Chris Powell column

By Chris Powell

Amid dissension and turnover at Hartford’s Wadsworth Atheneum, an art museum of international standing, Hartford Business Journal editor Greg Bordonaro wrote the other day that the city has an “image problem,” especially when compared to West Hartford, about which The New York Times recently published a report lauding, among other things, the suburb’s great restaurants. (The Times seldom cares much about anything in Connecticut unless it’s edible.)

But while the Times was merely patronizing, Bordonaro was profoundly mistaken. For the dissension at the art museum has no bearing on Hartford’s image, and the city doesn’t have an image problem but a reality problem.

Dissension at the art museum is nothing compared to the other recent widely publicized troubles of the city.

For starters, Hartford has a “shot spotter” system that is often in the news as it monitors all the gunplay in the city. While it is a small city, Hartford has murders every month, some especially depraved, like April’s murders of 3- and 17-year-old boys.

Even so, Hartford also has a cadre of political activists who want to “defund the police” and who last summer bullied Mayor Luke Bronin into cutting the police budget just before a spate of murders caused him to ask Governor Lamont to send in state troopers.

Some elected officials in West Hartford embody political correctness, but at least the town has a respectable school system, which Hartford doesn’t. Even as the city’s schools kept deteriorating a few years ago, Hartford put itself on the verge of bankruptcy by contracting to build a minor-league baseball stadium it couldn’t afford, leading to a bailout by state government, the assumption of more than $500 million of the city’s long-term debt.

Downtown West Hartford long ago superseded downtown Hartford as the hub of central Connecticut not because of the lovely restaurants lauded by the Times but because the suburb still has large middle and upper classes residing near its downtown, while misguided urban renewal in the 1960s turned downtown Hartford into an office district without a neighborhood.

Most of all West Hartford is desirable residentially because many of its children have two parents at home, while most children in Hartford are lucky if they have even one parent and so tend to live in financial, educational, and emotional poverty.

Art museums are nice but with or without them middle-class places can take care of themselves. Impoverished places can’t.

Now Hartford city government is considering paying a special stipend to single mothers in the hope that it will help them climb toward self-sufficiency. Such projects in other cities have not produced impressive results even as they risk inducing more women to adopt the single-parent lifestyle when they can’t even support themselves.

But Hartford can’t be blamed too much, for the city’s poverty is largely the consequence of state government policy — the failure of state welfare and education policy. Hartford and Connecticut’s other cities are what happens when welfare policy makes fathers seem unnecessary, relieves them of responsibility for their children, and aborts family formation, and when social promotion in school tells students they needn’t learn.

Of course social promotion is also policy in West Hartford and suburbs throughout the state, but those towns have parents who compel their kids to take education more seriously.

To achieve racial and economic class integration and to reduce housing prices generally, Connecticut urgently needs to build much more inexpensive housing in the suburbs and should outlaw the worst of their exclusive zoning. But the state has an even more urgent need to stop manufacturing the poverty that has been dragging the cities down for decades.

When the cities themselves are less poor, when more of their children have fathers at home and come to school ready to learn, when their home and school environments motivate rather than demoralize them, more people will want to live in Hartford just as people now want to live in West Hartford — and the management of the art museum won’t mean any more than it means now.

To change Hartford’s image — and Bridgeport’s and New Haven’s — state government has to change their reality.

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

By Chris Powell

Anyone watching television news in Connecticut last week might have gotten the impression that the state was being invaded by Nazi stormtroopers and the Ku Klux Klan.

Prompting the hysteria on the airwaves was, first, the arrest of a student at the University of Connecticut at Storrs for spray-painting a swastika on a university building across the street from the Jewish student organization.

Hours later a rope noose and a few ropes police said could be “interpreted” as nooses were found in a warehouse under construction in Windsor.

Jewish students at UConn reacted as if they had just gone through another Kristallnacht, as if some vandal somewhere isn’t always spray-painting swastikas or other vile graffiti on something. The Jewish students pledged to increase their efforts against anti-Semitism, as if there won’t always be some Jew haters and as if Jews aren’t safer, freer, and more secure in the national fabric here than they are anywhere else, including Israel itself.

Black politicians made angry statements, and at a news conference outside the Windsor warehouse a spokesman for the Hartford chapter of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People shouted at the cameras that what had happened there was a hate crime requiring investigation.

Good luck to such investigation, since the building was little more than a skeleton and wide open without security. Presumably Connecticut’s many unsolved murders can wait while the warehouse ropes are investigated and “interpreted” some more.

But nobody had gotten hurt or even threatened directly in the Storrs and Windsor incidents, and such incidents are often found to be “false flag” provocations anyway. While swastikas evoke the Nazi genocide of European Jewry, nooses long have had many targets besides Blacks being lynched in the old South. For centuries nooses were the mechanism of execution for anyone convicted of a capital crime in this country, going back to the imagined witches of Connecticut’s earliest colonial days.

But the NAACP seemed eager to claim a threat, since victimhood now is so politically powerful. If you’re seen as a victim, everyone is supposed to be intimidated and to do whatever you want, even if what you want has nothing to do with what wronged you. Indeed, victimhood now rationalizes any broad political agenda.

Nevertheless, Black people are less likely to be harmed by ropes lying around a construction site than by the bullets fired daily in their own neighborhoods, like the bullet that killed a 3-year-old boy in Hartford last month.

These politically opportunistic racial obsessions are sweeping over Connecticut and the country. For also last week South Windsor’s new Equity Council held a meeting with the Board of Education to air complaints of racial abuse in the town’s schools. While the complaints seemed to involve mainly the cruel and stupid talk in which teenagers excel, rather than matters of school administration, what was most remarkable about the meeting was the irrelevance to the problem of the remedies contemplated.

These remedies include replacing Columbus Day with Indigenous People’s Day, as if every racist in South Windsor isn’t as “indigenous” as anyone else ever was; celebrating the Hindu holiday of Diwali; and loading the school bureaucracy with more “diversity” babble.

What about just identifying and prosecuting the perpetrators of racist abuse like that cited at the meeting? Such relevance doesn’t seem to be on the agenda, maybe because these days in Connecticut even the most disruptive students can’t be expelled but must be coddled even as they impair the education of others. So South Windsor will blame Columbus instead.

Of course Connecticut has racial problems, especially the educational and economic lagging of minority groups. These problems can be uncomfortable to discuss. But the bloviating increasingly done about trivia only discourages people from discussing the problems and builds resentment.

Nearly everyone in Connecticut wants everyone else to do well, and most people really don’t care much about race. Intimidation and race mongering may work for a while politically but they won’t persuade, and only persuasion will accomplish much for the long term.

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

By Chris Powell

Recent leftist street theater in Connecticut raised issues that deserve more analysis than street theater can provide.

First, unionized members of the faculty of the four regional state universities brought their 14–foot inflatable skunk to Southern Connecticut State University for a rally protesting “stinky” contract proposals by the Board of Regents. Union members complained that the board wants them to work more and to control which research grants they apply for.

It’s unclear why the union members think such complaints would resonate with the public. While there isn’t much management in state government — nearly everyone there is unionized against management and thus organized against the public interest — the Board of Regents is supposed to manage the universities. Determining employee workloads is part of that, as is supervising research done by faculty. But the union thinks that faculty members should decide by themselves what research they undertake on the job.

To hear the faculty union members tell it as they escort their inflatable skunk from campus to campus, they are oppressed despite their generous salaries, gold-plated medical insurance, and defined-benefit pensions, which make them far more compensated than most private-sector workers.

A few days after the protest at Southern, the Working Families Party, which pushes Democratic state legislators to the left by threatening to run leftist candidates against them, held a “die-in” protest in Simsbury outside the home of the chief executive of medical insurer Cigna. The protesters were mad at him for opposing legislation to have state government sell medical insurance to small businesses. They said he and his company are killing people.

Advocates of the legislation complain about the profits of medical insurers and the huge salaries of their top executives. One of the protesters in Simsbury, the Rev. Tony Lorenzen, a minister for Unitarian congregations in Meriden and Woodbury, asked indignantly: “How is taking care of people’s health and well-being something anyone should make a profit from?”

But while the profits of medical insurers may be a fair issue, the insurers don’t keep most of the money they collect in policy premiums. Instead most of that money is paid to hospitals, doctors, and nurses. If that minister and the Working Families Party could persuade hospitals, doctors, and nurses to work for free, medical insurance companies would go out of business.

Indeed, as state budget director Ben Barnes famously explained at a General Assembly hearing in 2015, Connecticut heavily taxes hospitals for the same reason the career criminal Willie Sutton gave for robbing banks: “That’s where the money is.”

Improving access to medical insurance is a compelling objective for government. But how much can it be achieved without diminishing competition, choice, and individual freedom, running up government expense, and squeezing medical providers too hard? How much should it be done at the expense of an industry on which Connecticut long has heavily relied?

Those are complicated policy questions that are not answered by street theater, as much as that theater makes its participants feel righteous.

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FELONS SHOULD WAIT: Striving to get more members of racial minorities into court somewhere besides the criminal defendant’s table, the state Judicial Department is proposing legislation that would, among other things, allow felons to serve on juries as soon as they are released from prison, eliminating the seven-year buffer period now in force, and let noncitizen permanent legal residents serve on juries.

This pursuit is noble but it lowers standards too much. People whose involvement with the punishment side of the criminal-justice system is so fresh are bound to harbor resentments that could impair their jury service, and most people released from prison get in trouble with the law again soon. Time is needed for them to prove themselves good citizens.

Yes, the limited peremptory challenges allowed to the prosecution and defense could be used to disqualify former felons, but allowing recent ones to serve would disadvantage the prosecution far more than the defense.

Letting noncitizens serve on juries would pose less risk but still would devalue citizenship, which is already being devalued by the failure to enforce immigration law.

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

By Chris Powell

After raising taxes, concealing public records and the whitewashing of history seem like the highest objectives of the Democratic majorities in the General Assembly.

The Democrats would erase a range of misdemeanor and felony convictions a few years after such convictions are entered. The Democrats see this as a civil rights measure, on the premise that criminal prosecutions have gone disproportionately against racial minorities. The Democrats overlook that the longstanding association of poverty, crime, and race is a fact of history, and they seem to have given up on making people self-sufficient, instead seeking only to manage poverty in perpetuity by covering it up.

A similar premise operates with the Democratic legislation to conceal housing court records, thereby preventing landlords from fully evaluating potential tenants. The virus epidemic provides no excuse here, since government has imposed moratoriums on evictions and has established funds to help unemployed tenants and their landlords, and since an eviction caused by the economic depression signifies only a tenant’s misfortune, not his misconduct.

Drug convictions are among those the Democrats would conceal. While drug criminalization always has been futile, it has been constitutional, everyone has been obliged to obey it, and such convictions do convey something about character. So what about fairness to people who obeyed drug laws and thus forfeited profit from the contraband trade? The Democratic legislation makes them chumps.

Only the federal courts have saved Connecticut from what otherwise would be an abomination now. Two teenagers have been charged in the April 10 murder of a 3-year-old boy in Hartford, a shocking atrocity, and if the Democratic legislators had gotten their way, the identities of the defendants would be concealed and their trials would be secret in accordance with a state law enacted two years ago.

That law also was portrayed as a civil rights measure, though for centuries secret trials have been mechanisms of persecution and railroading.

Fortunately two federal courts have found the secret trials law unconstitutional and state government recently agreed to disregard it. But the premise of Democratic policy here remains entrenched. It is that the public should be kept ignorant. Then government escapes accountability.

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ORPHANS AND PUPPIES: Because of the cascade of cash, $6 billion, being bestowed on Connecticut from Washington, state and municipal government here will be having a grand old time for the next couple of years. But Governor Lamont’s plan for spending state government’s share of the money implies a warning about the years after that.

That is, the governor would use almost $1.8 billion of the federal money just to cover the big deficits that are projected in the regular state budget because spending commitments continue to exceed tax revenue. Two years from now those deficits will reappear unless spending is cut or taxes are raised. Such allocation of the federal money could be called “kicking the can down the road.”

But then the governor could argue that life itself is one long can kick, and the deficits won’t reappear until after he has faced re-election.

In this respect the tax hunger of many Democratic state legislators could be construed as more responsible than the governor’s opposition to major tax increases.

The governor’s plan for the federal money recognizes some compelling needs, if not as much as they should be recognized. But one of those needs — kindergarten readiness programs — signifies the most profound lack of parenting.

Connecticut has tens of thousands of children who arrive in kindergarten three grades behind where they should be, having been deprived of ordinary care and stimulation at home. Most of these homes are heavily subsidized by government on the premise that this is cheaper than taking direct responsibility for the neglected children, who are essentially orphans.

This financial calculation by the government is correct only if the lifelong costs of child neglect — educational failure, physical and mental illness, crime, and general misery — are not tallied. So state government doesn’t tally them. Nor does it audit the cause of child neglect — welfare policy.

Even puppies and kittens are treated better. They are put up for adoption.

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

By Chris Powell

While there is a compelling reason to raise taxes on the rich, it’s not the reason motivating many Democrats in the General Assembly, who would increase both state income and capital gains taxes on the rich and impose a special state property tax on their expensive homes.

These Democratic legislators want mainly to increase state government’s political patronage, the compensation of government employees, and the dependence of the poor on government. Connecticut’s quality of life seldom improves from their legislation. The state’s problems are never alleviated, much less solved, while state government keeps manufacturing poverty.

Besides, state government is already rolling in federal “stimulus” money, with $6 billion of it waiting to be allocated by Governor Lamont and the legislature. Properly allocated, that largesse should keep state government manufacturing poverty quite without any new taxes for years.

Nor is the reason offered by Democrats in Congress for raising federal taxes on the rich any good — to increase the government’s revenue.

For the virus epidemic already has pushed the federal government into implementing Modern Monetary Theory, which holds that government can create and disburse infinite money without levying taxes, constrained only by depreciation of the currency. The trillions of dollars recently created may go onto the government’s books as debt, but that debt will never be repaid and instead will be monetized by the government’s purchase of its own bonds. Indeed, as MMT notes, the debt is already treated as money when it is in private hands.

As anyone who goes grocery shopping, puts gas in his car, and pays electricity, insurance, and tax bills knows, inflation is already roaring and making a joke of the official price data.

The single compelling reason to raise taxes on the rich is to diminish income inequality a little after it has been increased so much by the federal government’s policy of inflating asset prices during the economic depression caused by the epidemic — a policy of directing far more money to the financial markets and thus to the ownership class, people who own stocks and bonds, than to the laboring class, tens of millions of whose members lost their jobs because of government policy and crashed into poverty.

But this effort to reduce wealth inequality should be undertaken at the federal level, not by state government in Connecticut — at least not yet. That’s because Connecticut is already a high-tax state whose economy has been weak for many years, and raising state taxes would disadvantage Connecticut even more relative to other states.

Money will go where it is treated best, and until the dislocations of recent months that drove thousands of people out of the New York City area, Connecticut was losing population relative to the rest of the country, losing mainly the prosperous people who pay taxes.

Connecticut’s effort to reduce wealth inequality should concentrate on reducing the poverty the state manufactures with its welfare and education policies.

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MORE NULLIFICATION?: Many people in Connecticut, including some state legislators, argue that medical care is or should be a human right and that, as a result, state government should extend Medicaid insurance to the tens of thousands of people living in the state illegally. The cost is estimated at nearly $200 million per year.

These people are not entirely without medical care. They can pay for it themselves or present themselves at hospital emergency rooms when they are sick or injured and hospitals must treat them for free if they are indigent.

Of course such medical care falls far short of comprehensive. But if comprehensive medical care is a human right, is living in Connecticut a human right too? If so, most people in Central America might insist on living in the state. Extending Medicaid to immigration lawbreakers would be a powerful incentive for more lawbreaking, which is already rampant.

So in addressing the Medicaid extension issue, Connecticut can’t help addressing the illegal immigration issue as well. Extending Medicaid will be, in effect, more nullification of federal immigration law, just as the state’s pending legalization and commercialization of marijuana, sensible as such policies may seem, will be more nullification of federal drug law.

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

By Chris Powell

Nearly everyone in public life in Connecticut has seemed to feel compelled to kowtow to and marvel at the verdict in the case of former Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin as if his conviction was a triumph of justice against the odds. In fact Chauvin’s killing of George Floyd may have been the most photographed and witnessed crime since Jack Ruby shot Lee Harvey Oswald in Dallas on national television 58 years ago.

All governmental authority in Minnesota and most news organizations around the world were immediately arrayed against Chauvin. His own supervisors testified against him. He wasn’t going to escape responsibility.

Yes, Floyd was a petty criminal, drug addict, and deadbeat dad, and his poor health likely contributed to his death. But with the video anyone could see that the proximate cause of his death was the pressure applied to his neck by the officer’s knee for 9½ minutes.

Besides, as Supreme Court Justice Felix Frankfurter observed with wry understatement, “the safeguards of liberty have been forged in controversies involving not very nice people.” The rights of petty criminals are everyone’s rights.

The only danger to a conviction in the Chauvin case was not the “structural racism” that political correctness imagines filling the universe but the political pressure applied to Minnesota’s judicial system while it strove to provide Chauvin with due process of law. The worst of this pressure came, appallingly, from officers of the federal government — U.S. Rep. Maxine Waters, D-California, and President Biden himself. That pressure may provide grounds for appeal.

Connecticut’s most ridiculous kowtowing to the verdict may have been that of the interim president of the state colleges and universities system. Jane Gates, who signs her name with “Ph.D” — a “doctor” like Jill Biden. Gates issued a statement lamenting “the sordid history of a weaponized legal system stacked against people of color” and declaring that defeating structural racism “is perhaps our most important mission as educators.”

If that really is the most important work of educators in Connecticut, it may be no wonder that most students in the state emerge from high school without mastering high school work and that most students admitted to the higher education system supervised by Doctor Gates require remedial high school courses. As Doctor Gates says, educators have something more important to do than teach students how to read, write, and do basic math, since students need political indoctrination more than a good basic education.

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KEEP IN-PERSON VOTING: Connecticut’s procedures for voting are said to be more restrictive than those of most states. Yet all one has to do is register at town hall, a special voter-enrollment session elsewhere, or via the internet and then go to the polls during 14 hours on Election Day. People who will be out of town or who are too ill to get to the polls can obtain absentee ballots and vote by mail.

It’s actually easy and simple, but Secretary of the State Denise Merrill, a Democrat, and many Democratic state legislators think it’s too hard. They support legislation to allow everyone to vote by mail for mere convenience. This strikes at the heart of election integrity, since it would remove the primary assurance of the genuineness of votes — the personal appearance of voters when they cast their votes.

Putting intermediaries between voters and the casting of their votes facilitates corruption and mistakes. A few absentee ballots delivered by mail can be managed securely, but great numbers of mail ballots can’t be.

Already there is plenty of room for corruption in Connecticut’s elections. Voter rolls are not updated as often as they should be and so in any election the rolls include people who have died or moved and can be impersonated.

And while only citizens are authorized to vote, the citizenship status of registrants in Connecticut is never checked. Election authorities simply take people at their word that they are citizens, even as some political activists advocate letting noncitizens vote.

The convenience of voting in Connecticut could fairly and safely be increased by allowing people to vote in person in the week ahead of Election Day. But “no excuse” absentee voting will invite trouble and impugn every close election.

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

By Chris Powell

State Treasurer Shawn Wooden has brought to Connecticut a proposal that has been floating around the country for a few years now. Wooden would have state government endow “baby bonds” for poor children, opening $5,000 savings accounts for them at birth with the proceeds made available to them at age 18 for purposes including college education, home ownership, starting a business, or retirement savings.

The idea is pending as legislation in the General Assembly, and at a meeting in Waterbury this week Wooden argued that it would break down “structural racism.” Such fashionable cant seems obligatory with many policy proposals these days, but it may be silliest as it tags along with “baby bonds,” since their premise is that people are most disadvantaged not by racism at all but by poverty.

Good for the “baby bonds” idea at least for recognizing that much. But the proposal fails to recognize the primary cause of generational poverty. It is not racism or the lack of financial capital but rather the lack of human capital.

Most of the babies who would be targeted by “baby bonds” are born into homes without fathers, and sometimes without mothers as well as they are left for a grandparent to raise. These children seldom have any mentors. Because of their lack of parenting and Connecticut’s pernicious educational policy of social promotion, these children graduate from high school without having mastered even elementary school work. They are not prepared to be self-sufficient adults, much less to start and operate a business with “baby bond” money — and most new businesses fail anyway.

As for college, young people from poor minority households who have performed well in high school are likely to get scholarships for college anyway quite without having to rely on “baby bond” money, and if they perform well in college and have developed job skills, they will have no trouble getting hired by major corporations.

But throwing money at a problem seems to be the only solution of which liberalism is capable anymore.

Poverty, not racism, is the country’s biggest problem and the biggest problem of racial minorities, and Connecticut’s worst “structural racism” is that of its welfare and educational systems, which, far more for racial minorities than for whites, destroy families by subsidizing childbearing outside marriage and substituting self-esteem for learning.

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LET ADULTS ‘VAPE’: As the General Assembly approaches legalizing and commercializing marijuana, Connecticut may be realizing that drug criminalization is futile. But meanwhile the legislature seems about to outlaw sale of flavored “vaping” fluids used with electronic cigarettes. So what gives?

The argument for the latter legislation is that most young people who use tobacco started with electronic cigarettes, which lure them with candy-store flavorings. True enough, perhaps, but then marijuana also is a “gateway” drug, an introduction to more addictive drugs like heroin, cocaine, and prescription painkillers.

Of course alcoholic beverages long have been beyond the capacity of many people to handle, but outlawing them a century ago made the problem worse.

Decades of public health campaigns have sharply reduced tobacco smoking. Unfortunately such campaigns against intoxicating drugs have not been successful. Many people crave intoxication, since life isn’t so enjoyable for them. But “vaping” fluids don’t intoxicate and have some benefit for people trying to break tobacco addiction.

If the attack on “vaping” products means to discourage tobacco smoking, young people who “vape” will run into the anti-tobacco campaigns eventually. Even before that they might encounter a parent or mentor and get some counseling about healthy living.

Besides, just as the ingredients for making alcoholic beverages remained legal and widely available during Prohibition, the ingredients for making “vaping” fluids are legal and will remain available too. The government won’t be able to eliminate them much better than it has eliminated illegal drugs. Instead government mainly will run up the price and thereby enrich some clever entrepreneurs.

Government fairly enough can prohibit the sale to minors of goods that might endanger them. But a country that would be “the land of the free and the home of the brave” shouldn’t treat adults like children.

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

By Chris Powell

Legislators from Hartford, New Haven, and Bridgeport last week gathered at the state Capitol to offer their solution to the horrifying explosion of violence in Connecticut’s cities.

They would throw money at it with “violence-prevention programs.”

For centuries parents were pretty good “violence-prevention programs,” but few young people in the cities have parents anymore, a problem that still cannot be acknowledged.

Obliviousness continued last week in New Haven, where the Board of Education decided to start removing police officers from schools and to replace them with psychologists, counselors, and social workers. It wasn’t clear whether the psychologists, counselors, and social workers would be equipped to stop violence. But the school board seems to feel that the prospect of counseling will be enough deterrence.

Again no one in authority asked the crucial question: Where are all the messed-up kids coming from?

But not everyone in the cities was so oblivious last week. WTIC-AM1080 aired telling details from Hartford. The station broadcast remarks made by the Rev. Henry Brown at a vigil for a murder victim. “People are driving like they’re crazy,” Brown said. “They cut in front of you, run red lights, stop signs. What is wrong with you?”

Meanwhile, the station said, the Hartford police reported that over the course of one week they attempted 176 traffic stops and 45 of the vehicles involved just sped off.

Hartford police don’t chase vehicles unless a major crime is involved, but Chief Jason Thody admitted that traffic in the city is “out of control.”

Car thefts by teenagers in Connecticut are out of control too, now that they know that there is no punishment even for repeat offenders.

For intimidated by opportunistic accusations of racism, society is losing its self-respect.

Legislators from Connecticut’s cities are presenting another silly solution to the urban problem: marijuana legalization and commercialization, provided that the resulting tax revenue goes to city government and the licenses required go to minority group members.

Drug criminalization indeed has been futile but pouring more intoxicants into poor and demoralized places is a perverse sort of economic development.

City legislators call their marijuana legislation “equity.” That’s just a euphemism for political patronage.

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INSURERS VS. LEMBO: Connecticut’s big insurance companies are openly threatening to leave if state Comptroller Kevin Lembo’s “public option” bill to put state government into the retail medical insurance business is enacted, and Lembo is angry.

Yes, government policy shouldn’t be determined by special interests, but then welcome to Connecticut. After all, in Connecticut liquor retailers control liquor policy, state employee unions control their working conditions and compensation, auto retailers control auto retailing regulations, and teacher unions control public education.

Somehow Lembo is bothered only by the insurance companies.

Besides, there are fair questions about the comptroller’s proposal.

It includes a tax on medical insurance policies though there’s no good reason insurance buyers particularly should pay for increasing insurance for the poor. That the federal government once did it that way is no justification, since it was wrong then too, and it would be done that way mainly to fool people into thinking that insurers raised prices, not the government.

The long-term operating costs of the “public option” are worrisome and probably unknowable. And the plan might use government subsidies to undermine insurers.

Lembo sneers at the huge salaries paid to top executives of the insurers, with five of them making $100 million a year collectively. The companies well might tighten up there and pass the savings along to policyholders.

But most big business is offensive that way, and if Connecticut wants to remain the insurance capital of the world and enjoy the industry’s employment, state government must be sensitive to its concerns. Of course if Connecticut wants state government to run everything important, leaving everyone no choice, it can do that too. Florida and Texas sure won’t mind.

But arranging decent medical insurance for everyone may be best handled by the federal government, especially for Connecticut’s sake.

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

By Chris Powell

Until a few days ago television stations in Connecticut were broadcasting a commercial showing a Black woman who says she is a doctor and wants to persuade “people who look like me” that COVID-19 vaccine is safe, adding emphatically, “because it is.”

Or does the woman just play a doctor on TV? She doesn’t identify herself, which may be lucky for her now, since last week blood clots were reported among some people who recently had gotten one of the vaccines widely in use in Connecticut, and the federal government recommended that its use be temporarily suspended.

Whereupon the commercial with the Black woman doctor seemed to disappear.

This doesn’t mean that any of the vaccines are unsafe in a general sense. It means only that suddenly the government is unsure about one of them. This shouldn’t be so surprising, since, despite extensive testing, all the COVID-19 vaccines are new and so cannot have passed the ultimate test, time.

But many people, including Governor Lamont, quickly realized how damaging the suspension of this vaccine was to the credibility of government and establishment medicine. Until last week they and their agents were proclaiming the vaccine’s safety. Now the government is proclaiming doubt, and the “people who look like me,” many of them already skeptical, have another reason not to trust them.

This disaster could have been prevented with candor and honesty. The Black woman who plays a doctor on TV could have been scripted to say:

“All vaccines carry some risk, mainly because a few people may have bad reactions to them. Of course we don’t have long history with the COVID-19 vaccines. But they quickly have proven extremely effective at preventing the disease and reducing its severity, and thus they are likely to save hundreds of thousands of lives for every one they might impair. As with other vaccines, benefit far outweighs risk, especially for the most vulnerable populations, including people who look like me. So please consider getting vaccinated, as I have been.”

But Connecticut Attorney General William Tong is handling the challenge differently. Instead of candor and honesty, in an essay in the Washington Post last week Tong wrote that social media companies Facebook and Twitter should censor people who provide “disinformation” about vaccines. And who should determine what constitutes “disinformation”?

Presumably government officials like Tong himself — officials who have the business regulatory power to intimidate social media companies.

How ironic that any politician should urge censorship of “disinformation,” as if politics itself isn’t full of it and “disinformation” won’t always be something disagreeable to the government.

Will Tong investigate the woman who plays a doctor on TV and was telling “people who look like me” that the vaccines are safe just hours before one of them was shelved for safety reasons? What about that disinformation?

The Constitution doesn’t guarantee only accurate and fair expression. It guarantees free expression, and it leaves the people themselves responsible for discerning the truth. Lies are bad but censorship is worse.

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UCONN, BAILOUT CHAMPION: Maybe now that the University of Connecticut’s basketball teams have failed to win this year’s national championships, Governor Lamont and the General Assembly will examine the university critically for once.

The university’s health center in Farmington is seeking an extra $174 million over three years to cover what it calls “unsustainable” fringe benefit costs for its employees. But UConn has no plan to control those costs. They are to be sustainable after all.

While the health center has lost revenue during the virus epidemic, its deficits and excessive employee costs have been problems for years and the university keeps getting bailouts.

Last week the state auditors reported that UConn incurred a $30 million overrun for construction of its new downtown Hartford campus, from an estimate of $87 million to final cost of $117 million, on account of 283 changes in the construction plan and 24 contract revisions.

UConn says that the $30 million is no big deal, and it will remain no big deal while the governor and legislature keep letting the university get away with anything.

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

By Chris Powell

For the sake of democracy, comity, equality of opportunity, and prosperity, Connecticut, like the rest of the country, needs integration — racial, economic class, and ethnic. Exclusive zoning in the suburbs long has hampered that, and it’s getting worse as housing prices are soaring.

But advocates of the anti-zoning legislation in the General Assembly weaken their cause by deliberately misdiagnosing the problem. If last weekend’s murders in Hartford don’t knock some sense into them, nothing will.

First a 3-year-old boy was killed in a drive-by shooting. Two hours later a 16-year-old boy was shot to death on a street nearby. As a result little notice was paid to another incident of urban depravity last weekend — the shooting of four people in Waterbury. At least no one was killed there.

The mayhem and depravity in Connecticut’s cities help explain support for exclusive zoning. For why shouldn’t people want to get away from city life and prevent it from following them, along with the awful performance of city students and the incompetence and corruption of city government?

Long ago exclusive zoning was in large part a matter of race. Not so much anymore, for many inner suburbs are integrated racially and many minority families shop for school systems there as the whites who left the cities years ago did. But while racism remains the big complaint against it, exclusive zoning today is mainly a matter of people protecting themselves against the pathologies and expense of poverty.

The zoning controversy makes this clear. Exclusive zoning’s opponents call their bill the “fair share” legislation, insofar as the suburbs should have more low-cost housing to absorb their “fair share” of poor city residents and reduce poverty in the city. Hartford Mayor Luke Bronin and New Haven Mayor Justin Elicker speak openly of their desire to export their poorest constituents.

So it is stipulated that the people to be exported are burdens on government and society. Any suburban resident who didn’t know this already might wonder: If the cities want to get rid of the expense of the poor — the social services they require, the crime they cause, the drag their neglected children put on the schools — why should the suburbs want them?

This week Governor Lamont provided another proof of this burden. He announced that the state Education Department will assign to the cities what will be essentially truant officers to help schools recover the many students who, despite “remote learning,” have disappeared during the virus epidemic.

That is, most city kids have little if any parenting.

Thus the anti-zoning legislation strikes at Connecticut’s longstanding but unarticulated social contract: The middle and upper classes will let the state’s majority political party, the Democrats, operate the cities as poverty and patronage factories as long as the suburbs offer escape. That’s why the decisive opposition to legislation that might transfer more poverty from the cities to the suburbs has always come from suburban Democratic legislators.

The complaint of racism is hurled against exclusive zoning to distract from the far bigger underlying problem, the problem no one in authority dares to discuss: the everlasting failure of Connecticut’s welfare and education policies to elevate the poor. Instead these policies destroy the family and foreclose the opportunities that might come from education, thus maintaining the urban population’s financial dependence on government and Democratic political regimes. In turn the party obtains from the cities its decisive pluralities in state elections — but at a devastating social cost.

A major beneficiary of these dependence-induced pluralities, U.S. Sen. Chris Murphy, jumped opportunistically on the Hartford shootings last weekend, blaming them on the lack of a federal law requiring background checks for certain gun sales and transfers.

Yes, there are tens of millions of guns circulating throughout the country, but background checks won’t get them back, even as checks on the backgrounds of most of the young perpetrators of serious urban crime in Connecticut would disclose fatherlessness and parental neglect leading to educational failure, mental and physical illness, drug abuse, and crime. But the perpetrators are only secondarily to blame, for they are what, for political advantage, government has made them.

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