Chris Powell column

By Chris Powell

Congratulations to one of Connecticut’s forever members of Congress, U.S. Rep. Rosa DeLauro, Democrat of New Haven, for teaching the country a wonderful political science lesson.

Having ascended to the chairmanship of the House Appropriations Committee, DeLauro has just revived the infamous practice of putting “earmarks” in the federal budget — requirements that funds that ordinarily would be appropriated for general purposes be reserved for patronage projects desired by congressmen. Now DeLauro is forwarding her chief of staff, Leticia Mederos, to a national law and government relations firm, Clark Hill, whose office on Pennsylvania Avenue is within walking distance of the Capitol and the White House. Mederos will become a lobbyist, and her close connection to the House appropriations chairwoman will be a swell advantage to her clients.

This stuff is sometimes euphemized as public service. Where candor is permitted, it is called influence peddling or even plunder.

The political science lesson taught here by DeLauro and her outgoing chief of staff is like the one taught by Huey Long when he was governor of Louisiana in the 1930s. Gathering his closest supporters just after his election, Long is said to have told them:

“You guys who supported me before the primary will get commissionerships. You guys who supported me after the primary and before the election will get no-show jobs. You guys who donated at least $10,000 to my campaign will get road contracts. Everybody else will get goood gummint.”

Thanks to DeLauro and the rest of the new Democratic administration in Washington, $1.9 trillion in goood gummint is on its way to the country in the name of virus epidemic relief.

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DeLauro estimates that more than $4 billion of that money will be given to state and municipal government in Connecticut for purposes leaving wide discretion in its allocation. That $4 billion is equivalent to almost 20 percent of state government’s annual spending and is $2 billion more than what state government estimates it has spent responding to the epidemic. That extra $2 billion will be a grand slush fund.

Governor Lamont and the General Assembly will decide just where to spend the money, and spending it carefully will be a huge challenge that is not likely to be met well.

Of course much of the federal largesse will be spent in the name of education, but how exactly, and more importantly, why? After all, Connecticut has been increasing education spending for more than 40 years without improving student performance, just school staff compensation. Even now half the state’s high school graduates never master high school math or English and many take remedial high school courses in public “colleges.”

So the most promising educational use of the federal money might be to finance remedial summer school for Connecticut’s many underperforming students over the next several years, since so many have missed most of their schooling during the last 12 months and were already far behind in education when the epidemic began. Using the education money for remedial summer school would minimize the problem school administrators fear. That is, if the emergency federal money is incorporated in recurring school operations, it will leave a disruptive gap when it runs out in a year or two.

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As “earmarks” return to Congress, Connecticut’s bonanza from Washington is sure to induce more earmark fever at the state Capitol, where it long has infected bonding legislation. Already Hartford Mayor Luke Bronin imagines spending billions for high-speed railroad service from the city to New York and Boston and development of the city’s riverfront, as if the lack of those things is Hartford’s big problem. At least the mayor is no longer boasting about defunding the city’s police. In the 48-hour period that included his “State of the City” address this week, six people were shot in separate incidents in the city, one fatally. Maybe Hartford’s most pressing need is for more police officers.

But if the governor can persuade the Democratic majority in the General Assembly not to spend the federal money too fast, enough will remain in the slush fund to get them past the 2022 state election without raising taxes, if also without making state government any more efficient and effective.

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

By Chris Powell

Does Connecticut really want to be a conspirator in financial market rigging?

That’s the question raised by the data center development legislation just approved by the General Assembly and signed by Governor Lamont. The legislation will exempt data centers from sales tax on the transactions they process and commit the state not to tax them.

New York and New Jersey, where the financial markets are concentrated, have noticed the explosion of transactions there in recent years. So those states are thinking about taxing transactions. While the tax would be tiny, it might raise hundreds of millions of dollars each year because there are now so many transactions. This threat of taxation has prompted financial exchange operators to ponder whether they should move out of New York and New Jersey. Connecticut state government is salivating over the possibility.

But the explosion in transactions arises mainly from what is called “high-frequency trading,” the super-fast placing and withdrawal by major brokerage houses and banks of so many orders in a particular market that ordinary investors are disadvantaged in price. The big traders have invested heavily in computer systems and microwave transmission towers that profit by shaving fractions of a second off order execution. Trading so much faster, the big traders become the market and can cheat everyone else.

That’s what data centers are about, and what the General Assembly and the governor plan to facilitate.

The few legislators who voted against the bill note that data centers employ few people once their construction is complete. Indeed, if, to lure data centers, Connecticut is to forswear any financial transactions tax, it’s hard to see how data centers would generate much revenue for the state.

But whatever revenue was generated, most would come from market rigging. Connecticut should not facilitate that. Instead, as Ralph Nader and others urge, the federal government should impose a tax on high-frequency trading to make market rigging less profitable.

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CONSPIRACY FACT: Lately news organizations have been full of commentaries disparaging conspiracy theories and theorists, even as news organizations should be taking many of them seriously.

Of course some are ridiculous on their face, like the QAnon stuff, but since government grows larger and increasingly conducts important business and implements policy in secret, government itself is by definition a conspiracy. The accusation leveled for years against Donald Trump about collusion with Russia, concocted in secret by this country’s own intelligence and law-enforcement agencies, was a conspiracy that news organizations declined to expose until long after the damage was done.

Every day the Federal Reserve and the central banks of other major countries confer secretly to decide how they will intervene in markets, usually surreptitiously. Often they consult secretly with the executives of the biggest investment banks, to which the Fed has been making secret loans totaling trillions of dollars.

Those loans are for market rigging.

The banking conspiracy is vast. It determines the valuation of all capital, labor, goods, and services. It is not conspiracy theory but conspiracy fact — and the news organizations that lately have derided conspiracy theory never inquire about it, maybe because the conspirators buy a lot of advertising.

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THE TEACHERS OF OLD: Two major causes of the decline of American education are widely understood — the collapse of the family, which has diminished parenting and led to social promotion in schools, and the unionization of teaching and school administration, which has reduced accountability.

But there is a third factor in education’s decline — women’s liberation. Until about 50 years ago women were prevented or discouraged from pursuing many professional jobs. Back then most women aspiring to careers beyond the secretarial pool were more or less limited to nursing and teaching. So schools had their pick of the smartest, most talented, and most caring women.

Now that women have a full range of employment options, schools have to compete much harder for the best teachers. Inevitably they don’t do as well as they used to.

Of course there is no going back to injustice. But education has been the loser.

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

By Chris Powell

Gambling and intoxicating drugs mainly transfer wealth from the many to the few and the poor to the rich, so it is sad that state government is striving to get into the business of sports betting, internet gambling, and marijuana dealing. That’s how hungry state government always is for more money.

Even so, Governor Lamont may deserve some credit for the deal he seems about to achieve with Connecticut’s two casino Indian tribes. The tribes long have claimed that the casino gambling duopoly state government conferred on them in the 1990s also gives them exclusivity on sports betting and internet gambling in the state.

Under the governor’s plan the tribes drop their claim to exclusivity and share the sports betting and internet gambling business with state government via the Connecticut Lottery. The Mohegan tribe has fully accepted the plan while the Mashantucket Pequot tribe appears to have yielded on exclusivity and to be quibbling only about a percentage point or two in taxes.

So Connecticut may be glad that this much of its sovereignty would be recognized and that the governor didn’t give the store away.

But just as this outcome could be worse, it could be better too. For state government has shown no interest in inquiring whether it really needs the Indian tribal duopoly to run casinos — inquiring whether the casino exclusivity the state has conferred on the tribes in exchange for 25 percent of their slot machine revenue reflects the full value of the state’s grant of duopoly.

After all, the duopoly has never been put out to bid. Would other enterprises pay the state more for the privilege of operating casinos and sports betting parlors in, say, Bridgeport, New Haven, and Hartford, locations far closer to heavily populated areas than the Indian properties in southeastern Connecticut’s woods? Casino operators in those cities, much closer to more gamblers, might gladly pay state government more than 25 percent of their slot machine take, or their 25 percent tribute might produce more money because they had more customers.

This potential for greater revenue is implied by the complaint of Sportstech, operator of the state-licensed horse and greyhound racing and jai alai betting parlors throughout Connecticut. The company is threatening to sue the state because it hasn’t been invited into the gambling expansion plan with the casino Indians. No other potential operators seem to have been solicited either.

So the governor’s plan will preserve gambling in Connecticut as a business for privileged insiders — the two tribes, which have come to control enough legislators in their part of the state to block state government from following the ordinary good business practice of soliciting bids.

The gambling situation in Connecticut is not just essentially corrupt but ridiculous as well, as indicated by the crack taken last week at the Mohegans by the chairman of the Mashantucket Pequots, Rodney Butler, who was sore that the Mohegans didn’t wait for the Pequots before agreeing to the governor’s plan. “It opened up wounds between our tribal nations that go back centuries,” Butler said, referring to the alliance of the Mohegans with the English colonists in the war with the Pequots nearly 400 years ago.

Can ethnic hatreds really endure that long when the ethnicities have been so absorbed by the larger culture? Can a distant descendant of Chief Sassacus and a distant descendant of Chief Uncas really resent each other after their intermediary generations have lived in raised ranches and worked at Electric Boat like nearly everyone else where the tribes of old lived? Aren’t these people with tiny fractions of Indian descent more likely to dispute each other over the Yankees and the Red Sox or Biden and Trump?

Or is the revival of the Pequot War just a pathetically opportunistic defense of lucrative privilege?

Connecticut is full of people who are suffering serious disadvantages arising from all sorts of things that were not their fault, disadvantages far greater than a tiny bit of relation to the tribes of old. Indeed, for decades that relation has been no disadvantage to anyone. State government offers these truly disadvantaged people nothing special.

While some of them soon may be given marijuana-dealing licenses, if Connecticut were to be run on ethnicity, they would deserve casinos far more than the people who have them now.

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

By Chris Powell

By a 3-2 vote, Connecticut’s Commission on Compensation of Elected State Officials has recommended small raises, a bit more than 1%, for state legislators and the top state elected officials — the governor, lieutenant governor, attorney general, treasurer, secretary of the state, and comptroller.

There’s good reason for such raises. The salary of legislators, $28,000, which is supplemented by unvouchered expense accounts of $5,500 for senators and $4,500 for representatives and a mileage allowance, has not increased in 20 years. The salaries for the governor and the other elected officers of the executive branch — $150,000 for the governor, $110,000 for the others — have not increased for 17 years. (Governor Lamont has declined a salary.)

Since Connecticut gives its governor a mansion to use in Hartford, the salary for the office isn’t bad. But the pay for the other executive officers is low in light of their full-time responsibilities. As for legislators, they are paid part-time rates for what is often a full-time job, though they disgracefully abdicated during most of the virus epidemic.

So ordinarily raises would be appropriate now, and a 1% raise would be tiny. More frequent raises eventually would facilitate service by more people who have families to support. But it won’t happen, and maybe it shouldn’t.

No matter the merits, legislators are scared to vote for raises, even though they could not take effect until after the next election. Most legislators might vote for raises only if the vote would be nearly unanimous and they had assurance that members of the other political party would not make an issue of the raises in the next election.

Of course that is political cowardice.

But a better reason not to enact the raises has been offered by the state Senate’s Republican minority leader, Kevin Kelly of Stratford. Amid the economic damage inflicted by the epidemic, Kelly says, too many state residents are struggling financially and would resent higher pay for legislators.

Of course such resentment didn’t prompt the governor and legislators to stop the raises that began a few months ago for state government employees. Since the state employee unions are so politically mobilized, nearly everyone in authority just shrugged.

Resentment against raises for legislators is a hint that even though the voters keep reelecting nearly all of them, legislators generate little enthusiasm. There probably is wide recognition that state government has not been improving living conditions in Connecticut for people generally. If living conditions were improving markedly in the state, people might gladly support raises for elected officials.

Legislators in both parties seem to consider it success enough just to get reelected regardless of the state’s general decline. After all, some salary and benefits are better than none.

These circumstances are not likely to change until somebody makes a good case for why and exactly how things should change. Ordinarily this task would fall to the minority party, but Connecticut’s Republicans long have had no platform and don’t seem to want one.

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Please let this be the end of the Democratic Party’s posturing, nationally and in Connecticut, as the party of women’s advancement. For a few days ago all Democratic U.S. representatives, including the five from Connecticut, voted for legislation denying equal rights to women.

The legislation, the grossly misnamed Equality Act, would require athletic events to allow men to participate as women and to use women’s restrooms, and presumably vice-versa.

The act would demolish the premise of previous equal rights legislation involving athletics — the premise that, since men in general are stronger and faster than women, women cannot have equal opportunity in athletics unless they have their own contests.

The legislation also would deny restroom privacy to both genders.

The legislation’s premise is that gender is not biological but merely a state of mind. So much for science.

Gender-separate athletic contests don’t deny opportunity to people who wish to pose as someone of the opposite sex. Such people are free to participate according to their biological gender.

This legislation is as lunatic and offensive as anything Donald Trump ever proposed. But it’s politically correct.

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

By Chris Powell

Legislation can’t be right when its premise is wrong, and a big premise of the proposals to legalize recreational marijuana in Connecticut is wrong. That is, the proposals presume that racial minorities deserve special reparations for the damage the “war on drugs” has done to them. So the proposals would give preference to members of racial minorities in the issuance of legal drug-dealing licenses.

This premise is doubly mistaken, first because drug prohibition penalized racial minorities less because of racism in criminal justice than because they were disproportionately involved in the drug trade. They were not so much more penalized than they profited.

Second, and far more important, the “war on drugs” wasn’t the war that most handicapped racial minorities. It was the “war on poverty.” People don’t deal illegal drugs when they have many better career options. But a half century of welfare and education policies has only worsened living conditions in Connecticut’s cities.

Connecticut might have noticed this by now. For various worthies long have prattled about the gap between the educational performance of white and minority students and city and suburban schools, but government has failed to reduce the gap, because those worthies never trace the problem to its source in welfare and education policies.

The victims of the “war on drugs” deserve more than a patronizing pat on the head, a discount on drug-dealing licenses, government loans for opening storefronts, and encouragement to push more of their neighbors toward intoxication, lethargy, and dependence. They deserve to have the right questions asked of government:

— Which policies have been destroying the family and impairing education in minority communities?

— How have those communities benefited from government subsidies for childbearing outside marriage and from social promotion in school?

— How are fatherless, neglected, uneducated, and alienated young people not supposed to be tempted by the money of the contraband drug trade when they can’t get better jobs?

Maybe the only way to get those policies questioned is to call them racist. Maybe they were not meant that way, but their results are.

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State legislators want to increase the yearly appropriations to compensate municipalities for the revenue they lose because of the property tax exemption given by state law to nonprofit organizations like colleges, hospitals, and churches and the state and federal governments.

The exemption is especially burdensome for Hartford and New Haven, half or more of whose grand lists is tax-exempt. But then those cities get half their budgets covered by state grants, so the injustice isn’t as great as the cities claim.

So it might be better to question the property tax exemption itself.

The exemption is a government subsidy to any enterprise that claims to be entirely pursuing the public good. The exemption is most profitable for colleges, which cover far more land than the typical church or sober house. Of course colleges already receive other huge subsidies from government, particularly through the student loan system and the tax-deductibility of donations to their endowments, even though college education now may take more out of the country than it puts back.

This drag is demonstrated by the estimated $1.6 trillion in student loan debt, the many student debtors who don’t earn enough to keep up with their loans, the many indebted college dropouts, and the many graduates with degrees irrelevant to their employment.

By far the biggest beneficiary of property tax exemption in Connecticut is Yale University in New Haven, for which the exemption is worth an estimated $160 million each year even as the university has an endowment of more than $31 billion.

So why not limit property tax exemption to, say, the first million dollars of assessed value? While hospitals would have to pay a lot, they could recover it simply by raising charges to patients, most of which would be paid by insurers and government itself.

Then New Haven’s city government could gorge on $160 million from Yale each year, maybe a lot more as city property taxes kept rising, and eventually city government could devour the mentor of the city’s lunatic liberalism. It might serve them both right.

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

By Chris Powell

Nice guy that he was, Joseph D. Duffey, who died last week at age 88, was not a terribly adept politician. He was not outgoing or a glad-hander but a soft-spoken Protestant clergyman. But from 1967 to 1970 he was the most courageous participant in Connecticut politics, and more than anyone else he helped turn the state away from the political machines that long had dominated it. Because of Duffey, Connecticut became a lot more small-d democratic.

In 1967 the Vietnam War grew controversial, costing more lives and resources while lacking progress and a persuasive rationale. But no elected official in Connecticut, Democrat or Republican, would oppose it, just as no Democratic leader in the state would endorse Minnesota Sen. Eugene J. McCarthy’s challenge to the Democratic Party’s expected renomination of President Lyndon B. Johnson.

Duffey stepped forward to lead the McCarthy campaign in the state, and while it gathered many volunteers, they quickly discovered that the process for selecting delegates to both the Democratic State Convention and the Democratic National Convention had been rigged before the presidential campaign began.

The party’s town committees chose the state convention delegates, who would choose the national convention delegates. There would be no primary in which party members expressed their choice for president. To try to win national convention delegates, the insurgents first had to assemble challenge slates of local state convention delegates and petition to get them on the ballot in a municipal primary.

But the McCarthy people still gained a surprising number of state convention delegates, and so the state Democratic machine gave Duffey and a few other McCarthy supporters places on the delegation to what became the infamous 1968 Democratic National Convention in Chicago.

Two years later Connecticut Democratic U.S. Sen. Thomas J. Dodd, a supporter of the war, was facing re-election. But he had been censured by the Senate for corruption and party leaders did not want to renominate him. The anti-war Democrats wanted an anti-war candidate and rallied behind Duffey — and again they had to struggle through the same unfair process for state convention delegates.

The objective was to get 20 percent of the votes at the convention, which would qualify a candidate for a statewide primary for the Senate nomination, something Connecticut had never experienced. The party machine worked brutally to prevent it. But remarkably Duffey got his 20 percent and prevailed in the primary, defeating two rivals, a millionaire political neophyte backed by the machine and the state Senate’s majority leader.

Dodd withdrew his candidacy for renomination by the Democrats and ran as an independent, taking enough votes away from Duffey to throw the election to Republican Lowell P. Weicker Jr. But Connecticut’s Republicans that year had their own first primaries for governor and senator. While the Republican insurgents lost, people saw that the 20 percent threshold could be reached and a party machine beaten. A new day had dawned in Connecticut politics and soon the state began liberalizing its nomination procedures.

Duffey’s general election campaign for the Senate was difficult. Because of his opposition to the war, Republicans, including Vice President Spiro Agnew, called him a communist or a communist sympathizer. Though he is now sainted by the political left, Weicker played along with the red-baiting.

But as McCarthy had done two years before, Duffey had knocked the machine down and brought many new people into politics. His campaign also had some fun moments because he was often accompanied by his most famous supporter, the actor and national heartthrob Paul Newman.

One day Duffey, Newman, and their small entourage arrived in New Britain for a rally at the Burritt Hotel, where a huge crowd, mostly women, was gathering. But first they stopped at a nearby bar and grill for a quick lunch.

As they got up to leave for the hotel, Newman reminded Duffey that they should go into the bar and shake some hands. So in they went, whereupon none of the midday drinkers knew who they were, but at least the bartender recognized Duffey.

Maybe that was some consolation for him when he saw the crowd at the Burritt swooning for Newman.

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

By Chris Powell

Everyone is entitled to be sick and tired of the virus epidemic, and no one is more entitled than Governor Lamont, whose administration has been consumed by it.

Most people were happy with the administration’s handling of the epidemic until this week, when the governor changed policy on prioritizing the long-awaited vaccinations. Instead of giving priority to the elderly, classes of employees deemed essential, and people with some particular medical vulnerability, the governor decided that it would be better to vaccinate people simply by age, from oldest to youngest.

This angered people who were getting near the front of the line or who have medically vulnerable relatives who were nearing the front. They felt cheated. But except on this personal basis, it was hard to argue with the governor. He noted that assigning priority by occupation or special susceptibilities would cover more than a million of the state’s 3.5 million residents, and keeping track of such a large group was getting too complicated.

So the governor came to figure that going by age would be faster and generally favor the people more vulnerable to the virus — older people — and that increasing the number of vaccination clinics would get the work done faster still.

Maybe the governor and his advisers are wrong, but they are the ones who have been organizing the campaign against the virus and so must be credited for experience as well as best intentions.

In any case the primary measures of the epidemic show it is steadily receding, probably because of vaccinations and because many people are strengthening their immune systems with vitamins and dietary supplements and because daylight is lengthening as spring approaches, daylight being vital to the body’s creation of Vitamin D, on which the immune system depends.

People are entitled to regret their loss of place in line but great progress against the epidemic is visible and this should console them and foster another month or two of patience.

Like everything else, state government is imperfect, may not be getting everything right, and needs criticism to check against errors. But state government is working hard in circumstances unprecedented in living memory. There is no cause for recrimination.

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Under the pressure of the epidemic, education in Connecticut has largely collapsed. Most students already were performing below grade level. Now many will be two grades behind. Summer school could recover some of the learning that has been missed — if the classes are in person, state government makes them mandatory and arranges for the necessary money, and if teachers agree to do the extra work and take some risk for the greater good as supermarket clerks and cashiers do.

Since he is still ruling by decree, the governor should make this happen, though he has been timid about the schools, leaving local boards to do as they see fit and to cope with the recalcitrance of the teacher unions.

But one summer session won’t be enough to catch up. Given the chronic lag in student performance, it would be best to require summer sessions for all schools for the next two or three years, exempting students who can pass a grade-level proficiency test. That might be a powerful incentive for students and their parents to stop relying on social promotion.

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With M&T Bank’s plan to acquire Bridgeport-based People’s United Bank, the concentration of Connecticut’s banking industry and the national economy is accelerating without much notice from government.

Since 1955 People’s United has acquired about 18 other banks, including two banks formerly based in Vernon, Rockville Bank and United Bank.

Since 1987 M&T Bank, based in Buffalo, New York, itself has acquired 20 other banks.

Such acquisitions profit bank stockholders by eliminating competition and reducing employment. There is no advantage to the public here.

Suffering badly financially, news organizations are not likely to examine these acquisitions critically. But federal and state antitrust laws should be applied against them. Connecticut Attorney General William Tong finds time nearly every day for many less important things. Anti-competitive and anti-employment bank combinations give him a chance to get real.

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

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.