Chris Powell column

By Chris Powell

Nearly everyone except government employees has suffered financial losses during the virus epidemic, and since those losses were caused more by government’s closure of much of the economy than by the epidemic itself, everyone wants reimbursement from the government.

There’s some justice in this, especially in the requests from businesses in Connecticut for state government to use its federal epidemic relief money to cover the $700 million the state borrowed from the federal government to pay the huge and unexpected unemployment benefits claimed during the epidemic. Otherwise unemployment insurance taxes on businesses may have to be increased for years, weakening the state’s already weak economy.

Covering the unemployment insurance debt with federal money would benefit all businesses. But particular industries also want special reimbursement — like restaurants, entertainment venues, nursing homes, and child-care providers. There might be no end to it.

Meanwhile the federal government is also incurring unprecedented debt in the name of restoring the economy. This debt will be repaid either through higher taxes, which will be paid to some extent by everyone, or through debt monetization, which will mean inflation, more taxation for everyone.

Tax burdens may be apportioned upward on the income scale but inflationary burdens will be apportioned downward and indeed already are being apportioned downward, with food, fuel, and housing costs soaring.

Social welfare subsidies on today’s ever-expanding scale are validating the insight of the French economist of two centuries ago, Frederic Bastiat. “Government,” he wrote, “is the great fiction by which everybody tries to live at the expense of everybody else.”

That sort of system has been tried elsewhere and has never been very productive, another reason why the country should discontinue its catastrophic lockdowns and quarantines, get back to work, and tough it out.

* * *

Connecticut’s epidemic of teenagers stealing cars has been going on far longer than the virus epidemic, but state government’s response has been pathetic, since there are so many repeat offenders.

Now the General Assembly is wringing its hands about the problem again. Legislation has been proposed to require second juvenile car-theft offenders to wear tracking devices, as if that will deter anyone. For young people have already discerned that there is no punishment for stealing cars and the law is a joke, since the government is too scared of hurting their feelings and messing them up more than they already are messed up.

State Rep. Robyn Porter, D-New Haven, resents that juvenile car thefts became a political issue only when they increased in the suburbs. They long have been a big problem in the cities, Porter says. But then why didn’t city legislators make an issue of them? Probably it’s because the young perpetrators are disproportionately city residents and their elders have not wanted them punished as deterrence.

Instead of putting ankle bracelets on the young car thieves, state Rep. Jillian Gilchrest, D-West Hartford, proposes more “after-school programs.” But almost half the kids in Connecticut’s cities have skipped school for months now, and truancy was already a problem before the virus epidemic. With more after-school programs, maybe the kids will just show up in the afternoon for playtime and do their joyriding in the morning and on weekends.

Despite the hand wringing, what can’t be discussed here is what the political left always strives to overlook — social disintegration resulting from the collapse of the family. Its causes include the political left itself, since the left believes that children really don’t need parents at all and that government can raise them perfectly well via welfare stipends, social workers, and after-school programs. But all those stolen cars keep getting in the way, along with educational failure, mental and physical illness, drugs, and shootings.

Once this belief that parents are unnecessary became policy, it has disproportionately harmed kids from minority groups, so it is more racist than the “equity” issues the left lately prattles about. But this is OK because the social workers are Democrats and unionized, and because poverty long ago was transformed from a problem into big business.

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

By Chris Powell

Connecticut’s Constitution, in its Declaration of Rights, commands: “All courts shall be open.” So what has happened to the case of Hector R. Cruz?

Cruz was 16 when, according to the charge against him — first-degree sexual assault, a felony — he raped a child in Glastonbury in December 2019. The charge was pending in Hartford Superior Court when, according to Journal Inquirer reporter Alex Wood, it disappeared from the docket the other day without explanation.

Wood offered several possibilities for the case’s disappearance. Among them: A judge could have sealed the case from public view while leaving it pending. Or a judge could have granted Cruz “youthful offender status,” which makes cases secret and reduces the potential punishments for a defendant.

Such options are indeed authorized by state statutes, but those statutes contradict the Constitution, since they close the courts to the public. As the Glastonbury case demonstrates, these statutes also trample the public interest in accountable government.

If a rape was committed but was not prosecuted, why? If a rape was charged falsely or erroneously, why? Who was responsible for the falsehood or the mistake and what, if anything, was done about it? On what evidence and reasoning did the court make its decision, whatever that decision was?

The Judicial Department should answer these questions or explain why accountability here is illegal despite the Constitution’s command. So far the department has said only that it no longer has any public record of the case.

And state legislators and Governor Lamont, who recently enacted a law concealing the prosecution of young people for even the most serious crimes, including murder — a law federal courts have nullified for being contrary to the federal Constitution — should awaken to the dark path down which they are taking the state.

Secret courts cannot produce justice. They are tyrannical wherever they operate — in China, North Korea, Iran, Myanmar, and Connecticut.

* * *

Vaccinating an entire population practically all at once is a stupendous and unprecedented project. The United States may be executing it better than any other country and Connecticut better than any other state. But the propaganda of the campaign is cutting corners with the truth and treating people like children.

Television and radio commercials and experts proclaim that the COVID-19 vaccines are safe and all doubts are to be swept aside. In fact not just the COVID-19 vaccines but nearly all vaccines in common use present some risk, however small — not so much because they can cause the ailments they aim to protect against but because a few people have bad reactions to them, some severe or even fatal.

That’s why since 1986 the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services has operated the National Vaccine Injury Compensation Program — to pay damages to the injured.

Adverse reactions have been reported with the three COVID-19 vaccines in use in the United States. One of those vaccines and in Europe the Astra-Zeneca vaccine seem to have caused blood clots in some people, enough to prompt suspension of the latter vaccine. Some deaths soon after vaccine administration have raised suspicion too.

Two of the three vaccines in use in the United States are not traditional vaccines but use “messenger RNA” technology, the first time this technology has been used with people. Early results have been good but these vaccines lack the long record of traditional vaccines. Indeed, all the COVID-19 vaccines, including those using traditional technology, are being used under the government’s emergency authorization because their testing, while extensive, inevitably has been short.

A more honest publicity campaign for COVID-19 vaccination would acknowledge that the vaccines carry risks, as all vaccines do, while asserting that the government and most independent experts believe that these risks are well worth taking — that they will save hundreds of thousands of lives for every one lost or impaired.

But such honesty might get trampled in the hysteria that has arisen around the virus epidemic. Even now it can hardly be discussed politely whether a disease with a recovery rate near 99 percent has justified the suspension of commerce and education. Propaganda is sweeping aside inconvenient facts and fair questions.

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

By Chris Powell

Many liberal Democratic officials around the country and especially in the Northeast, including Governor Lamont, are looking hypocritical for urging President Biden to help repeal the federal government’s limit on the deductibility of state and local taxes — the “SALT” tax deduction cap.

Liberal Democrats usually advocate more progressive taxation — that is, higher tax rates on higher incomes — and progressive taxation is exactly what the cap on SALT deductions is. It limits to $10,000 the deduction taken by federal income taxpayers for the state and local taxes they pay.

Anyone who pays more than $10,000 altogether in state income and municipal property taxes is probably doing well financially. Liberal and conservative tax analysts agree that most money saved by repealing the cap and restoring full deductibility for state and local taxes would go to the wealthiest people. One study says the wealthiest 5% would receive 86% of the savings.

Indeed, the SALT cap may have been the only liberal change in the tax code made by the Trump administration and the Republican majority in the last Congress, though of course they made the change for the wrong reason. The Republicans realized that the cap would be most annoying in high-taxing and wealthy but Democratic-leaning states — like Connecticut.

Progressive taxation is fine as a principle for liberal Democrats, but in practice it is something else when many of their most prosperous constituents vote Democratic. When the SALT cap was imposed, those constituents started to feel more of the burden of state and local taxes. Suddenly their big state and local taxes were no longer partially refundable by the federal government, and they were reminded that there can be a big cost to voting Democratic.

Pursuing redistribution of wealth from prosperous municipalities to poor ones, Connecticut’s most liberal Democratic state legislators, led by the president pro tem of the state Senate, New Haven’s Martin M. Looney, are advocating a “mansion tax,” a 1% state property tax on expensive homes. But the idea is a bit misguided, since property taxes are already progressive insofar as owners of expensive homes pay more even as they tend to use much less in local government services than other people do.

At least the “mansion tax” is consistent with progressive taxation even as repeal of the SALT cap would betray it. So will those most liberal Democratic state legislators chide the governor for supporting repeal of the SALT cap and opposing the “mansion tax”? Is the governor too moderate for them?

As the next election for governor approaches, Lamont might not mind being perceived that way. In high-tax and politically uncompetitive Connecticut, debate among Democrats over taxes would be a good sign and a reminder that the main beneficiaries of three decades of big tax increases have been only government’s own employees.

Not all Democratic state legislators want to be considered far left on taxes and spending. Some like to posture for restraint in government finance.

One of these Democrats, Guilford state Rep. Sean Scanlon, House chairman of the General Assembly’s Finance, Revenue, and Bonding Committee, has proposed legislation to limit municipal property tax increases and to have state government subsidize regionalizing municipal government services, which might save some money.

But Scanlon’s legislation would provide little restraint on spending and little tax relief. He would limit municipal property tax increases to 2½% per year, and while such a limit might be appreciated in New Haven, which recently endured a 10% increase, in many towns 2½% increases are normal. Indeed, a municipal property tax cap that really might restrain spending — say, a 1% limit — would never get past the legislature’s Democratic majority, since it would force towns to economize with compensation of municipal employees, the Democratic Party’s army.

Advocating regionalism is just how Democrats dodge economizing in local government. Regionalism might eliminate a few jobs once, but savings would be small and quickly devoured by the yearly increases in employee compensation under union contracts.

Personnel is the biggest expense of state and municipal government in Connecticut. As long as collective bargaining and binding arbitration laws put that expense beyond democratic control, there won’t be any savings.

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

By Chris Powell

Despite the criminal prosecution underway in Minneapolis for the wrongful death of George Floyd, police officers are far more sinned against than sinning and are crucial to decent society. So claims that a flag displayed to support them is racist are ridiculous.

The flag in question, the “thin blue line” flag, is a replica of the United States flag with a blue stripe superimposed across its middle. It is no more inherently racist than Black Lives Matter flags and posters. Yes, there are racist cops just as there are racists in the Black Lives Matter movement, and racists may use those flags and posters to solicit support. But the flags and posters have legitimate meaning and are not contaminated by occasional misuse.

These days making an accusation of racism is the quickest way to intimidate one’s adversaries. Those who accuse the “thin blue line” flag of racism want to undermine support for all police officers. That must be rejected.

Nevertheless, it is just as well that South Windsor’s Town Council failed last week, on a tie vote, to pass a resolution authorizing the “thin blue line” flag to be flown on a town government flagpole in the center of town, as organizational and commemorative flags are authorized to fly there.

For there is a serious problem with the “thin blue line” flag: the Flag Code of the United States. The code is federal law and it says: “The flag should never have placed on it, or attached to it, any mark, insignia, letter, word, number, figure, or drawing of any kind.”

That is, the flag always should be displayed exactly as it is.

While the code establishes protocol for the flag, no penalties can be imposed for violating it. It is trumped by the right of free expression guaranteed by the First Amendment to the Constitution. Indeed, the Supreme Court has courageously ruled that people have a First Amendment right to burn or deface their own U.S. flags.

But people who love their country should treat the flag, the country’s symbol, with respect. They might do well to note a part of the code that is routinely violated:

“The flag should never be used for advertising purposes in any manner whatsoever. It should not be embroidered on such articles as cushions or handkerchiefs and the like, or printed or otherwise impressed on paper napkins or boxes or anything that is designed for temporary use and discard.”

While people have a right to disobey the flag code, a government flagpole should not be party to it. Surely South Windsor can find another way to show its appreciation for police officers and defend them against the anarchistic smears of racism.

* * *

UNCONSTITUTIONAL BILLS: The First Amendment is not getting the respect it deserves from the General Assembly. Several bills that violate the First Amendment have been introduced and are being taken too seriously.

One would prohibit the publication or broadcast of the identities of the victims of fatal accidents, as well as photos of fatal accidents, before a victim’s family is notified. Such circumstances can be shocking, but then word of any untimely death is shocking, whether it comes from police or news organizations. The right to publish and broadcast public events can’t be curtailed, and delays in police work can’t be allowed to obstruct freedom of expression.

Another bill would block public access to housing court records while letting journalists see them. But journalism is first a constitutional right, not a profession, and anyone can be a journalist at any time. If a journalist has the right of access to public records, equal protection of the law requires that everyone have access.

A third bill would give state government the power to interfere with the ownership and finances of the Hartford Courant because the newspaper holds an antique state charter. But the charter did not give state government the authority to run the paper.

The pending acquisition of the newspaper chain that owns the Courant by a rapacious investment house may be a disaster for journalism nationally and in Connecticut, but then anyone else can make a better offer for the paper.

Legislators might do far more for journalism if they ever made sure that Connecticut students could read at a high school level and had some understanding of citizenship when they are given their diplomas.

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

By Chris Powell

While Governor Lamont’s office has conscientiously produced detailed virus-epidemic data every weekday for a year now — a triumph of organization and persistence — his administration and news organizations have made too much of it and the governor himself is gently backing away from it.

The daily data has included three main components: the number of people newly testing positive for the virus, the new hospitalizations of people carrying the virus, and new “virus-associated” deaths. The data components may be the best that could be devised but they really aren’t so meaningful.

The administration long stressed the first component, the “positivity rate,” and news organizations still do. But this is the least meaningful component. When it is reported that, say, 4 percent of people tested for the virus on a particular day were positive, it gives the impression that this reflects the degree of infection in the whole state. Instead it is only a measure of the people who chose to get tested that day. Since many may have gotten tested because they weren’t feeling well, the testing sample is doubly unrepresentative.

Further, the tests themselves are unreliable. They produce many false positives and many positives involve people who have no symptoms or only mild ones.

The governor lately has been annoyed by the continuing emphasis on the “positivity rate,” since Connecticut’s rate is higher than that of many other states, giving the impression that there is more infection here when the difference may be only a matter of Connecticut’s doing more testing. So the governor wants to keep reopening the state and to pay less attention to the “positivity rate” and more to the second component of the data, hospitalizations of people infected with the virus. This component is indeed more relevant, bearing on the capacity of the state’s medical system.

But the epidemic never has come close to incapacitating the system. Emergency field hospitals were set up briefly but never used. Reporting the total number of hospitalizations and the daily number of new hospitalizations tended to exaggerate the severity of the epidemic because it did not characterize the patients. Many ordinary ailments can push the frail elderly or chronically ill into critical condition, It is much more threatening when previously healthy young people need hospitalizing. But the daily data never made the distinction.

For the same reason the third component of the data, people who died with the virus (though not necessarily of the virus), could be misleading too. With or without epidemics, people are always dying, especially the elderly, and while the number of “virus-associated” deaths in various age groups has been recorded, it has not been publicized on a daily basis and so the raw death count also has made the epidemic scarier. As it has turned out, most deaths indeed involve the frail elderly.

The best way to evaluate the daily epidemic data probably has been to add the new hospitalizations and deaths and divide them by the new positive tests to calculate a serious case rate — the daily percentage of virus-infected people who have died or required hospitalization. The serious case rate long has been less than half the “positivity rate,” and it has been declining toward 1 percent or less as medicine has learned how to treat infections better than to put people on ventilators and pray.

But even at the height of the epidemic and the panic about it, 95 percent of the people testing positive in Connecticut were just sent home to recover, and nearly all did. The recovery rate nationally is near 99 percent.

That’s why the big lesson of the epidemic seems to be to protect the frail elderly and the chronically ill, especially in nursing homes, not to suspend commerce and education. Despite its good intentions, the suspension of normal life by many state governments, including Connecticut’s, has caused economic and social damage that may never be fully remediated, and it increasingly seems like a catastrophic mistake.

Maybe this mistake was unavoidable, there having been no epidemic so scary since the polio epidemics of 60 years ago. But the current era was already hysterical before the epidemic, and government and news organizations have made the epidemic much scarier than it should have been.

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

By Chris Powell

Connecticut’s lawns are turning green again. Robins are scouring them for worms, which are returning to the surface despite the high taxes and accusations of racism above ground. Redwings are trilling madly over the ponds, brooks, and marshes.

Daffodils and crocuses are in bloom. Leaf buds on the trees are swelling. Many days are blessedly sunny and mild.

Kids are going back to school — not that anyone ever will be able to tell from their test scores, but at least they’re out of the house again. Virus epidemic restrictions are fading as people get vaccinated. Money for state government doesn’t just grow on trees now; it rains down from the heavens as never before.

Indeed, in another month Connecticut, in its natural state, may become, as it does for a while every year, nearly the most beautiful place on Earth, just as it may be climatically the safest and most temperate.

Politically there will be as much to complain about as ever, but consider the alternatives.

Connecticut people wintering in Florida, many of them tax exiles, are planning to return north to escape the summer heat down there, as well as the alligators, Burmese pythons, lizards, and insects as big as pumpkins.

Texas, another state without an income tax that lately has drawn many people from Connecticut, was also without electricity and drinking water for much of February, and soon its heat and humidity may make its Northern transplants miss snow.

Tennessee, which also manages without an income tax, lately has been suffering floods and tornadoes on top of country music.

California, once the “golden state,” has been impoverished by bad public policy and is being overwhelmed not just by taxes but also by poverty, homelessness, drugs, illegal immigration, and political correctness. State government there seems oblivious as many middle-class people depart or sign petitions to remove the governor.

Maybe the recent arrivals in Connecticut who hurriedly escaped New York can give their new neighbors some valuable reflections.

Of course no place is perfect, but nothing about geography or climate stands in the way of Connecticut’s regaining the advantages it had before it succumbed to the old corruption of prosperity — the belief that prosperity is the natural order of things, not something that had to be earned and must be constantly re-earned. Whether Connecticut can restore its prosperity is entirely a political question, a question of whether its people retain enough civic virtue to discern and assert the public interest over the government class and other special interests.

If glorious spring in Connecticut cannot persuade people that such an undertaking is worthwhile, nothing can. Those who often threaten to leave but haven’t left yet should take a bigger part in the struggle.

* * *

WHERE’S THE RACISM?: Maybe the people who are accusing Connecticut’s suburbs of being racist will explain how it is racist not to want to be stuck with a school system like Hartford’s, whose chronic absenteeism rate among students approaches 50 percent.

It’s not the fault of school administrators and teachers. The other day the Hartford Courant reported about the daily circuses being staged by city schools to entice students to show up. The circuses seem to be helping a little, but it is not cynical to ask: Where are the parents of the chronically absent kids? Are racists blockading their homes?

Is the exclusive zoning in many suburbs why so many city kids have been skipping school?

Zoning doesn’t know anyone’s race. Zoning does have a good idea of people’s financial circumstances and the financial capacity of the town that enacted it, and it wonders: How does any town benefit from a large population of unparented and desperately disadvantaged children who run school performance way down and expense way up?

Complaints of “structural racism” don’t answer that question. They distract from it and prevent any inquiry into why so many children have no parents and are so neglected.

If structural racism was really the problem in Connecticut, laws long in place would have solved it already. But structural poverty remains to be addressed, and, worse, remains even to be acknowledged.

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

By Chris Powell

Just as Hillary Clinton and the sleaziest elements of the Democratic Party gave the country Donald Trump, Trump and the sleaziest elements of the Republican Party now have given the country Joe Biden.

Also a gift of Trump is the press that has fawned over Biden even as he stumbled up the stairs to Air Force One, doddered and cheat-sheeted through his first presidential news conference, and imposed silly but politically correct policies by executive order, insofar as Trump caused Trump derangement syndrome.

Of course the country well may be relieved that disgraceful tweets no longer emanate from the White House around the clock and that there now are days when the country is not embarrassed by its president, if only because he is kept out of sight.

But Iran is getting closer to nuclear weapons, the southern border has been flung open again, the futile war in Afghanistan is being extended, and trillions of dollars are being created and distributed to states and municipalities as spectacular slush funds in the name of remediating the self-inflicted damage of virus epidemic lockdowns,

While Trump, unpredictable except for his vulgarity and ignorance, alienated this country’s allies, his recklessness also kept its adversaries off balance. News organizations don’t have to acknowledge Biden’s cognitive decline for this country’s adversaries to see it, and it may embolden them into making challenges we are not prepared for.

Soon there could be worse things than mean tweets, and then what? Will God still be looking after fools, drunks, and the United States?

* * *

Having visited immigration facilities at the southern border the other day, Connecticut U.S. Sen. Chris Murphy said he “fought back tears” as he saw hundreds of migrant children being detained on their own.

Murphy’s tears might as well have been those of the crocodile variety, since, having long been indifferent to security at the border, the senator shares responsibility for the renewed disaster there, along with Biden and other Democrats in Congress.

Vulgar and cruel as Trump could be, at least he declared that the border should be secure and he scared people out of entering the country illegally or making bogus claims for asylum. But during his presidential campaign Biden promised a change in policy, and potential immigration lawbreakers are taking him at his word.

Now the president is telling them not to come here, but a more persuasive message is being conveyed by admission of the many people who are coming anyway, especially the kids about whom Murphy professed to get teary.

People would not be heading for the border if they did not expect a good chance of admission. Indeed, most of the children have been sent across unaccompanied because everybody knows that while parents with children may be turned back, unaccompanied children eventually will be forwarded to relatives or friends living in this country, many doing so illegally, while the children’s cases await disposition.

Anything short of a policy of blocking all illegal border crossings and requiring asylum claims to be made outside the country will constitute a broad invitation to the people of impoverished and violent Guatemala, Honduras, El Salvador, and Nicaragua to keep taking their chances on a long, dangerous, and sometimes fatal journey.

That’s why the bigger cruelty here hasn’t been Trump’s at all but that of the Democrats who put immigration enforcement in doubt as they strive to erase the borders and proletarianize the country.

* * *

WHAT’S TO EVALUATE?: Teacher evaluation has never been very serious in Connecticut and legislation is pending in the General Assembly to make it less so. The bill would prohibit school systems from using student test scores in teacher evaluations for the next three years.

The rationale for the bill is that the extended interruption of schooling by the virus epidemic will set back education for a long time. But of course school administrators know this and will handle evaluations accordingly. In the meantime test scores still will continue to signify something.

After all, if teacher evaluations can’t take student learning into account, what else is there? Classroom decoration? Blackboard penmanship? Or just a teacher’s usual cooperation in promoting students from grade to grade even as they fail to learn anything?

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

By Chris Powell

Participating in a legislative hearing on housing discrimination last week, state Rep. Michael Winkler, D-Vernon, may not have known (along with most of his constituents) a couple of disgraceful aspects of United States history: the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 and the internment of U.S. citizens of Japanese descent during World War II when they were falsely suspected of disloyalty. Or maybe Winkler just forgot about them. That can happen.

So Winkler mistakenly remarked that a Greenwich housing official who was defending his town against complaints of exclusivity should not have counted residents of Asian descent as members of oppressed minorities because Asian Americans never faced discrimination.

While mistaken, Winkler had not “disparaged” people of Asian descent, as some people inferred and some news organizations reported. He was just opposing exclusive zoning and was a bit inept as he argued, accurately, that wealthy Greenwich is not as open residentially as it might like to pretend, and that Blacks are the most disadvantaged of Connecticut’s minority groups.

But since this is the era of political correctness, indignation, intimidation, and posturing, Winkler’s colleagues at the state Capitol couldn’t just cordially correct him. They had to demonstrate their righteousness by denouncing him as if this avuncular liberal Democrat was actually a grand dragon of the Ku Klux Klan.

The next day state Attorney General William Tong, himself of Asian descent, carved time from his busy schedule posturing elsewhere to pile on, though Winkler had already apologized contritely at the end of the hearing the night before. His contrition did Winkler no good. The verdict was already in: Off with his head!

Tong bellowed: “The history of bias and hate against Asian Americans in this country is long and largely invisible, an unfortunate reality that has been highlighted by the ignorant comments made by Representative Winkler. The myth of the so-called ‘model minority’ is a dangerous fiction that for too long has allowed this country to erase and ignore this shameful history.”

Of course nearly everybody these days wants to be considered a victim of one thing or another because victimhood is so powerful politically. If you’re a victim, everyone is supposed to be cowed into doing whatever you demand, even if it isn’t any fairer than what was done to you. Victim status is especially useful to politicians, even those who have reached high office, thereby inadvertently giving evidence that maybe they weren’t such victims.

Anyone who questions this racket risks getting called an ugly name. So most people in politics endure it in silence.

But the “model minority” is not a myth about people of Asian descent in America. The social science and occasional political controversies suggest that despite the bigotry they have faced — much reduced now, the Chinese Exclusion Act being long repealed and the internment of the Japanese Americans long repudiated by statute and reparations — Americans of Asian descent indeed tend to work harder than they complain. As a result their success, as a proportion of their numbers, is much greater than that of other ethnic groups and whites, especially academically. This may have more to do with culture and family values than genetics.

So the bigger history here is not, as Tong says, “shameful” but heroic — a history of overcoming injustice and thus making the whole country more just. Indeed, that remains the American story generally, which in turn is part of what used to be called the ascent of man, though it may have slowed lately.

Even as the attorney general postures about injustice to people of Asian descent in the distant past and in the present in other states, he has dismissed injustice to them right in his own state. For Tong has taken the side of Yale University against the litigation brought on behalf of students of Asian descent who claim that in pursuit of “diversity,” Yale, like other elite institutions, has imposed a quota on their admission, just as higher education long has done against Jewish students with superior qualifications.

If academic achievement determined admission, student populations in higher education would be even more Asian and Jewish than they already are. But the political correctness Tong strives to serve in pursuit of even higher office confuses diversity with justice.

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

By Chris Powell

Political correctness and its cancel culture are starting to evoke the second great Red Scare and the tactics of Sen. Joseph McCarthy in the 1950s.

Last week the talented young political journalist Alexi McCammond was pushed out of the editorship of Teen Vogue magazine just as she was starting the job. Anti-Asian and anti-homosexual comments she had made on the internet 10 years ago, when she was 17, galvanized the magazine’s staff against her, and two advertisers threatened to withdraw. The magazine’s owner, the Conde Nast chain, which had been aware of McCammond’s old offense, turned on her.

It didn’t matter that McCammond, who is Black may have come to recognize her own bigotry as she grew up. Two years ago she had acknowledged and publicly apologized for the mean comments and alerted her prospective employer about them. Conde Nast first thought that youthful mistakes might well be forgiven when sincerely repented. But the PC cancel culture, which seems especially virulent among journalists, quickly intimidated management out of its quaint attitude.

McCammond’s hateful adversaries are teaching not only that there can be no forgiveness for thought and speech crime even when it is repented but also that it merits a virtual death sentence. For how is McCammond to get another job now? What employer will consider hiring her and risking a confrontation with the woke mob?

And if there is to be no forgiveness, why should anyone repent anything?

The prophet of old taught: “Go and sin no more.” The prophets of the cancel culture teach: “Go cut your throat before we do it for you.”

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COLLEGE LOAN RACKET: With its first tranche of college loan debt cancellation, the Biden administration has confirmed that much of higher education is a racket and aid to it is not support for education at all but just for educators, who are a big part of the Democratic Party’s army.

The cancellation, announced this week by U.S. Education Secretary Miguel Cardona, will erase obligations to repay about a billion dollars in loans taken by students who claim that their colleges deceived or defrauded them in some way. This billion dollars is a small fraction of the estimated $1.7 trillion owed by about 45 million college borrowers. While most of them are quite able to pay, the Biden administration is expected to follow with more loan forgiveness.

The college racket goes far beyond college borrowers who have not found employment that pays well enough to support a decent living as well as loan payments. The racket also encompasses the millions of college graduates and dropouts who hold jobs for which no higher education is required.

Secretary Cardona did not announce prosecutions of any colleges that defrauded or deceived students, nor any reconsideration of the self-serving attitude prevailing in educational circles that everyone should go to college. In his brief tenure as Connecticut’s education commissioner, Cardona never addressed the remedial nature of public higher education in the state, where most freshmen at public colleges never mastered high school work and so must take remedial courses.

College loans are not the country’s big educational problem. The failure of lower education is.

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UNJUSTIFIED GUILT: No matter how much they scramble and publicize, state and municipal government officials can’t satisfy themselves over what they call the “equity” of their campaign to get people vaccinated against the virus epidemic. Vaccination in Connecticut so far has covered a much larger share of the white population than the racial minority population.

Officials should stop lashing themselves about this, for it is only to be expected. Racial minorities long have lagged in the metrics of many good things and have led in the metrics of many bad things — because race correlates heavily with wealth and poverty.

People with more money can afford to take better care of themselves. They tend to be better educated and more engaged with society and to know more about how to deal with the world.

Not so with the poor. Extra efforts always must be made with them, and even then they may be suspicious and standoffish.

There is a big “equity” issue here but it has little to do with vaccinations. It is the failure of welfare and education policy — and it can’t be discussed.

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

By Chris Powell

With as much as $4 billion in discretionary largesse about to descend on Connecticut’s state and municipal governments and school systems, economizing and improving services to the public will be removed from the agenda for a long time. These slush funds can only worsen the excesses and exploitation in government, even as the Yankee Institute’s extraordinary investigative reporter, Marc Fitch, has noted some big excesses this month.

Fitch reported that another 62 managers at the state Transportation Department are being permitted to unionize though their annual salaries range from $86,000 to $149,000, quite apart from their luxurious fringe benefits.

According to Fitch, an official of the state Office of Policy and Management explained at a hearing of the General Assembly’s Appropriations Committee that the State Employee Relations Act “has a very stringent definition of a managerial employee” and it is difficult for the administration to meet the classification criteria — not even with positions whose salaries are so high.

Another OPM official was quoted as saying there were probably about 3,000 managers in state government 20 years ago but now there are only about 1,300. This produces a ratio of about one manager for every 30 employees, which isn’t much management at all. But then politics has ensured that there never can be much management.

Citing national data, Fitch notes that state and municipal government employees in Connecticut, at 74%, are the most unionized government employees in the country. The public gets no benefit from this, but candidates for state office get union support.

Fitch also notes that only two-tenths of 1 percent of Connecticut state government employees who have passed their probationary period are dismissed for performance reasons each year, making them either the best government employees in the world or the least managed.

Of course this doesn’t mean that state employees are bad people, just extremely privileged ones. It also means that most state legislators and governors are the tools of the government employee unions and that most taxpayers are uninformed.

This is not likely to change until the state’s minority political party has the wit and courage to pick up on the Yankee Institute’s work — and the desire to become relevant.

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STORY FROM THE STREET: Rivaling the Yankee Institute for the most important journalism in Connecticut this month was a report by the New Haven Independent’s Courtney Luciana last week about the heavy demand on a church-sponsored overnight “warming center” in Hamden that had to start admitting people by lottery while turning others away.

Interviewing the homeless as they lined up, Luciana waded deep into the real world.

There was an irresponsible young couple who can’t take care of themselves but whose female member had just gotten pregnant anyway.

There was a former drug addict who had just been laid off.

There was a college graduate who was fleeing domestic violence, had gotten evicted, and was sleeping under bridges.

There was a military veteran who said he came to New Haven because he thought he’d have a better chance to get housing and turn his life around.

Some of those seeking entry to the “warming center” had more affecting stories than others but their merits made no difference in the lottery. Because of lack of space many had to be turned away into the freezing night.

People should bear the consequences of their irresponsibility. They should pull their own weight. But government policy often encourages irresponsibility, and judgments must be suspended when people are stuck out in the cold.

In recent years Connecticut has reduced chronic homelessness with what is called supportive housing but has not made so much progress with the mental illness and addiction usually behind homelessness.

Government in Connecticut always has money for less compelling things, like raises and pensions for its own employees, and people throughout the state are celebrating rising prices for housing though housing is a necessity of life whose price should be driven down, not up. As the Independent’s report suggested, the most urgent work of government in Connecticut may remain in the street.

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