What did Governor Lamont mean by failure of tax increases?

By Chris Powell

Addressing an internet meeting of the Connecticut Business and Industry Association a week ago, Governor Lamont made the most remarkable statement of his two years in office. “I have no interest in broad-based tax increases,” Lamont said. “Every governor, Republican or Democrat since, or including, Lowell Weicker has done that and it did not solve the problem.”

Of course a few months ago the governor signed into law a broad-based tax increase that took effect three weeks ago: the half-percent increase in the state income tax that is to finance a program of paid family and medical leave, self-insurance that people easily could have arranged on their own. And a few weeks ago the governor endorsed an increase in the wholesale gasoline tax, a hidden tax that, falling on everyone who travels in motor vehicles, is broad-based too.

Maybe the governor just forgot about his recent broad-based taxes as he spoke to the business people. That can happen. More importantly, what exactly did he mean in saying that the big tax increases of his predecessors over the last 30 years “did not solve the problem”? Just what is “the problem”?

The governor is a Democrat, and from a Democratic perspective those tax increases — especially the state income tax, pushed through the General Assembly by Governor Weicker in 1991 after he campaigned on opposing it — did solve “the problem.” That is, the problem of securing the loyalty of the Democratic Party’s army, members of the state and municipal government employee unions, whose ever-more generous compensation was financed by those tax increases.

So could the governor really have meant the other problem — the problem seen from the public’s perspective — state government’s failure with tax increases to improve life in Connecticut for those not employed by government? Could the governor really have meant, say, the failure to reduce poverty and dissolution in the cities and to improve performance not only in city schools but most others, the state’s loss of population relative to the rest of the country, its loss of businesses and skilled, high-paying jobs and their replacement by low-paying jobs?

That is, by “the problem” with taxes could the governor have meant Connecticut’s decades of general decline?

Maybe his audience was thunderstruck, for nobody seems to have asked what he meant by “the problem” with taxes. But the governor hinted he might elaborate soon. He added that the federal government’s pending reimbursement of the state for epidemic expenses “might buy us some time to make some efficiencies.”

“Efficiencies”? Again this is not how Connecticut Democrats usually talk.

Indeed, even as the governor was telling the business group that raising taxes hasn’t solved “the problem,” some members of his party’s enlarged majority in the General Assembly were proposing raising taxes all over the place — on the incomes of “the rich,” on expensive houses, on motor vehicles driven on state highways (that is, tolls), and on legalized marijuana and sports betting, the latter burdens sure to fall more on the unrich. A Democratic legislator also proposed to give big tax credits to households with children, but this seemed dependent on raising taxes on “the rich.”

Having to choose between taxing everybody, including the poor, or doing without more money and economizing, by political necessity most Democratic legislators will choose more money every time. The army’s salaries and pensions always come first.

RESTORE DEMOCRACY: This week the governor said he wants to extend until April 20 his emergency powers to rule by decree, in the belief that the epidemic will be under control by then. That is wishful thinking and would push the suspension of democracy in Connecticut beyond a year when it already has been too long.

Republican legislative leaders have a better idea. They would end the governor’s rule by decree on March 1, with the legislature deciding which of the governor’s orders to continue as legislation and which to extinguish. Future emergency declarations would be limited to 30 days and could be extended only by legislative action.

Throughout the epidemic the legislature has been fully able to operate but abdicated instead. Legislators should start earning their pay again, and the governor himself should demand it.

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

No one dares to answer for disaster of state’s cities

By Chris Powell

Nearly everyone in Connecticut knows that its capital city, Hartford, is a mess, and that its largest city, Bridgeport, is too. Yet for saying so about Hartford in an essay in The Wall Street Journal on New Year’s Day, former gubernatorial candidate Bob Stefanowski continues to generate outrage from news organizations and the establishment leaders they strive to give voice to. Predictably enough, none of the responses has addressed Stefanowski’s specific criticisms. Instead the responses have constituted only mindless boosterism for Hartford.

Decades of boosterism haven’t improved the city but the latest installment may be meant to prevent the failure of Connecticut’s urban policies from becoming the issue it should be.

For example, why, despite ever-greater state spending on Hartford, do its demographics grow only poorer and its schools never improve?

Though it was already insolvent and a ward of the state, why was Hartford allowed to borrow tens of millions of dollars to build a minor-league baseball stadium, leading to a $500 million bailout by state government? State government could have prevented that disaster, so why didn’t it?

Why did Hartford Mayor Luke Bronin pander to the “defund the police” crowd by reducing the city police budget by $2 million only to have to appeal for state troopers a few weeks later as crime in the city exploded?

Even the news organizations purporting to serve Hartford have yet to pose such questions. With his essay Stefanowski began to do so, and the response from those news organizations was only: That’s mean! Don’t do that again!

What’s really mean is leaving Hartford, Bridgeport, and New Haven in perpetual poverty and dysfunction, where they will stay until the failures of policy and management are acknowledged. As Stefanowski wrote, state government shares responsibility for those failures. Those who took offense at their mere mention now share responsibility too.

COURANT’S P.C. POSE: Congratulations to the Hartford Courant for pledging, in the name of social justice, to do less of what it hardly had been doing anyway: publishing police photos, “mug shots,” of arrested people.

This pledge was just a load of what is called virtue signaling, since few mug shots have appeared in the Courant lately not because of concern for social justice but because of the newspaper’s long retreat from local news.

Of course this retreat doesn’t contradict the Courant’s argument that mug shots can be prejudicial and contribute to racial stereotyping. But crime itself is racially disproportionate, and it is not stereotyping to acknowledge it. A mug shot doesn’t stereotype; it signifies an actual arrest. And any arrest publicity is potentially prejudicial.

So is the public not to be reminded that crime is racially disproportionate, just as family disintegration, educational failure, and poverty are? And is criminal justice not to be watched closely so injustice may be diminished? Are only the arrests and mug shots of white people to be published?

One could get that impression lately, as national news organizations are going out of their way to publicize any trivial incident in which a white person mistreats a Black person, like the incident the other day in New York City where a white woman mistakenly accused a Black teenager of stealing her cell phone. Meanwhile there is no reporting of trivial incidents in which Blacks  mistreat whites.  Are there no such incidents, or is political correctness overwhelming the news?

TEACHING MOMENT LOST: University of Connecticut President Thomas C. Katsouleas toadied to political correctness again last week in responding to an internet petition urging the university to “condemn” two students from Stafford who attended the “Stop the Steal” protest in Washington that ended with the attack on the Capitol. There was no allegation that the students broke the law, but one was photographed with the infamous provocateur Alex Jones.

Responding to the petition, Katsouleas wrote that Jones is “despicable.” Katsouleas did not write that the university has no business condemning anyone for peacefully exercising his First Amendment rights.

So a teaching moment was lost. Instead the P.C. petitioners were reminded of how easily the university president can be made to dance. Students may be learning that much anyway.

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

Biden’s cosmic hypocrisy; and UConn Health’s ironic advertising

By Chris Powell

At least President Biden has some sense of his high office, knows how to behave in public, and unlike his predecessor, Donald Trump, is not likely to become a cosmic embarrassment on account of his demeanor. No, Biden’s embarrassments will be matters of policy and hypocrisy, as with the cosmic hypocrisy of his inaugural address calling for national unity.

For the new president, a Democrat, leads the party that just spent four years proclaiming “resistance” to Trump, much of that time also contriving the hoax of Trump’s supposed collusion with Russia. This followed multiple presidential elections in which Democratic congressmen challenged the electoral vote, conduct the Democrats now suppose to be treasonous when committed by Republicans. Until now national unity has been of little concern to the Democrats.

But if unity is ridiculous in the current circumstances, Biden’s call for civility in political discourse should be heeded. When the country’s leaders treat each other viciously, standards collapse everywhere. The country has had four years of bad examples from both parties.

The president’s address was wrong about something else. He said democracy is “fragile.” This has become a theme of the Democrats and the many news organizations allied with them. They suggest that the Republican opposition is typified by the rioters who ransacked the Capitol on Jan. 6 after being summoned to Washington by Trump to “stop the steal” as the electoral vote was counted and that this was a “coup” to overthrow the government.

But there were only a few hundred rioters and there was no force behind them, no junta poised to seize the government. The riot was entirely a matter of the lack of ordinary police protection, it was quickly put down, and it appalled the country and demolished much regard remaining for Trump.

If Trump had ordered the military to “stop the steal,” the generals would have laughed at him and few people even among his own supporters would have followed illegal orders from him. Coups don’t work in established democracies. They succeed mainly in overthrowing regimes with less than majority support, as in Chile in 1973, not in preserving unpopular regimes.

Whether the vote in the recent presidential election was tallied honestly remains a fair question deserving investigation because the mass absentee balloting that was used is an invitation to mistakes and fraud.

While Trump’s campaign failed to produce compelling evidence that any state’s tally was reversed by fraud, news organizations attesting to the integrity of the tallies never seriously investigated them either. So Congress had to follow the totals officially certified in each state.

While state Capitols were put on alert for rioting by Trump supporters on Inauguration Day, there wasn’t any. The only rioting is being done by the usual crazy leftists and anarchists, who don’t like Biden either.

Yes, as the new president said upon taking office, democracy has prevailed. But it prevailed because it is still pretty strong, not fragile.

Medicine is getting competitive, so no one may begrudge the radio and television advertising being done by the University of Connecticut’s Health Center in Farmington, which styles itself UConn Health. The ads are bright and try to be inspiring, though of course, as with much advertising, their script might be used by any other hospital anywhere.

But while the script of the UConn Health ads won’t be questioned by news organizations, which are starved for advertising, it is spectacularly ironic. For the ads conclude grandly: “Together anything is possible.”

That’s never what UConn Health tells state legislators and budget officials. For UConn Health chronically runs huge deficits requiring special appropriations and last month the current deficit was estimated at $50 million.

The problem is always staff compensation and lack of basic management. Two years ago UConn Health kept a professor on the payroll for months after he stopped showing up for work — his wife had killed him — and an audit found that UConn Health had lost more than 700 pieces of equipment each worth more than $5,000.

Anything may be possible at UConn Health except controlling costs.

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

Military-industrial complex is OK with Connecticut’s delegation

By Chris Powell

In his farewell address 60 years ago President Dwight D. Eisenhower warned against what he called “unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex.” Since he was a military hero, perhaps only Eisenhower could give such a warning during the Cold War without risking denunciation as a communist.

But Eisenhower’s warning has never been heeded, and President Biden, with his nominee for defense secretary, is essentially proclaiming the victory of the military-industrial complex. The new president’s nominee is retired Army Gen. Lloyd Austin, who upon leaving the Army a few years ago joined the Board of Directors of military contractor Raytheon Technologies Corp., which recently acquired Connecticut-based United Technologies Corp. If confirmed by the Senate, Austin will have to sell Raytheon stock he received for serving on the board. It may net him as much as $1.7 million.

Acknowledging what will be his continuing potential for conflict of interest, Austin pledges to avoid decisions involving Raytheon for a year. But this can’t worry Raytheon much about its investment in the general, since the corporation plans to be doing government business a lot longer than that.

With Austin at Defense and former Federal Reserve Chair Janet Yellen becoming Treasury secretary after receiving at least $7 million in speaking fees from big banks and investment houses in the last three years, the federal government’s two most lucrative agencies will have been securely captured by their primary beneficiaries.

With the exception of Sen. Richard Blumenthal, the members of Connecticut’s congressional delegation — all supposed liberals — are fine with this exploitation. After all, the state is full of investment bankers and military contractors and what’s good for them may be considered good for the state. As for the country, that’s something else.

Even Blumenthal’s concern about Austin probably will become a mere quibble. Federal law prohibits military officers from becoming defense secretary until they have been out of uniform for seven years, so Austin will need a waiver from Congress. Such waivers have been granted twice before. Blumenthal says that to uphold the principle of civilian control of the military, he opposes another waiver. But few other members of Congress are objecting to it, and Blumenthal and those others still could have it both ways, voting against the waiver and then voting to appoint Austin once the waiver is granted.

Besides, with the Democrats in full control of the federal government, conflicts of interest and civilian control will barely register against the party’s new highest objective in Cabinet appointments — racial, ethnic, and gender diversity. Austin is Black and so meets the decisive qualification.

PAY AS YOU THROW?: The Lamont administration seems to have determined that state government no longer can make any money by burning trash to generate electricity at the state Materials Innovation and Recycling Authority’s facility in the South Meadows section of Hartford. Such generation apparently is now much more expensive than electricity generated from natural gas, and the facility’s equipment already needs renovation estimated to cost more than $300 million.

So the authority plans to close the facility by July 2022, turning it into a trash transfer depot and shipping to out-of-state dumps the trash now being burned. This is not only retrograde environmental policy; it likely will raise costs for the authority’s 70 client towns. As a result the authority and the towns are discussing how to reduce their “waste streams” — possibly by charging residents a fee for every bag of trash collected, a system called “pay as you throw.”

There would be some sense to this, since it would cause people to take more responsibility for their trash, the packaging of what they buy, and recycling. But this also would increase the risk of illegal dumping, even as Connecticut’s roadsides and city streets are already strewn with trash.

It might be best for state or federal sales taxes or fees to recover in advance the disposal costs of everything sure to wear out, as the state already does with beverage containers and mattresses and used to do with tires.

Government needs to teach people more about the trash issue. But all that roadside litter suggests that many people are unteachable slobs.

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

Democrats may make sure Republican Party survives

By Chris Powell

As he skips the inauguration of his successor and shuffles off to his resort in Florida, has Donald Trump destroyed the Republican Party? Some political observers think so and of course Democrats hope so.

Trump’s petulant and even seditious exit from office did him no credit. But then he did not do so badly in the popular vote and the Electoral College, and even landslide defeats in presidential elections seldom knock a major party down for long.

Herbert Hoover led the Republicans to a landslide victory in 1928 over Democrat Al Smith but himself was ousted in a landslide by Franklin D. Roosevelt and the Democrats in 1932.

Barry Goldwater, the Republican presidential nominee in 1964, was derided as too conservative and was clobbered by Lyndon B. Johnson and the Democrats in 1964, but the Republicans still won the next presidential election with Richard Nixon.

George McGovern, the Democratic presidential nominee in 1972, was derided as too liberal and lost big to Nixon and the Republicans in 1972, but the Democrats still won four years later with Jimmy Carter.

The reversal of party fortunes in these cases was largely a matter of self-destruction. Hoover turned a stock market crash into the Great Depression. Johnson escalated and failed to win a stupid imperial war. Nixon and his vice president, Spiro Agnew, got caught in criminality. (Even so, Nixon’s appointed vice president, Gerald Ford, nearly won the 1976 presidential election for the Republicans anyway.)

Both major parties have influential elements that many voters find objectionable if not repulsive and yet gain big roles when their party is in power. So it is not hard to imagine such elements bringing trouble to Joe Biden’s new Democratic national administration even as the Republicans at last may be relieved of the daily embarrassments of Trump’s demeanor, especially since, out of office, much civil and even criminal litigation may keep him busy. Additionally, Republicans in Washington may rediscover that being in the minority makes taking potshots easy, far easier than governing.

Will the Biden administration self-destruct with corruption, incompetence, failure, or politically correct nonsense? Maybe not, but with the Democratic margins in Congress being so thin, the new administration may have to be unusually successful to avoid losing control of both houses in the elections two years hence, since mid-term elections usually go against the president’s party.

In any case, while good government is good politics, good government seldom lasts long, so defeated parties tend to revive faster than expected.

REVOLVING DOOR SPINS: Having just left the speakership of Connecticut’s House of Representatives, former state Rep. Joe Aresimowicz, D-Berlin, has quickly moved into a position with Gaffney Bennett and Associates, which calls itself Connecticut’s leading government relations firm. Connecticut’s “revolving door” law prohibits Aresimowicz from lobbying legislators and government agencies for a year, but obviously the firm believes he can bring in a lot of good business anyway.

Aresimowicz’s transformation may dishearten advocates of the public interest but it’s not unusual. The Connecticut Mirror notes that three former House speakers are already lobbying or working for firms that do government relations. The Mirror might have added that a former state Senate leader heads Connecticut’s biggest teacher union.

As a legislator Aresimowicz himself was employed by a government employee union. While this presented more than the typical potential conflict of interest most legislators face, it was perfectly legal, since the legislature is nominally part-time work, most legislators must hold other jobs, and Aresimowicz’s constituents knew who he was when they elected him.

Former state legislators aren’t the only ones drawn to government employment in Connecticut. Many journalists have left news organizations for public relations positions with government agencies or businesses. Indeed, there now may be more former journalists in government P.R. in Connecticut than there are news reporters.

Government is just where the money is these days. Former legislative leaders don’t go to work for the Red Cross, Salvation Army, or Audubon Society, nor do former journalists. There always has been and always will be more money in subverting or deflecting the public interest than in pursuing it.

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

Police chief’s premature pension is $117,000; and a new hidden tax is coming

By Chris Powell

Last week this column examined the government pension racket in Connecticut through the example of the “retirement” of New Haven Police Chief Tony Reyes, who is only 49 and is giving up his city salary of $170,000 to become police chief at Quinnipiac University in adjacent Hamden. Since New Haven City Hall needed a week before it could provide an estimate of the annual pension Reyes immediately will begin receiving, last week’s column surmised it might amount to $80,000.

That was low. The city’s budget office now estimates Reyes’ annual pension at $117,000.

While Quinnipiac is a nonprofit institution exempt from federal, state, and municipal taxes and thereby is subsidized by all levels of government, the university won’t disclose what it will pay Reyes. But his salary there likely will equal or exceed his salary with the city. That would mean annual income for him of at least $287,000 for his remaining 15 or so years of a typical working life. That’s getting close to the $319,000 salary now being paid by the University of Connecticut to its former president, Susan Herbst, who is now teaching just one or two political science courses at UConn’s Stamford branch — essentially another premature pension — after enjoying a year of paid vacation costing UConn $711,000.

Social Security, the pension system covering most people who do not work for the government, penalizes those who begin claiming benefits prior to the standard retirement age but continue to work for wages. The benefits of such people are reduced. But Connecticut’s government pension system rewards people for working for wages while also collecting benefits, thereby signifying that government employees are better and more deserving than the people who pay for them.

This practice is somehow called public service, and while it is all taxpayer money, it draws no objection from the governor, state legislators, and mayors like New Haven’s Justin Elicker, who are always pleading poverty.

ANOTHER HIDDEN TAX: Now Democratic state legislators are planning to impose another hidden tax like the “gross receipts tax” levied on wholesale gasoline prices, which drivers pay without seeing it posted at the gas pump or anywhere else.

The Democrats’ new idea is to tax medical insurance companies as the federal government did until recently in the name of raising money for insurance for the poor. This tax would drive up insurance costs for everybody while giving the false impression that the big, bad insurance companies had raised prices again. The Democrats’ idea presumes that medical insurance is not already expensive enough for nearly everyone.

Government already imposes hidden taxes on medical insurance by requiring policies to provide discretionary coverage many people don’t want.

While government should facilitate decent medical insurance for all, people always should be given a clear view of government’s cost. Other than deceiving voters, there is no justification for hiding the cost of insurance for the poor in the insurance bills of others.

The additional tax burden would be clearer if the revenue was drawn from general state taxes, like the income and sales taxes. Then insurance for the poor would compete in the open with all other demands on government.

Until people can see clearly how they are taxed, they are not likely to insist on efficiency and better priorities in government, like ending the pension racket.

MURPHY LOOKS AWAY: Last week Connecticut U.S. Sen. Chris Murphy deplored the decline of press freedom in Ethiopia. Meanwhile the giant social media companies in the United States began censoring President Trump, former U.S. Rep. Ron Paul, and others because of their political views.

That did not bother the senator.

Additionally, in recent years one national media company has acquired half the daily and weekly newspapers in Connecticut and another three companies have acquired most major radio and television stations in both the state and the country — again without objection from the senator.

Is the senator unaware of the worsening concentration of media ownership at home and the resulting reduction of voices? Or does he realize that while nothing about Ethiopia can ever hurt him, challenging the concentration of media ownership here might?

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

Trump brings out the worst everywhere, including Yale

By Chris Powell

Maybe President Trump’s greatest talent has been to bring out the worst in nearly everyone — not just his supporters, some of whom ransacked the Capitol the other day to stop Congress from formalizing the result of the presidential election, but also his opponents, whose own betrayal of decency has provided many excuses for Trump’s.

Amid the president’s contempt, sneering, mockery, cruelty, hatefulness, megalomania, narcissism, distortions, self-contradiction, ignorance, mental instability, and unfitness to hold authority over others, the country has become Weimar America, with proto-Nazis and Communists brawling in the street, even at the Capitol.

Trump’s contempt is what has resonated most with people. As government is more corrupt than ever and drained of meaning by posturing politicians, people are especially vulnerable to nihilism. Trump didn’t cause this but he has exploited it dangerously.

While the last-minute effort to impeach the president a second time won’t drive him from office and isn’t likely to disqualify him from another presidential candidacy, it at least may restrain him from more recklessness and subversion in the days left before the next president is inaugurated.

Even many Republicans in Congress must be sick of Trump’s demeanor, which has discredited the good things done during his administration as well as the opposition party the country and Connecticut will continue to need.

But as was indicated this week by a phenomenon at law schools around the country, the Trump years have done vast damage to politics and public life, prompting both left and right and large elements of journalism to abandon fairness and due process of law. Instead of trying to calm the hysteria, the president has stoked and reveled in it.

Thousands of law students and professors have just signed a petition originated at Yale University in New Haven calling for Missouri Sen. Josh Hawley and Texas Sen. Ted Cruz, both lawyers and Republicans, to be disbarred for challenging the count of the presidential electoral vote in Congress.

The senators had every right to do this, a right guaranteed in two places in the Constitution, and Democratic senators had done the same after recent elections without being denounced.

The law school petition charges falsely that the challenges by Hawley and Cruz incited the riot at the Capitol, though it was the president who called his supporters to Washington and told them to “fight” before ushering them along to try to intimidate and disrupt the electoral vote count.

But these days it is not enough to defeat one’s adversaries politically. No, political disagreement is now considered cause to strip away their very livelihoods, and this hateful belief infests not just the country’s brawl-ridden streets but also its law schools.

The law students and their professors seem to have missed the warning from playwright Robert Bolt’s resurrection of the great medieval English lawyer, judge, churchman, and martyr Thomas More in “A Man for All Seasons.” Bolt’s More says:

“And when the last law was down and the Devil turned round on you, where would you hide, the laws all being flat? This country’s planted thick with laws from coast to coast — man’s laws, not God’s — and if you cut them down, do you really think you could stand upright in the winds that would blow then? Yes, I give the Devil benefit of law for my own safety’s sake.“

For someday the Devil’s side may be in power and eager to abuse it.

The law students and their professors also seem to have missed the similar warning from the great American judge Learned Hand.

In the middle of World War II Hand reflected on the spirit of liberty. The judge said it “is not the ruthless, the unbridled will. It is not freedom to do as one likes. That is the denial of liberty and leads straight to its overthrow. A society in which men recognize no check upon their freedom soon becomes a society where freedom is the possession of only a savage few, as we have learned to our sorrow. … The spirit of liberty is the spirit that is not too sure that it is right.“

That is, it is a spirit that will not deny the liberty of others no matter how profound the political disagreement. This spirit will remain in danger even as the Trump years come to an end.

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

New Haven police chief ‘retires’ at 49 to pension bonanza

By Chris Powell

Everyone agrees that Tony Reyes has been a great police chief in New Haven, having been appointed in March 2019 after nearly two decades of rising through the ranks of the police department. But the city will lose him in a few weeks as he becomes police chief at Quinnipiac University next door in Hamden. This is being called a retirement, but it is that only technically. In fact it is part of an old racket in Connecticut’s government employee pension system, an abuse of taxpayers.

Typically police personnel qualify to collect full state government and municipal pensions after 20 years, no matter their age. Reyes is only 49, so he easily has another 15 years of working life ahead of him even as he collects a hefty pension from New Haven.

The chief’s salary is $170,000 so his city pension well may be half of that each year. After a week of requests City Hall was unable to provide an estimate of the pension, but then maybe city officials were too busy helping their Climate Emergency Mobilization Task Force figure out how to remove carbon from the atmosphere. In the meantime maybe the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency can handle New Haven’s pensions.

Nor would Quinnipiac disclose what it will pay Reyes, though the university is a nonprofit institution of higher education whose tax exemption comes at the expense of federal, state, and Hamden property taxpayers. But since a Quinnipiac vice president is paid nearly $600,000 a year, Reyes probably won’t starve there.

In the absence of accountability from city government or the university, here’s a guess: Reyes will draw an annual pension from New Haven of $80,000 per year while Quinnipiac pays him $150,000 a year. After 15 years at Quinnipiac, Reyes may get another annual pension of $80,000, plus $30,000 a year in ordinary Social Security, for total retirement income at age 65 of close to $200,000 annually — as if half that wouldn’t be lovely.

Pensions are ordinarily understood to be to support people whose working capacity is ended or substantially diminished. But pensions in state and municipal government in Connecticut often provide luxury lifestyles during second careers and after. Meanwhile mere private-sector workers are lucky to conclude their careers with enough Social Security and savings to scrape by on their way to the hereafter.

This scandal could be remedied easily, with enormous savings and greater retention of the best personnel. State and municipal legislation and contracts could restrict government pension eligibility to the customary retirement age of 65 or to the onset of disability before that. But that would require elected officials who had the wit to alert the public to how it is being exploited and the courage to stand up to the government employee unions.

It also would require news organizations to report the scandal in the first place. But it seems that not even New Haven’s own news organizations have inquired about the police chief’s pension bonanza.

WEED VS. VAPING: The new session of the General Assembly will be intriguing for many reasons, maybe most of all for plans to legalize and tax marijuana while outlawing flavored “vaping” products and prohibiting the sale of tobacco products in stores within 5 miles of schools, which might limit tobacco sales to kiosks in the middle of a few state forests.

Both campaigns seem to be originating with liberal Democratic legislators. The House chairman of the Public Health Committee, Rep. Jonathan Steinberg, D-Westport, an advocate of outlawing flavored vaping products, says, “There’s plenty of documentation about how exposure to addictive products at a young age makes it hard for people to extricate themselves.”

Of course marijuana also can lead to addiction to other drugs. Some people deal with and outgrow dope smoking, but some don’t.

Drug criminalization long has failed and probably has done more damage than illegal drugs themselves. But it is silly to pretend that outlawing “vaping” products will protect kids any more than outlawing marijuana has done.

Contraband laws just create black markets that make the law futile. If Connecticut opts for legal marijuana while prohibiting “vaping” products, it will be only because legislators believe there’s much more tax revenue in the former than the latter.

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

Connecticut is just posturing when it calls poverty racism

By Chris Powell

Does any state do more posturing against racism than Connecticut does only to get such meager results?

A week ago West Haven’s City Council joined the 19 other municipalities in the state that have declared racism a public health emergency. Tolland’s Town Council is being asked to do the same.

But who exactly are the racists? None are ever identified.

And what exactly are the racist public health policies? Seldom are any identified, and the policies cited in West Haven’s resolution aren’t health policies are all, nor are they particularly racial — educational disparities and exposure to environmental hazards. Rather these problems are the consequences of poverty.

Of course poverty and educational disparities are disproportionately racial, and poverty and educational policies fail to elevate many poor people to self-sufficiency. But there is no clamor to examine this failure, perhaps because the perpetuators of poverty and educational policies are in government office and bestow much patronage.

Yes, many Connecticut towns obstruct construction of inexpensive housing through exclusive zoning. To facilitate economic and racial integration, state law should end this. But the motive for the obstruction is perfectly reasonable: Impoverished households impose great public expense, especially because of their child neglect and abuse. They raise school costs, reduce performance, and increase crime.

As long as state policy is merely to spread poverty around rather than to eliminate it, most people won’t want it nearby, and complaints of racism will be misleading and ignored.

Much poverty results from federal government policy, like the failure to enforce antitrust law against the reduction of competition in major sectors of the economy. This failure reduces demand for labor and wages. Meanwhile the deregulation of investment banking has taken huge amounts of money out of the productive economy.

Much poverty also is a matter of the perverse incentives created by education policy, like social promotion, which rewards failure, and by welfare policy, which subsidizes childbearing outside marriage, destroying the family.

Getting at these causes will require returning to basics — like restoring the Glass-Steagall Act to get banks under control and stopping their high-frequency trading and market rigging, as well as holding parents accountable for their child neglect and abuse.

Last week the Connecticut Mirror inadvertently hinted about how elementary some remedies should be. The Mirror reported about a single woman in Bridgeport with two children. Her son had become an early reader and she was warned by his teacher that if she didn’t get him out of his neighborhood school he would quickly fall behind like his disadvantaged classmates.

The woman said she couldn’t afford to move out of Bridgeport and indeed could barely afford an apartment there. “Rents are a lot of money, especially for single parents,” she said. “I don’t know how people do it.”

Just as banks apparently don’t know they shouldn’t rig markets, the Bridgeport woman apparently didn’t know that having children outside marriage is expensive and reduces one’s housing options. Or maybe the banks and the Bridgeport woman do know they shouldn’t do what they did but figure they can get away with it. After all, when government subsidizes institutions and individuals no matter what they do, why not behave badly?

Fortunately the woman’s son won admission to a school in Westport, but his former classmates are still stuck.

For that matter, why shouldn’t state government employees behave badly? There is seldom any serious penalty.

A Judicial Department marshal, Edward Finlayson, was fired in December 2019 for two incidents of misconduct. First he thwarted the arrest of an immigration lawbreaker by federal agents at the courthouse in Derby. Then he obstructed Shelton police in their attempt to arrest two other people there.

But Finlayson appealed and his firing was reduced to a 45-day suspension. He appealed again and the suspension was reduced to 10 days. Despite his subversion of law enforcement he was back on the job within weeks.

News organizations reported his dismissal but not his quick reinstatement, which became public only a few days ago when a curious citizen asked that it be looked into.

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

Cheerleading by governor belies damage to economy

By Chris Powell

Few may begrudge Governor Lamont the cheerfulness of his “state of the state” address upon the opening of the General Assembly this week. As he noted, since last March Connecticut has produced much heroism in confronting the virus epidemic. That heroism includes the governor’s own.

For nobody runs for governor to preside over the destruction of the state’s economy amid mass sickness and death. The epidemic has been overwhelming, and even Lincoln acknowledged being overwhelmed in office. “I claim not to have controlled events,” the president wrote, “but confess plainly that events have controlled me.” They have controlled the governor too.

But the governor’s pep talk conflicted a bit too much with reality. He boasted that the attractiveness of Connecticut is so great that many people have been moving here in recent months. Of course some people have relocated here from New York City and thereabouts, but just days before the governor spoke, the Census Bureau and a moving company reported a net exodus from Connecticut for the year just ended. For many years the state has been losing population relative to the rest of the country.

Responding to the governor’s address, Senate President Pro Tem Martin M. Looney, D-New Haven, and the Senate’s Democratic majority leader, Bob Duff of Norwalk, avoided cheerleading. The epidemic, the senators said in a joint statement, “has impacted everyone in our state, caused untold loss, and fundamentally changed daily life. The 2021 legislative session will be like no other and our focus will be to protect the public’s health and help people recover economically, physically, and mentally.”

The agenda of the legislature’s Democratic majorities, enlarged by the November election, likely will include raising taxes. This week government employee unions rallied at the state Capitol in support of taxing the rich more to reduce pressure to economize with government employees.

The governor’s address said nothing about raising taxes and he lately has opposed raising taxes except when they can be hidden in wholesale gasoline prices. But the governor spoke favorably about legalizing marijuana and sports and internet gambling, which would be heavily taxed. Legal marijuana and more gambling, the governor noted in justification, are happening throughout the country. But these things are less signs of human progress than of the financial desperation of state government as it lacks the courage necessary to control costs.

Amid his cheerleading the governor could manage only a single reference to the thousands of state residents who for months have been lining up for free food. Meanwhile business closings and bankruptcies have been increasing.

Maybe the new national administration will send the states trillions more dollars in remediation, but there are serious risks in that, since the dollar’s international value is already falling sharply and some experts are musing about hyperinflation, which will harm the working class most even as property owners profit from it. Restoring the economy is likely to take a long time.

* * *

THE NEW OLD BOSS: Anyone hoping for a big change in the federal government’s economic and market regulation policies should take a close look at President-elect Biden’s nomination of former Federal Reserve Chair Janet Yellen for U.S. Treasury secretary.

The nomination has raised concerns because it seems like a merger between the Treasury Department and the central bank, whose independence of the frankly political side of the government long has been touted as a principle of central banking.

But it turns out that in the three years since Yellen resigned from the Fed she has been paid at least $7 million in speaking fees by the big banks and investment houses that the Fed and Treasury regulate and occasionally rescue financially. Yellen probably received more than $7 million, since it appears that she has not yet fully reported her income from banking and investment interests.

Rejoicing in what seems to be their party’s capture of a narrow majority in the U.S. Senate, some Democratic congressmen are promising to enact another cash bonus to every citizen of as much as $2,000. But with Yellen at Treasury, will the big banks and investment houses already have assured themselves of far more than that?

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