early treatment of the virus is crucial to defeating it.

The people lately waiting in long lines for a home test kit for the virus well may be putting themselves at greater risk of contracting it. The virus is bad enough. Test hysteria induced by government will make it worse.

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

By Chris Powell

Connecticut doesn’t audit the performance of any of its major and expensive state government policies — not education, not welfare, not urban — but now would be a pretty good time for state government to audit its response to the virus epidemic.

For the epidemic has consumed nearly two years of state government’s focus, impairing everything important — commerce, schools, mental health, social order, and basic liberty and democracy themselves — only for all official efforts to fail to stop the spread of the virus. New daily confirmed cases in Connecticut in the last week averaged almost 4,000, the most yet, and weekly “virus-associated” deaths are double what they were only a few weeks ago.

An increase in infections might have been expected as colder weather pushed people closer together indoors and because of the December holidays. But then a decline in infections also might have been expected because of the state population’s high degree of vaccination and face-masking — that is, might have been expected if vaccines and face-masking really work.

But even government and government-friendly medical officials admit that the vaccines are quickly losing effect. Needing frequent “boosters,” they aren’t half as good as traditional vaccines, and there is growing concern that too many “boosters” may damage the human immune system.

This doesn’t mean that the vaccines and masks haven’t helped or that the epidemic might not be worse without them. It means that another approach to the epidemic is necessary — greater emphasis on therapies, of which there are many, and not only the antiviral pills just developed by pharmaceutical giants Pfizer and Merck, which, like the vaccines themselves, are not yet adequately tested and thus full of risk.

Even government-friendly medical authorities acknowledge the correlation between virus infection and deficiency in Vitamin D, the “sunshine vitamin,” especially in people with dark complexions, and many authorities recommend strengthening the immune system with Vitamin D and C and zinc supplements. Natural and manmade antivirals and anticoagulants abound and many studies have found them effective against the virus, especially if administered soon after infection.

Unfortunately at the outset of the epidemic, when medicine did not understand the virus, patients were commonly told only to go home and take cold medicine and return to a doctor or hospital if their symptoms worsened. But when their symptoms worsened, it was often too late to save them.

Now treatment is more sophisticated. On any particular day infections in Connecticut may increase by thousands but hospitalizations and deaths by only a few. On some days infections soar but hospitalizations decline. Many infected people have no symptoms and nearly all people survive infection.

Even government-friendly medical authorities also acknowledge the correlation between virus fatalities and “co-morbidities” like obesity and diabetes, which most people could control.

Governor Lamont announced last week that state government soon will distribute, without charge, millions of masks and virus tests that can be taken at home. While the tests may be helpful, there is no shortage of masks and the virus penetrates them easily. It might be far better for state government to help people understand that their immune systems and general fitness may be defenses as good as if not better than masks and vaccines, and if state government distributed free immunity-boosting vitamins and supplements and even gym memberships.

State and local government officials and the medical authorities on whom they rely have done their best in circumstances that have no precedent in living memory. But their good intentions don’t vindicate mistakes.

Despite lockdowns, mandatory masks, vaccines, “boosters,” and damage to society that will not be repaired for many years, Connecticut and the country are facing more virus infections than ever. So government should start questioning its policies and assumptions about the epidemic, including the assumption that the epidemic is so deadly that combating it must take priority over all other objectives in life.

What isn’t working needs to change, if only to set an example for the other things in state government that, after long experience, don’t work except to sustain the government itself.

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

By Chris Powell

From Connecticut and Washington last week came more strong signs that higher education isn’t worth the expense to many students.

The Connecticut State Colleges and Universities system announced that it had just awarded another $3.6 million to 2,400 community college students to help them cover the cost of attendance, which was defined broadly to include food, housing, and child care. Another $21 million already has been awarded to students deemed in trouble financially. Emergency federal financial aid is paying for it.

And President Biden extended until May his freeze on repayment of federal college student loans.

Biden and the president of the state college system, Terrence Cheng, attributed the actions to hardship caused by the virus epidemic. But this was misleading.

For college loan debt has been a serious problem for a long time, as many college graduates can’t find jobs paying enough to support themselves in normal life and to repay their debt.

Similarly, even before the epidemic the state college system was suffering an alarming decline in enrollment, perhaps because parents and students were realizing that even the inexpensive education offered by the community colleges and regional universities was not always good value.

Now there is a severe labor shortage in Connecticut and throughout the country as millions of people seem to have given up on working — or at least given up on working officially and incurring tax liability. Jobs are going begging. Many require skills that can be gained short of a college degree or learned on the job.

This doesn’t mean that higher education is useless but that it is overpriced and that college loans and grants like those awarded in Connecticut last week are less subsidies to students than to higher education’s own employees.

The steady rise in the cost of higher education has correlated strongly with the rising compensation of college personnel and the growth of administrative staff.

Connecticut’s public college administrators are spectacularly paid, and last week, even as CSCU President Cheng lamented what he saw as the financial strain on community college students, he declined to suggest economizing with his annual salary of $360,000.

But then all public education, not just public higher education, long has been going soft, corrupted by prosperity and forgetting that prosperity is not the natural order of things but something that must be constantly earned.

Connecticut is a telling example of this, its elementary education having long eliminated standards for promotion from grade to grade and having adopted social promotion instead.

The system knows very well what it has been doing. It has minimized annual testing of students from kindergarten through high school and fails to provide any measure of student performance upon graduation. Instead the final measures of performance are the Scholastic Aptitude Tests given to all students in high school’s junior year.

The rationale offered for this is efficiency and to encourage all students to consider college. But the SATs provide no measures of academic proficiency at graduation. The last time Connecticut high school seniors were tested for 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. Recent junior-year SAT scores suggest the same.

Despite this lack of student qualifications, Connecticut strives to send everyone on to college. Until a few years ago most community college and state university freshmen were having to take remedial high school courses, but the embarrassment of it caused the courses to be replaced by counseling.

Thus public education has devalued itself on the way to mere credentialism, providing incentives to fail, not succeed. If it aimed more for education than the contentment of employees, parents, and students, it would guarantee college admission only to students who master high school work. But the system doesn’t want any data like that.

So having given up on ordinary education, Connecticut’s public schools are busying themselves with racial propaganda and “social and emotional learning,” for which there will never be any inconvenient measures of performance.

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

By Chris Powell

Poor New Haven. Its police department has been unable to make arrests in 35 of the 45 murders committed in the city in the last two years, a failure rate of 78%.

Despite $111 million in federal emergency assistance, New Haven’s school system is running a deficit again, constantly losing teachers to higher-paying school systems and unable to provide drinking water to students, having shut down the water fountains in school hallways in fear that the fountains contribute to the virus epidemic. While water bottle-filling stations have been ordered, they may not be installed before the next school year begins.

But elsewhere Mayor Justin Elicker’s administration is on a tear of efficiency. Last week the city launched a sweep of local businesses to check compliance with the mayor’s order that everyone indoors in business and commercial facilities must wear a face mask.

Face masks are doubtful mechanisms of curtailing the virus, but if everyone is required to wear a mask indoors, at least medical theater can make city government seem to be taking charge, distracting from its other failures. A problem will arise only if people start comparing risks.

For even before the arrival of the latest variant of the virus, Omicron, 99.8% of people infected recovered, and while Omicron is believed to be more communicable, in most cases it also appears to be far less severe, no worse than a cold and less deadly than, say, a bullet to the brain and the other causes of the criminal deaths New Haven can’t solve.

But all Connecticut, not just New Haven, should be questioning government’s priorities in the face of the city’s many unsolved murders.

A few days ago Windsor’s police department announced that after eight months of investigation, it remains unable to determine who, back in April, hung ropes resembling nooses at the Amazon warehouse under construction in that town. The ropes injured no one, but many people were eager to claim that they had felt threatened.

A Windsor police statement described the extensive efforts taken to solve the supposed crime: “Numerous interviews of Amazon construction site personnel were conducted, including steel workers, electricians, safety and security workers, and administrative personnel, as well as others not directly involved in the construction site. Investigators reviewed personnel records of multiple employees, camera footage, and shift logs.” Some people were given polygraph tests.

Assisting the Windsor police were the FBI, state police, and Hartford state’s attorney’s office.

What if such federal and regional resources had been poured instead into investigating the 35 unsolved murders in New Haven? Might one or two of them have been solved by now?

Maybe not, but at least Connecticut would have been spared eight months of expensive political correctness.

Last week there was also a hopeful development in New Haven. After years of failure to act on the huge potential of historic Union Station, the busiest and grandest railroad station in Connecticut, city government and the state Transportation Department signed a development agreement.

State government will lease the station and its adjacent property to the city for 35 years, with a possible extension of 20 years, so the city might improve it with much-needed parking, a bus depot, restaurants and retail shops, offices, a beautiful plaza, frequent shuttle bus service to Tweed New Haven Airport, and whatever else might befit this gateway to Connecticut and link it to downtown New Haven a half mile away — if enough free money ever can be found from the state and federal governments, since the city never will have any of its own to spare.

It’s a compelling idea but as the city’s police and school disasters suggest, there’s little reason to believe that New Haven is capable of executing it any more than Hartford has been capable of managing its own big development projects, which is why state government has put a state agency in charge of them. The same should have been done for the Union Station project in New Haven.

So it will be no surprise if the project takes 35 years just to get started, only to end up with marijuana dispensaries, methadone and abortion clinics, gambling parlors, still more housing for people who can’t support themselves — and still not enough parking.

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

By Chris Powell

For several years now the “woke” Democratic majority in the General Assembly has been striving to erase many criminal convictions, either by statute or by facilitating pardons. This has been done on the mistaken premise that criminal records are the main impediments to former offenders as they seek to regain employment and housing.

But the main impediments to former offenders are their lack of education and job skills — more so now than ever as tens of thousands of jobs in Connecticut are going begging.

Simultaneously the “woke” Democratic majority has been striving to increase accountability in police work, enacting new standards for police officers and departments.

Last week investigative reporting by the Connecticut Post’s Bill Cummings disclosed that the two objectives have proven contradictory in a most ironic way.

In 2013, according to the Post, a Bridgeport police officer was charged with assaulting his former girlfriend’s new boyfriend and shoving her during the incident. The Bridgeport department stripped the officer of his police powers but kept him on the force doing administrative work. Two years later the officer was convicted in a plea bargain that reduced the charges to threatening and breach of peace.

Whereupon the Bridgeport police department managed to delay the officer’s mandatory state certification, allowing him to remain employed long enough so he could obtain a pardon from the state Board of Pardons and Paroles in October 2020, nullifying his convictions. Then, last May, the state Police Officers Standards and Training Council recertified him as an officer, allowing him to return to his old beat — demolishing accountability.

A member of the police standards council, former state Rep. Michael Lawlor, D-East Haven, who now teaches criminal justice at the University of New Haven, told the Post: “Everyone felt extremely uncomfortable doing this,” but the pardon removed the council’s discretion.

“This is the kind of thing that makes people scratch their heads and wonder what the standards really are for police officers,” Lawlor said. “Ordinary citizens will look at this and say, ‘I don’t believe it.’”

Actually, ordinary citizens who have lived in Connecticut for a while will believe it readily. They also may understand that when government destroys accountability for some people, other people may take advantage too and eventually there may be no accountability for anyone, just lots of politically correct fog descending to keep the public ignorant about crime.

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Public school teacher pensions in Connecticut are based largely on salary and longevity. Salaries differ among municipal school systems, and state government, not municipal government, pays all the pension expense. As a result state government puts more into the pension system for highly paid teachers, who tend to work in more prosperous towns that can afford to pay teachers more than poorer towns can.

So the teacher pension system subsidizes wealthy towns more than poor towns, which is unfair. A study group is agitating about it again.

Former Gov. Dannel P. Malloy proposed to start charging municipalities for a big share of the state’s teacher pension expense. Governor Lamont has proposed charging a much smaller amount. These charges would reduce state government’s cost but not make the system any fairer even as it caused municipalities to raise their property taxes. The General Assembly hasn’t gone along.

Another solution is possible. Starting with new hires, state law could standardize teacher pensions, awarding the same benefits to all teachers everywhere, adjusted for longevity, regardless of salary and municipality of employment. The new pension calculation rate might be based on the state’s average teacher salary.

This would increase pension benefits for teachers in poor municipalities and reduce them for teachers in wealthy municipalities. Voila — perfect equality and fairness.

But fairness doesn’t count much in Connecticut when any government employees may be inconvenienced. Besides, unfairness in the teacher pension system hardly matters anyway, since no adjustment of education financing systems in the state has ever had any bearing on student learning.

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

By Chris Powell

Don’t call it a “vaccine passport,” Governor Lamont says. What the state Public Health Department has started providing Connecticut residents is a “digital vaccination card” that uses a state government database to affirm the holder’s inoculation for Covid 19.

Everything about it will be voluntary. No one will be required to obtain or carry the card and no businesses or employers will be required by state government to condition entry or employment on proof of vaccination.

In principle the “digital vaccination card” won’t be much different from what many people already have created for themselves — a digital copy, stored on their mobile telephones, of the card they were given when vaccinated. The new card will be encrypted and direct electronic card readers to the state government vaccination database, which will confirm the holder’s vaccination.

This still isn’t much reassurance for people who want to protect their privacy in the long term. For the “digital vaccination card” will be a “vaccine passport” wherever business and employers choose to require it to distinguish the vaccinated from the unvaccinated for admission and employment purposes. And the state vaccination database will be instantly available for incorporation into a comprehensive and mandatory “vaccine passport” system if government starts one.

But of course businesses and employers already can require proof of vaccination, as by presentation of people’s original vaccination cards. So for the time being the card from the Public Health Department will just make ascertaining vaccination status easier for everyone who wants to ask or tell.

This system will allow the governor to maintain that he is against having state government impose requirements for vaccination for participation in ordinary life, without actually outlawing such requirements in the private sector. Under Lamont policy, virus restrictions will remain a matter of local option.

Theaters, closely packed, whose patrons seem comfortable with restrictions, may require both proof of vaccination and mask wearing, while restaurants and bars, less crowded than theaters and serving patrons who seem to oppose restrictions, may skip them.

The local option policy is incoherent public health policy. But the governor well may figure that it is the best policy politically. While virus infections, predictably enough, are rising as winter deepens and people are more confined indoors, the governor may sense, as many do, that society will suffer more from reverting to lockdowns than from more infections — and that he’ll do better by shifting to local officials the responsibility for any inconvenience.

The government and news organizations easily can quantify “virus-associated” deaths. It is harder to quantify the damage to education, business, jobs, mental health, sobriety, and social order inflicted by lockdowns in the name of preventing infections. But the public increasingly senses this damage and is not likely to stand for more of it even as a state election year begins.

Besides, since lockdowns confine more people to close quarters, they may not do much to prevent infections anyway.

Treatments for the virus have improved greatly in the last year, and even at the epidemic’s outset infection never was a death sentence, since more than 98% of infected people recovered and nearly all virus deaths involved “co-morbidities” that were as much a cause of death as the virus itself.

While the Lamont administration, health officials, and news organizations shout that 75% or so of patients hospitalized with the virus in Connecticut are unvaccinated, the other side of that coin is far more telling — that about a quarter of virus patients are fully vaccinated. Also more telling is the clamor for frequent booster shots.

That is, any vaccine that fails so often even as it requires three or more injections per year isn’t very effective.

Meanwhile adverse side-effects from the vaccines keep being discovered, signifying that the vaccines remain experimental, and critics of vaccine policy are being aggressively censored, which impugns vaccine policy more.

So Connecticut and the country might do best now to resolve to tough out the epidemic. If hospitals get too crowded, virus medicines run short, and more of both are needed, government should be able to finance them by avoiding more stupid trillion-dollar imperial wars and by economizing with its own amply compensated employees.

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

By Chris Powell

Revolutionaries throughout history sometimes have adopted a policy of “no enemies on the left,” figuring that, once in power, they could purge (or murder) those in their coalition who were not leftist enough. Maybe that’s how the Connecticut People’s World Committee, part of the state’s Communist Party, and Democratic U.S. Sen. Richard Blumenthal rationalized each other last week in New Haven at an event celebrating the founding of the Communist Party of the United States 102 years ago.

The committee was presenting its annual Amistad Awards, and the senator attended to give the recipients separate commendations from the Senate itself, indicating that his office and the committee worked together in advance of the event. One recipient was state Sen. Julie Kushner, D-Danbury.

Neither the honorees nor the senator push a particularly communist agenda but rather conventionally liberal Democratic policies like raising the minimum wage and extending paid family and medical leave. But then in pursuing such policies why is it necessary to celebrate communism, a totalitarian ideology with the blood of hundreds of millions on its hands?

Blumenthal said he was participating in the Communist event to honor “activism” and didn’t necessarily agree with the other participants about everything. But then even activism can be bad as well as good. While the New Haven Communists have appropriated the motto popularized by the late civil rights leader and U.S. representative John Lewis of Georgia — “good trouble” — there is more “bad trouble” associated with their banner than “good trouble,” and the ceremony’s organizers invited the participants, including Blumenthal, to join the Communist Party “to create a new socialist system.”

Days later, after suffering criticism and ridicule, Blumenthal said he didn’t know it was going to be a Communist event. But he must have noticed when he got there, and he didn’t run out.

Of course anything government does, from Social Security to police protection to stupid imperial wars, can be called “socialism,” and the New Haven Communists long have been part of the woodwork of the city and are not taken seriously politically even by their friends. They are no threat to national security.

But if a political party intends no more than things like higher minimum wages and civil rights, there’s no need to call itself Communist. That name is needed only if the party still contemplates expropriation and tyranny, which makes Blumenthal’s participation ironic, since his family’s spectacular wealth arises from a real estate empire. Did the People’s World Committee neglect to remind him that property is theft?

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PAIGE, CALL YOUR AGENT: A few weeks ago UConn women’s basketball sensation Paige Bueckers was a sensation off the court too when she became one of the first college athletes to win commercial endorsement contracts under the new college sports rules allowing them. Bueckers signed with Gatorade and internet marketer StockX.

Whereupon she injured her knee in a game and will be sidelined for two months at the height of basketball season. Her absence might demolish her value as a commercial spokeswoman.

But all may not be lost. For the women’s college basketball audience goes far beyond young people. UConn’s audience includes middle-aged and older folks, many of whom attended the university long ago and who now face mobility issues like the one just encountered by Bueckers.

StockX can sell more than sportswear. It also could pitch canes, walkers, wheelchairs, and support garments, which Bueckers might tout while she is a bit of an invalid. Being so incongruous, such commercials and ads might become sensations too, and while branding has yet to figure in the sale of medical equipment, maybe Bueckers and StockX could start a trend.

In addition, Bueckers had knee surgery at UConn Health in Farmington, which already does a lot of advertising, so she might have great appeal to basketball fans needing knee and hip replacements and such.

And while Bueckers’ promotion of Gatorade may not be so effective until she gets back in the game and works up a sweat, the advertising for old nutritional drinks used by people who are slowing down — like Geritol and Ensure — might benefit from some modernizing by a college basketball star.

Does Bueckers have an agent who can turn lemons into lemonade?

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

By Chris Powell

Connecticut, the state’s Hearst newspapers found this month in a series of investigative reports, has not made much progress solving its domestic violence problem. Of course studies of the state’s other major problems might reach a similar conclusion, but one has to start somewhere.

Connecticut’s main response to domestic violence is the protective order, with which a court warns an allegedly abusive party to stay away from the party who feels abused. The dark joke has been that every woman murdered by her husband or boyfriend dies clutching a protective order. That is, protective orders aren’t terribly effective, as the Hearst series showed.

The series found that a protective order had already been issued in a quarter of the 15,500 domestic violence incidents reported to police in Connecticut in 2020. A fifth of domestic violence charges in the state’s courts from 2016 to 2020 involved at least one violation of a protective order, and many of those charges were dismissed. Only about 20% of the 23,000 protective order violations charged in those years resulted in convictions.

Most of those charges were resolved by plea bargains or the referral of the accused to a rehabilitation program.

And so about 300 people, mostly women, have been killed by domestic violence in Connecticut in the last 20 years. Many more have been injured.

The data calls for more vigorous enforcement. But then so does the data for most crimes in Connecticut. For all criminal justice is a system of discounting charges via plea bargains and probationary programs, because there is far more crime than resources to prosecute them and because Connecticut’s criminal-justice system strives most of all to keep perpetrators out of jail.

Other than domestic violence, it is hard to find any serious crime in Connecticut where the defendant doesn’t already have a long criminal record but has remained free or suffered only short imprisonment, since the state lacks an incorrigibility law.

The Hearst series reported that domestic violence cases are discounted in court more often than equally serious crimes, but this is misleading, for domestic violence cases can be more difficult to prosecute. More of their evidence is uncorroborated testimony — “he said, she said” cases — more of their accusers lose the desire to testify, and fewer of the accused have long records indicating a danger to anyone besides their accusers.

As the stream of domestic violence deaths and injuries suggests, protective orders, rehabilitation programs, and social workers are no substitute for speedy trials, convictions, and imprisonments. Meanwhile there is always infinite demand for government to protect people against all the risks of life.

But government can’t protect everyone from everything all the time, and, distracted by the virus epidemic, government now is less able to protect everyone from even ordinary threats. Until Connecticut is ready to prosecute, convict, and imprison abusers quickly or to hire round-the-clock bodyguards for everyone threatened by domestic violence, people will have to be ready to protect themselves and take some responsibility for the awful partners they have chosen.

It’s an unpleasant thought, but then nothing is gained by ignoring the social disintegration worsening all around, of which domestic violence is only one part.

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ESCAPING THE EXTREMES: Responding to recent commentary in this space, a reader writes that if Bob Stefanowski can get next year’s Republican nomination for governor without a primary, he has a chance to beat Governor Lamont. But if Stefanowski has to run in a primary, “he will have to kiss up to every Trump-supporting, gun-toting, anti-abortion nut in the Republican Party” and then the nomination will be worthless.

Another reader counters: If Governor Lamont wins renomination by the Democrats without a primary, he has a chance to beat Stefanowski. But if Lamont faces a primary, “he will have to kiss up to every AOC-Squad-supporting, illegal-gun-toting, pro-abortion nut in the Democratic Party,” and then his nomination will be worthless.

Yes, both parties have extremes that can dominate their primaries, and the governor has done a fairly good job tiptoeing away from his party’s crazy left. Can Stefanowski get around his party’s crazy right?

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

By Chris Powell

Last week New Haven Mayor Justin Elicker got a slap in the face from the city council, the Board of Alders, which rejected his nomination of Acting Police Chief Rene Dominguez to become permanent chief, despite her creditable 20 years with the city’s police department. The board’s complaints against Dominguez were that she hadn’t produced a plan for improving the department, the department’s upper ranks have lost members of racial minorities, the department is out of touch with the community and needs to look more like it, and the department has failed to solve most of the city’s recent murders.

But it’s remarkable that anyone would want to be police chief in New Haven in the first place. Because of the city’s awful demographics — its poverty, its high population of criminal offenders and former offenders, and its many neglected children — the city long has had trouble keeping good officers and teachers. Dominguez herself recently applied to become chief in Ansonia. Rather than try to placate the Board of Alders in a second bid to become chief, she will retire from the department when her successor is chosen.

If New Haven’s police don’t get along well enough with city residents, it doesn’t help that so many city residents break the law and have family members who as a result resent law enforcement. This trouble is reflected by city government’s recent creation of an agency to help offenders returning from prison stay out of trouble. As for the inability of the city’s police to solve most of the recent murders, many city residents must know or suspect the perpetrators but aren’t saying.

Politics is also a problem in New Haven. It is often cutthroat, much patronage is available from city government, and many people can’t make as good a living outside government as they can make inside. Reflecting on the rejection of Dominguez, the mayor acknowledged political obstacles.

Of course New Haven isn’t peculiar in these respects. They are also reflected in Connecticut’s other large cities. But because of the increased number of murders, crime lately has seemed far worse in New Haven. If state government ever wanted to do more than throw money at the cities it might ponder New Haven’s inability to solve most of its murders. Outside the cities such haplessness might be considered a scandal. But apparently Connecticut considers unsolved murders in New Haven and the other cities to be the natural order of things, and considers the purpose of the cities to be mainly to contain the troublesome.

Throwing money at the cities has enabled them to maintain the veneer of civilization, though their schools hardly teach, stuck with so many fatherless children unprepared to learn, and their police barely keep order amid so many people who feel little attachment to society.

Throwing money has not addressed the social disintegration. It has just kept many people comfortably employed by government and sustaining the regime, which cares only for their votes at election time. So Connecticut’s cities remain poverty factories.

It is probably too much to ask state government to audit its expensive comprehensive failures, starting with its urban and education policies, since those policies have so many dependents. But how about the discrete problem of New Haven’s many unsolved murders? Couldn’t state government at least notice them and, say, assemble a special squad of investigators to help solve them and dispel the impression that no one outside the cities cares?

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ANOTHER GREAT BUSINESS: If, as it often seems, abortion rights are the second highest objective of government and politics in Connecticut, following only the contentment of government’s employees, California suggests that Connecticut is missing a great opportunity. Anticipating the Supreme Court’s reversal of Roe v. Wade, leading California Democrats propose to make California a “sanctuary” state for abortion and even to pay out-of-staters to travel to get their abortions there.

California has that much extra “emergency” money from the federal government.

But for most Americans California is far away. Being in the populous Northeast, Connecticut might turn abortion into economic development, since it might fit right in with the state’s recent ventures into marijuana dealing and sports gambling.

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

By Chris Powell

For decades Connecticut’s elected officials have not been very good at solving the state’s major problems, which remain much the same as they long have been. But as shown by the latest report from the Yankee Institute, written by Ken Girardin, assisted by the Reason Institute’s Marc Joffe — “Warning Signs: 2021 Update” — the state’s elected officials have been expert at concealing problems. For a while they were even good at making Connecticut’s looming financial disaster seem to disappear even as it was worsening.

State government’s unfunded pension and medical care liabilities for its employees and retirees, lately estimated as nearly $100 billion, are now acknowledged even by Democrats, the party of the government employee unions. But the Yankee Institute’s report calculates that the similar unfunded pension and retirement liabilities of municipal governments are another $15.5 billion, with more than 40% of that burden resting where it least can be afforded, on the state’s three largest cities, Bridgeport, Stamford, and New Haven.

Cities aren’t the only municipalities with badly funded pension and retiree medical plans. The Yankee Institute report calculates a “fiscal health score” for all of the state’s 169 municipalities, and many suburbs also do poorly, including East Haven, West Hartford, Manchester, Rocky Hill, Fairfield, Guilford, Wethersfield, and Hamden, the latter having the largest per-capita municipal debt in the state.

State government is ultimately on the hook for the municipal liabilities, unless it wants to allow municipalities to file for bankruptcy — as state government should have had Hartford city government do in 2018. Instead the administration of Gov. Dannel P. Malloy induced a willfully blind General Assembly to pass legislation by which state government assumed most of the city’s debt, more than $500 million. This even had the state paying for the minor-league baseball stadium the city had just built despite its insolvency.

For elected officials the wonderful thing about pension and medical benefits for government employees is that they can be promised in the present to win votes from those employees and their unions while actual payment for the benefits can be pushed into the future, made the responsibility of officials not yet elected and residents not yet able to vote or even not yet born.

In the last several years state government has begun to catch up on its pension fund contributions, but the unfunded liabilities remain huge and at the current rate of catching up they will not be whittled down to a responsible level for many years. Meanwhile state law imposes no controls on the pension liabilities incurred by municipalities — nothing that could prevent the need for another Hartford-style bailout, a bailout to which, as a matter of fairness, every other municipality already can claim to be entitled because Hartford got one.

As a practical matter state government and the governments of the larger municipalities already have become mainly pension and benefit societies, and these expenses are crowding out services to the public. As the Yankee Institute notes, today’s taxpayers are paying for ordinary services that were delivered long ago, if then.

There are ways of stopping the cannibalization of government by pension expenses.

The state could outlaw defined-benefit pensions and state-paid retirement medical insurance for future government employees, leaving them with the individual retirement accounts, Social Security, and Medicare coverage on which most people depend. A few towns have already ended defined-benefit pensions for new employees.

State law could require government employees to contribute more to their retirement plans. State law could remove government retirement benefits from labor negotiation and set them by statute. It could require municipal pension systems to comply with conservative state formulas for forecasting pension fund growth and obligations.

But there can be no solutions until elected officials liberate themselves from the government employee unions — especially Democrats, whose party the unions own, but also Republicans, who are almost as afraid of them.

Such liberation can happen only when braver candidates agitate publicly about the unaffordability and unfairness of a system that puts the contentment of government employees ahead of all other objectives in government.

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