Chris Powell column

By Chris Powell

Does recognizing that the “war on drugs” is a failure and that people are entitled to be left alone in their personal lives require not just legalizing marijuana and taxing it heavily but also putting state government into the marijuana business and turning that business into racial political patronage?

Governor Lamont and many Democratic state legislators say yes. They support legislation directing state government to award marijuana sales licenses preferentially to members of minority groups as a matter of “equity,” because those groups have been disproportionately victims of drug prosecutions. Some legislators even want state government to finance the start-up expenses for the new legal drug dealers.

The issue may be a bit academic, since marijuana is already largely legal in Connecticut, the law having been greatly weakened in recent years and the federal government declining to enforce federal law against it in states that don’t much want it enforced.

But racial patronage is offensive, not just in itself but also because it would reward people for having broken the law while making no similar reparations to people who obeyed the law and forfeited their chance to profit from the contraband trade.

The vision of loads of tax revenue seems to be blinding the legislation’s advocates to the damage that inevitably will be done by full legalization, making the hallucinogen more available, especially to children. Some people get dependent on if not addicted to marijuana and thereby are pushed toward more dangerous drugs and lose motivation in life. How much tax revenue is this increase in social disintegration worth? And do the disadvantaged and demoralized communities that have been so harmed by the “war on drugs” really need easier access to intoxicants?

Tax revenue estimates for legal marijuana may be high, since illegal marijuana is not taxed at all. The more legal marijuana is taxed, the less competitive it will be with underground sales.

Then there is the problem of federal law. No state’s criminal laws need to match the federal government’s, but a state’s licensing and taxing marijuana sales and even financing marijuana businesses would nullify federal law. That Connecticut already strives to nullify federal immigration law is no excuse.

So the best policy for Connecticut on marijuana and other illegal drugs might be simply to leave them alone, to repeal the state’s criminal laws against them, and let the federal government enforce here whatever of its own laws it cares to enforce, while increasing drug rehabilitation services, more of which are already needed anyway.

That might be plenty of “equity” for everybody.

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State legislators are also raising a bill to make housing a “right” in Connecticut. This is just another righteous pose now that the majority in the General Assembly has moved farther left. For the bill has no practical meaning.

If housing is to be a “right,” nobody should have to pay for it — housing should be free. After all, “rights” are things no one has to pay for, like freedom of expression and religion.

And if housing is to be a “right,” there is no stopping there. Food and medicine are also necessities of life and must become “rights” too.

How much housing, food, and medicine should be “rights,” and how should they be paid for? The bill doesn’t say. Money should be a right too; it should grow on trees. But it doesn’t.

And how could a state make housing a “right,” or food and medicine, without inviting all the hard-luck cases in the country, or all its slackers, to relocate there?

When housing, food, and medicines become rights, there will be little incentive for anyone to work. Then who will build the housing, grow and prepare the food, and manufacture the medicine?

Parents used to warn their children that the world didn’t owe them a living. The housing bill proclaims that those parents were wrong. But of course fewer people today grew up with parents, so the housing legislation may sound perfectly sensible to them.

Once the bill’s sponsors get publicity for their noble intentions, maybe state government will return to a more realistic premise — that government should strive to make housing ample enough so it is less expensive and consumes less of people’s income, even as people pay market rates for it.

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

By Chris Powell

Having just gotten big raises amid an economic depression with horrible unemployment in Connecticut, the state employee unions have proclaimed that they won’t consent to Governor Lamont’s budget proposal to freeze state employee salaries for a while. The unions insist that state government should raise taxes on the wealthy so they pay their “fair share.”

What is the “fair share” the wealthy should pay? “Fair share” advocates never provide any fixed calculation for it. That’s because it is only whatever best facilitates raises for state and municipal government employees. For when raises for government employees are drawn from taxes on people who aren’t so wealthy, there is always a political problem, as the non-wealthy seldom find it compelling to pay more to people who are already well paid.

But despite their comic self-interest, the state employee unions have a point about taxing the wealthy. For the emphasis of the federal government’s economic policy during the virus epidemic has not been on sustaining the income of people who have lost jobs and business, though of course some federal aid has been sent their way. No, the federal government’s emphasis has been on supporting financial asset prices, as with the purchase of government and corporate debt and by intervening, often surreptitiously, in markets.

Since most financial assets are owned by the well-to-do and they are the ones with most of the capital gains accrued in the past year, their share of the nation’s wealth has exploded while the share owned by ordinary working people has fallen. Federal government policy has been worsening income inequality and increasing the political influence of the wealthy.

It’s not that the federal government needs tax revenue. It can create money for itself with abandon. Since they cannot create money, states and municipalities need it. But trillions of federal dollars seem to be on the way to states and municipalities, so their need is not really so great right now — unless raises for state and municipal government employees are to take priority.

What’s urgent is reducing income inequality and equalizing political influence. So since the federal government did the wealthy an expensive and unnecessary favor, there would be justice in raising their capital gains taxes.

But the federal government is the place to do that, not state government in Connecticut, where taxes are already so high as to have been encouraging prosperous people to leave for many years, with the state steadily losing population relative to the rest of the country. Connecticut needs to be more competitive with taxes and the cost of living. Besides, any tax increase in Connecticut now will only diminish the incentive for Governor Lamont and the General Assembly to examine the expensive state policies that fail to achieve their nominal objectives.

For example, once again there is much clamor in the legislature to increase state grants to municipal schools. But 40 years of increasing those grants have failed to improve school performance. The grants have resulted only in higher pay for school employees. Legislators never ask what Connecticut gets for spending more in the name of education, presumably because they know that there is no relation between spending and school performance and that the only objective is to please the teacher unions.

Any inquiry into this might be revealing but also most impolitic so it will never happen.

Has raising state employee compensation improved services to the public? Of course nobody pretends that, but no legislators ever ask the question. Omitting state employee raises from his budget proposal, the governor shows he thinks state government can operate acceptably without another round of raises. His position is remarkable for a Democrat, since the state employee unions are his party’s army. But then a salary freeze is only his opening position in a negotiation.

Legislators will be part of that negotiation and most legislators are tools of the unions, so odds are that once again state employees will get raises before more money is appropriated for the nonprofit social-service organizations whose employees do government work at half the cost of state employees and are almost dirt-poor.

But that’s their own fault. They simply aren’t as politically organized as the state employees are.

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

By Chris Powell

Without taking much notice, Connecticut lost a hero of journalism and justice the other day: Donald S. Connery, 94, who lived in Kent for almost 60 years even as he traveled and reported from around the world for United Press International and Time magazine and its related publications.

Connery’s feats of journalism were remarkable. He was stationed in the Soviet Union in 1962 and was expelled for his radio broadcasts during the Cuban Missile Crisis. He interviewed newsmakers from John and Robert Kennedy to the Beatles to Ho Chi Minh and Nikita Khrushchev.

But Connery’s enduring legacy arises from something else — the interest he took in the case of Peter Reilly, who was charged in 1973 at age 18 with the murder of his mother at their home in Canaan. There was no evidence against the dazed young man except for a confession that was fed to him by a state police lieutenant during eight hours of interrogation. As his shock faded Reilly recanted the confession but a jury convicted him of manslaughter anyway.

Support from his community got Reilly a new lawyer and a private detective and soon they produced evidence implicating others. Eventually the state’s attorney’s office admitted that it had withheld strong evidence in Reilly’s favor. In 1977 a Superior Court judge vacated his conviction.

Back then hardly anyone would believe that someone would confess falsely to murder. But in writing a book about the Reilly case, “Guilty Until Proven Innocent,” Connery discovered otherwise — that false confessions are actually a national phenomenon that has produced many wrongful convictions. People who are in shock, scared, and exhausted may say whatever they think their interrogators want to hear.

Connery went on to study and agitate about such cases for 40 years, working with the Center on Wrongful Convictions and the National Center for Reason and Justice, eventually becoming an advocate for Richard Lapointe of Manchester, a small, mentally disabled man charged with murdering his wife’s grandmother in 1987. Two years after the murder Lapointe was invited to visit the Manchester police and during more than nine hours of interrogation he was fed three contradictory confessions, which he obligingly signed.

Neither a prosecutor nor a jury could see the weakness in the case and Lapointe was convicted, serving almost 26 years in prison before the state Supreme Court in 2015 granted him a new trial. A justice wrote what should have been obvious: that Lapointe’s confessions were not credible. At last the state dropped the case.

Connery’s book “Convicting the Innocent” tells Lapointe’s story and others like it.

False confessions continue. The Central Park Five case in New York City in 1989 may be the most notorious, because the falsely accused were Black and Hispanic and thus easy victims. They won $41 million in damages. But because of Connery’s work everyone in criminal justice — police, prosecutors, judges, and jurors — is more obliged to look at confessions critically, especially when, as with Reilly and Lapointe, there is little physical evidence.

Long after his departure Connery still will be helping justice to be done.

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DELUSION IN HARTFORD: How good of the Hartford Courant the other day to lecture the city about what it needs even as the newspaper no longer has a physical presence there or anywhere.

Hartford, the Courant editorialized, lacks “walkable vibrancy.” Its streets have “too many desolate or inhospitable stretches” and need bicycle lanes. There should be more food trucks downtown and more connections to the Connecticut River.

Meanwhile the city has shootings nearly every day. Even before the virus epidemic its children were neglected. City property taxes are grotesque.

Imagine instead a city whose children have parents and perform at grade level and so are in little danger of alienation and being drawn into crime.

The problem with Hartford and all other cities is simply the people who live there. They are not entirely to blame, for public policy has made them what they are — uneducated, unskilled, underemployed, unmarried, unable to support themselves and their kids, and demoralized. If Connecticut could ever fix that problem the cities would take care of themselves, quite without bicycle lanes and food trucks downtown.

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

By Chris Powell

Since Governor Lamont mused the other day that he has rather enjoyed being able to rule by decree for the past year without having to bother with the General Assembly, maybe it’s not so surprising that most criticism of his state budget is coming from fellow Democrats, who are used to sharing power.

Dozens of Democratic state legislators are appalled that while the governor would raise spending by 2%, he doesn’t want to raise taxes too much, though he would increase wholesale gasoline taxes and impose a special tax on trucks and a few weeks ago presided over a half-percent increase in the state income tax in the name of paid family and medical leave.

The governor also advocates legalizing and taxing sports betting and recreational marijuana, though the revenue from those things and their timing are only speculative.

That’s not enough for the most liberal Democratic legislators. They want income and capital gains taxes raised on the wealthy and state grants diverted from towns to cities, likely prompting property tax increases in the former.

It’s all political calculation.

The governor knows that billions of dollars in emergency federal grants to remediate the virus epidemic soon will be on their way to Connecticut. The Hearst Connecticut newspapers reported over the weekend that this likely will mean $2.7 billion for state government and another $1.6 billion for municipalities on top of the $400 million authorized for Connecticut’s schools in December by Congress and a president whose name is anathema to most of those who will spend the money. The governor figures that with a little caution in state government this federal money will see it through to the gubernatorial election, in November 2022.

The problem with the governor’s calculation is that the emergency federal money will probably not recur — that it will be the biggest installment ever of “one-shot” revenue. When such revenue is used for recurring expenditures and then disappears, it requires government to reduce spending or raise taxes.

That’s why the most liberal Democratic legislators want to raise taxes in a big way now, under cover of the epidemic — because unlike emergency federal aid, state taxes are forever and will reduce pressure to economize in government even where policy long has failed, as with education and poverty.

The governor is more sensitive to taxes because his constituency is statewide and is sensitive to taxes too and because, while Connecticut is an overwhelmingly Democratic state, Republicans have finished fairly strongly in the last three elections for governor despite poor campaigns.

The most liberal Democratic legislators are not so sensitive to taxes because most of their districts are safely Democratic and most of their constituents, being poorer, don’t pay much in state taxes to begin with and because state government spending is used disproportionately to provide services to the districts that pay little in taxes.

If the most liberal Democratic legislators get sore enough, they could prevent the governor’s budget from passing with Democratic votes alone, thereby giving the Republican minority some influence on the budget. But most likely the governor will obtain the budget votes of enough liberal Democrats by reallocating some of the emergency federal money to their favorite purposes without imposing the new taxes they want.

That will leave for 2023 the problem of the evaporation of the big “one-shot” federal grants. But the governor reasonably may hope that the state’s economy will recover by then and be producing enough tax revenue to keep state government lumbering along without ever having to worry about expensive policies that work mainly to sustain government employment.

Legalizing marijuana in Connecticut may come with a catch. Urban legislators want to condition it on favoring members of minority groups for the award of marijuana-selling licenses, since members of urban minority groups have been disproportionately involved in drug crime and disproportionately punished for it.

This raises the question raised about college loan forgiveness. What perks will be given to people who paid their own way through college or didn’t go at all? And what perks will be given to people who might have become prosperous drug dealers but obeyed the drug laws even though they now are to be considered stupid and futile?

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

By Chris Powell

Nearly everyone will forever remember some admired or even beloved teachers whose insight, enthusiasm, and caring pointed students in the right direction. Of course there were and are some mediocre, incompetent, and even malicious teachers too, but they are easily forgotten.

So even as society becomes more fractious and angry, there is still a cult of respect around the teaching profession.

But that cult may not last much longer as teacher unions, most notoriously in big cities like New York, Chicago, and Los Angeles, but also in most states, including Connecticut, obstruct normal school operations amid the virus epidemic. The unions insist on perfect protection against the virus when there is no perfect protection, though risk of transmission is far lower in school than in other places that continue to operate normally.

Of course the damage to schoolchildren from the loss of in-person schooling has been catastrophic — not just in education but also in their mental and physical health. Recovering will take years.

The teacher unions long have proclaimed the importance of education and the dedication of their members to students, so now maybe the country will see how empty this prattle has been. In effect the unions now are proclaiming that education and children don’t matter that much at all.

In pursuit of the greater good during the epidemic, risks are being borne by hospital and nursing home employees, emergency personnel, postal and delivery workers, and supermarket clerks and cashiers. But according to the teacher unions, their members cannot bear any risk. No — if even one student or school employee contracts the virus, even without showing symptoms, the whole school must be closed for a week or two and everyone in it must be quarantined, though children are the least susceptible to the virus and fatalities from exposure in school are rare.

The “remote” learning offered as an alternative to regular schooling is a joke, since as many as half the students don’t show up and many of those who do show up are impossibly distracted. But while education is destroyed, everyone employed in its name remains on the payroll anyway, compensated many times better than the supermarket clerks and cashiers without whom no one would be fed.

Governor Lamont and state Education Commissioner Miguel Cardona, President Biden’s nominee for U.S. education secretary, are part of this pretense. The governor and the commissioner have been hailed for favoring normal operation of schools, but most of Connecticut’s schools have not been operating normally.

Though he has ruled by decree under his emergency powers since last March, the governor has failed to order schools to do anything in particular. Local school boards are free to be intimidated by the teacher unions, as they usually are intimidated along with state legislators and as the governor himself seems to be, since keeping government employee union members happy long has been the primary objective of government in Connecticut.

Some people say teachers are not pleased with the intransigence of their unions amid the destruction of education. But if teachers are displeased with their unions and are ready to take the same risks as supermarket clerks and cashiers, they have yet to show it. Teacher union leaders may know better than anyone else what is required for election to their offices — better even than people with happy memories of beloved teachers from many years ago. After all, back then Connecticut’s public schools were public — that is, administered by elected officials. Today, not so much, as even most school administrators are unionized in a conspiracy against the public. School management is not really management.

There’s no harm in cherishing memories of old school days. But they should not blind anyone to the huge change in public education since then, a change that invites the sort of reflection with which the journalist William L. Shirer prefaced one of his books about modern European history. Shirer quoted the German writer, scientist, and statesman Johann Wolfgang von Goethe:

“I have often felt a bitter sorrow at the thought of the German people, which is so estimable in the individual and so wretched in the generality.”

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

By Chris Powell

Democrats ran against Herbert Hoover for 20 years after 1932. Now they seem to be planning to run against Donald Trump for another 20.

The Democrats’ second attempt to impeach the former president even though he has left office is only part of it. Many in the party are campaigning to banish from public life anyone who supported Trump in any way and even trying to suspend freedom of speech.

As for Trump himself, there has been hardly a peep from him since he left office Jan. 20. Even during his last days in the White House he seemed to have little to do once his Twitter account was taken away.

While there is speculation that he will try to start a political party of his own or a television news channel, he probably lacks the wit or energy, and maybe even the money, to do more than tweet, if he can find another mechanism for that.

With luck Trump will fade into history and Lincoln’s old observation will be vindicated, if narrowly: “While the people retain their virtue and vigilance, no administration, by any extreme of wickedness or folly, can very seriously injure the government in the short space of four years.”

Democrats keep insisting that by calling his supporters to a rally in Washington on Jan. 6, the day of the electoral vote count, Trump meant to stage a “coup.” Certainly he wanted the rally to pressure Congress to count the votes his way, but a “coup” goes far beyond that. A coup is the seizure of the major agencies of government, and nothing like that was happening Jan. 6.

Take the Trump supporter who came to symbolize the rioters who split off from the main body of the rally and broke into the Capitol — the barechested guy wearing a bear skin, Viking horns, and face paint. Was he expecting to become interior secretary or chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff?

Was the slob who was photographed with his feet up on House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s desk waiting for the call appointing him surgeon general or ambassador to France?

Hardly. Those guys likely will be doing prison time soon. For after the riot the big fear in Washington was not about a coup but that so many of Trump’s top aides were resigning or about to resign in disgust that there might be no one to keep the lights on at the White House until the new president arrived, much less give instructions for martial law.

But even as the Trump rally failed as a coup, a real coup was succeeding in Connecticut. Governor Lamont was scheming to extend by another two months his emergency powers to rule the state by decree during the virus epidemic, powers to proclaim, amend, or suspend any laws: L’etat, c’est moi. Now Connecticut will be going without representative government for more than a year, though the rest of state and municipal government has remained perfectly capable of operation.

The governor is a Democrat and extending his emergency powers was ratified by the leaders of the Democratic majority in the General Assembly. Since they are in the same party, they might be expected to have no trouble governing in normal fashion. But in an interview with the Connecticut Mirror a few days after his emergency powers were extended, the governor said he was starting to like running the state on his own, without having to bother with the legislature. It seemed so much more efficient to him.

Of course efficiency always has been dictatorship’s argument against democracy. Democratic legislators are letting the governor enjoy dictatorship a little too much — and maybe they are enjoying their own irrelevance too much as well.

When he was president Trump presided over the same epidemic as the governor has been presiding over and yet he never invoked any undemocratic emergency powers, though he might have. If he had, the Democrats who have politely abdicated for Lamont would have screamed bloody murder.

Though no one in authority in Connecticut seems to have noticed it, the U.S. Constitution prohibits dictatorship anywhere in the country: “The United States shall guarantee to every state in this Union a republican form of government.”

Connecticut no longer has a republican form of government, and it wasn’t the aspiring tyrant Trump who took it away but some of his vociferous adversaries.

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

By Chris Powell

With Governor Lamont discouraging “broad-based” tax increases, many fellow Democrats in the General Assembly are planning to raise taxes around the edges.

Most industrious may be Senate President Pro Tem Martin M. Looney of New Haven. Looney would impose a special state property tax on expensive homes, a “mansion tax,” the revenue to be transferred to his hometown and other troubled cities. Looney also proposes rewriting the formula for state money to municipalities so as to give cities more and suburbs less for properties exempt from property taxes.

These proposals and others are based on the premise that the cities are oppressed financially by property tax exemption, and because the cities house so much “need,” particularly unparented schoolchildren.

But there is no particular fairness to a “mansion tax,” since mansions already pay much more in property taxes than other residential properties even as mansion occupants use much less in government services. That’s why suburbs use zoning to exclude inexpensive apartments — because such apartments tend to house unmarried women with many fatherless children, thus consuming much more in public services than they pay in property taxes. It’s also why the cities want to nullify that zoning — so they can export these burdensome households to the suburbs.

Since high taxes are already causing wealthy and middle-class people to leave Connecticut, the governor doesn’t want to raise their taxes. A “mansion tax” would extract their money in a less visible way — if they stayed.

As for the formula for state payments in lieu of taxes, there is no science to it. It is always a judgment call determined by political advantage, by how much has to be paid to which towns to achieve a majority in the legislature.

Yes, half a city’s land may be tax-exempt but then state government already reimburses half the budgets of the cities and most of their biggest expense, schools. So the property tax issue is not so compelling. Mainly cities just spend too much and accomplish too little with it.

After all, school spending has little effect on school performance in the cities or anywhere. More spending mainly increases staff compensation.

Really, just how impoverished and deserving is Looney’s own New Haven when it just began paying a lifetime pension of $117,000 a year to its “retiring” police chief so that, at age 49, he could become police chief at Quinnipiac University at a likely salary of $170,000 and build up a second huge pension?

Any city that spends that way is too comfortable being “poor,” though New Haven may be somewhat forgiven lately because its news organizations won’t report the chief’s pension.

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RAIL PIPE DREAM: Another pipe dream was floated last week by the Connecticut Mirror’s Tom Condon — a proposal to bring high-speed passenger railroad service through the state to connect Boston and New York. A previous proposal would have built a line parallel to the shore route already in clunky operation, but towns in eastern Connecticut freaked out and it was withdrawn.

The new plan would run the line from New York City to the middle of Long Island, build a tunnel under Long Island Sound to New Haven, use the rail corridor north to Hartford, and then clear a new corridor east to Manchester, Storrs, and Providence, connecting to the Boston line there.

The dream is lovely — and would be laughable even if the federal government offered to pay for it all. For even ordinary transportation infrastructure improvement is often impossible in Connecticut because of environmental and neighborhood objections and political cowardice.

For decades state government has failed to complete even basic projects like Interstate 384 from Bolton to Providence and Route 11 from Salem to Waterford, the latter project being just 8 miles long.

Tweed New Haven Airport still can’t lengthen its runway by a few hundred feet to handle standard jetliners.

The Metro-North railroad from New Haven to New York is often incapacitated by rickety tracks, sagging power lines, and problems with bridges more than a century old.

So smoke on, rail fans. Marijuana will be fully legal here soon if that’s not what you’re smoking already.

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

By Chris Powell

Maybe Connecticut should be grateful to the Desegregate CT organization for having just provided a map detailing how local zoning regulations make it almost impossible to build multifamily housing in most of the state. But didn’t nearly everybody already know that in principle? After all, the roots of exclusive zoning in the state go back to colonial times, when no one was permitted to live in the earliest towns without being approved at a town meeting as an “admitted inhabitant” and anyone who tried to move in without approval was “warned out.”

Then as now the objective of this selectivity was economic rather than racial — to guard against the public expense of supporting people who could not support themselves. While poverty and race are correlated today, poverty remains the far greater problem even as it gets little official attention.

Connecticut’s Republicans seem to welcome the zoning issue, reflexively defending “local control” and “the character of our towns,” euphemisms for exclusion and keeping out not just the poor but even self-supporting people getting started in adult life. The Republicans know that the suburbs are full of people who left or avoid the cities precisely to get away from their pathologies of poverty and don’t want it following them. But the Republicans won’t distinguish between the slackers and the self-supporting, and they don’t care about solving the poverty problem. They want only to keep it at bay.

Connecticut’s Democrats don’t care much about solving the problem either. Their objective is just to spread it around. Their latest idea is to authorize city housing authorities to build multifamily housing in the suburbs, pre-empting local zoning, as if the suburbs should be enthusiastic about gaining people the cities want to get rid of. Republicans might secretly wish for enactment of such legislation, for it could lead to the defeat of any suburban Democratic legislators who voted for it. Suburban Democratic legislators long have been the crucial resistance to curbing exclusive zoning.

Is anyone in authority in Connecticut interested in discovering what causes poverty and what lifts people out of it? Does anyone in authority here even notice that government policy has only turned the cities into poverty factories?

Educational failure is a cause of poverty, and an education-oriented solution was offered recently by the 2018 Republican candidate for governor, Bob Stefanowski, and by columnist and sometime Republican candidate Joe Bentivegna — school vouchers allowing parents to get their children out of poor-performing neighborhood schools. But Connecticut already does much of this with “magnet” schools, and they have caused their own problems.

For the “magnet” schools do what vouchers would: drain neighborhood schools of their better, more-parented students, worsening the performance of neighborhood schools.

Connecticut’s many unparented children are the main driver of the flight from the cities. Unparented children are where educational failure and crime come from. The Democratic response to this problem lately has been to try to exclude the public from criminal trials and erase criminal records — to make it harder for people to know what’s going on around them. Fortunately two federal court decisions have nullified Connecticut’s law requiring secret trials for juveniles charged with the worst crimes. Legislation still may be enacted to erase criminal records, but this will only camouflage the problem.

There is no getting around the child neglect and abuse causing poverty.

But there might be a generally acceptable solution to zoning exclusivity: requiring all towns to facilitate owner-occupied multi-family housing, accompanied by state mortgage assistance to purchasers who are employed, a system of starter homes routing working people toward the middle class.

This is how Singapore has solved its income inequality and ethnic segregation problems — by arranging for nearly everyone to own his home, to assure that everyone has property. Such policy is a theme of the beloved movie “It’s a Wonderful Life” and the idea goes back to the old Catholic social philosophy called distributism.

In any case, since housing is a necessity of life, the rising housing prices now being celebrated in Connecticut should not be celebrated any more than rising prices for food. To the contrary, they should be redressed.

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

By Chris Powell

From the legislation they have placed before the General Assembly’s Education Committee, you might think that state Reps. Jeffrey A. Currey, D-East Hartford, Jillian Gilchrest, D-West Hartford, and Nicole Klarides-Ditria, R-Seymour, just awoke from long comas.

Their bill would require schools to teach about “lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer, and other sexual orientations and gender identities.” Currey, Gilchrest, and Klarides-Ditria seem not to have noticed that for many years now most Connecticut high school students never master high school English and math, nor that school attendance in Connecticut has been erratic for 10 months because of the virus epidemic and that tens of thousands of students, especially those from the poorest households, have largely disappeared from school even as they already were years behind when they arrived in kindergarten.

As a practical matter there is little education now and even if the epidemic ended tomorrow schools would need two years to catch up on what students have missed. So do these legislators really need to get their political correctness tickets punched with their posturing obliviousness?

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FALSE PROTECTION: In the name of protecting the health of young people, many Democratic state legislators are proposing to outlaw flavored tobacco and flavorings for electronic cigarettes. Meanwhile these legislators also are maneuvering to legalize marijuana and internet gambling, which may mess up not only children but their parents as well.

Of course the difference is that there’s little tax revenue to be lost by outlawing flavored tobacco and e-cigarette flavorings and much tax revenue to be gained by legalizing marijuana and internet gambling. So proposing to outlaw flavored tobacco and e-cigarette flavorings is another empty pose.

Advocates of the legislation don’t seem to have noticed that alcoholic beverages recently have added flavorings likely to appeal especially to underage drinkers. Connecticut’s roadsides are now littered with “nip” bottles of such flavored liquor, thrown out of car windows during joyrides by juveniles who can’t bring home regular bottles of the stuff. Alcohol is just as dangerous to juveniles as tobacco and e-cigarettes, more so when juveniles are driving around and drinking, but nobody is proposing to outlaw flavored liquor. Apparently that also would risk too much tax revenue.

The movement to legalize marijuana, now close to irresistible, signifies recognition that contraband laws don’t work and that people can protect themselves against victimless crime. Meanwhile tobacco smoking is in a long decline because of the public health publicity campaign against it, and tobacco smokers are using e-cigarettes to kick the more dangerous tobacco habit.

Connecticut already prohibits sale of tobacco and electronic cigarettes to people under 21. Adults are trusted to decide for themselves about those and other risky products. Besides, a legislature that was really concerned about the health of children would be insisting on the resumption of in-person schooling before worrying about tobacco and e-cigarettes. But Connecticut’s teacher unions are far more fearsome than its liquor and tobacco merchants.

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LIQUOR RACKET PERSISTS: Even so, Connecticut’s liquor retailers are fearsome enough, numbering about 1,300 and distributed in every legislator’s district. They long have defeated attempts to repeal the state’s liquor price-support system, which imposes just about the highest alcoholic beverage prices in the country. Now the liquor stores are mobilizing against legislation to allow Connecticut-made wines to be sold in supermarkets.

There is no good reason to forbid supermarkets from selling wine and liquor along with the beer they already sell. For convenience to shoppers, other states allow supermarkets to sell all three alcoholic products. Liquor stores could be allowed to sell groceries too, and indeed Connecticut lately has let them sell some non-beverage items.

The only restriction needed here is to keep alcohol out of the hands of minors, and supermarkets can do that. They already “card” even the oldest folks buying beer.

The liquor store lobby perceives the request of the wineries as the camel’s nose under the tent of the whole corrupt liquor retailing system. People who don’t own liquor stores may cheer for the camel.

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

By Chris Powell

President Biden’s new education secretary, Miguel Cardona, lately Connecticut’s education commissioner, says he will give priority to the issue of college loan debt.

About 45 million U.S. residents, nearly 14 percent of the population, owe an estimated $1.7 trillion in college loans, with the average debt believed to be about $38,000. People entering adult life with that kind of financial burden often have to postpone family formation, homeownership, and much of the happiness of life. Some are overwhelmed just by the interest on the loans they took, quite apart from repaying the principal.

So there are proposals in Washington to postpone or forgive college loan debt in whole or in part, with the federal government essentially repaying it for the borrowers, thereby raising the question of fairness to people who did not go to college or who paid their own way or got family help.

But the real problem here is not college loan debt at all but college itself. After all, if, as widely presumed, college is such a wonderful thing and college degrees are crucial to successful careers, why can’t so many college loans be easily repaid by earnings?

This is not a matter of the damage done to the economy over the last 10 months by the virus epidemic, for college debt has been incapacitating people and failing to deliver for them for many years.

As early as 2013 the Center for College Affordability and Productivity reported that there were 46 percent more college graduates in the country than jobs requiring a college degree and that, as a result, degrees were held by 25 percent of sales clerks, 22 percent of customer service representatives, 16 percent of telemarketers, 15 percent of taxi drivers, and 14 percent of mail carriers.

Of course not all of those people were in substantial debt for college but many were.

The federal government established and subsidizes the college loan system on the premise that everybody is better off with a college education. The burdensome debt and the uselessness of so many degrees have proved this premise cruelly false. Meanwhile, loan policy grossly inflates the cost of college, increasing demand for what fails to work for so many people.

So why does the college loan system continue? It’s because college loans long ago stopped being subsidies to students and became subsidies to educators, another vast class of voters who are effectively dependent on government for their income even though many of them work nominally for private rather than government schools.

Government throughout the country, including Connecticut, has worsened this racket by reducing and even eliminating standards in lower education, allowing so many young people to graduate high school without mastering high school studies and sending them on to college to take remedial courses. If students learned what they should in high school, they might not think they need college so much.

Any solution here may be almost impossible politically, since the special interest benefiting from mistaken policy is too big and influential. But a small reform might be to restrict college loans to studies in medicine, science, and other fields where the national interest requires more graduates. Subsidizing more study in post-colonial experience, critical race theory, and sexual oddities may be politically correct but it serves only educators.

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EMASCULATED AGAIN: Leaders of the Democratic majority in the General Assembly had just agreed to extend for another three months Governor Lamont’s emergency power to rule by decree when they realized that this might cut them out of appropriating hundreds of millions of dollars of virus epidemic relief from the federal government.

The governor says he still will consult with legislators about dispensing the federal money, but consulting isn’t legislating and carries no legal force. While Democratic legislators don’t seem to realize it yet, Connecticut established three branches of government — the legislative, the executive, and the judicial — precisely so power would be democratized and shared.

Having finally bestirred themselves to convene the General Assembly after nearly a year of abdication, the members of the Democratic majority acted first only to emasculate themselves for still another three months. They can’t blame Donald Trump for this one.

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