Waterbury’s water disaster is a political lesson for all

By CHRIS POWELL

Waterbury suffered another catastrophic breakdown of its water system this month, the second since September, with most of the city and parts of its suburbs having to go without water for several days. 

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In both breakdowns city employees worked heroically around the clock to repair the damage, which was caused by the rupture of century-old piping.

Waterbury now plans to spend millions of dollars to replace old pipes and valves. But as indicated by the recent disasters and the smaller pipe breaks the city often suffers, the improvements should have been made long ago.

Waterbury is hardly alone in its neglect of infrastructure. The neglect of Hartford’s sewer system has been notorious and only this year started to get serious attention when it was noted that the worst damage was occurring in the city’s poorest neighborhood. Other municipalities in Connecticut are also living with old and potentially troublesome piping.

Why? It’s ordinary politics. As journalist James Reston said, all politics is based on the indifference of the majority. The public seldom cares much and pays little attention, so the squeaky wheels — and palms — get the grease. 

Basic infrastructure can be expensive and there is no influential constituency for maintenance and improvements until a vital system collapses and most people suffer from it and reluctantly concede that to fix the problem money must be spent and taxes probably raised. 

Elected officials know that it’s easy to raise the money for basic infrastructure when it collapses, but it’s hard to raise money for infrastructure when it seems to be working and is competing with all other demands on government, many of which come from influential constituencies. 

So elected officials may not worry much about infrastructure collapses, knowing that repair money will always be made available after a collapse, even if repairs cost far more than good maintenance would have.

Connecticut’s most influential constituency, unionized government employees, even has a special system of law to ensure its contentment: binding arbitration of union contracts. The law removes from the ordinary democratic process control of government employee compensation, which is most state and municipal government spending.

These days the people of the Waterbury area particularly and people throughout the state generally might do well to ask themselves: Why is there no binding arbitration for neglected basic infrastructure? Why is there no binding arbitration for, say, some other recently publicized failures of state government policy, the neglected needs of the homeless mentally ill and autistic children and their families?

Why has Governor Lamont promised 4.5% raises for unionized state employees but nothing for the homeless mentally ill and autistic children?

It’s because the special interests are always mobilized politically while the public interest is seldom mobilized, mainly because journalism about serious issues, like literacy generally, is declining and because elected officials lack the courage to risk offending special interests by trying to mobilize the public interest, which is usually contrary to the special interest.

If Connecticut ever wants a better public life, it will need a better public.

END COURTHOUSE SANCTUARY: A Wisconsin state judge has just been convicted in federal court of obstructing enforcement of federal immigration law. She helped an illegal immigrant evade arrest in her courthouse. 

Courthouses are good places for catching lawbreakers, since many lawbreakers are chronic. On average non-citizens may be better behaved than citizens, but this doesn’t really excuse illegal immigration, as supporters of illegal immigration suggest; the average is no consolation to people who have been wronged by someone in the group with the better average.

The Wisconsin case impugns Connecticut’s latest law obstructing immigration law enforcement, a law purporting to prohibit federal agents from making arrests in state courthouses. The law’s nonsensical rationale is that everyone should feel safe in a Connecticut courthouse — even people violating immigration law.

So what is to happen if, as in Wisconsin, court officials in Connecticut help illegal immigrants evade arrest? And why should someone breaking immigration law feel safe anywhere?

Chris Powell has written about Connecticut government and politics for many years. (CPowell@cox.net)

It’s a wonderful life, and a political one

By CHRIS POWELL

Frank Capra’s 1946 film, “It’s a Wonderful Life,” to be broadcast again Christmas Eve at 8 p.m. by NBC television, is loved most for its personal message of discovery at Christmas: that its hero’s life has been, unbeknownst to him, crucial to his family, friends, community, and even his country.

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Such general encouragement may seem more needed than ever these days; indeed, this may be, sadly, the cause of the film’s popularity. But “It’s a Wonderful Life” may be more important still for its overlooked lesson in democratic economics, a lesson arising from the struggle for survival of a combination credit union and savings bank, the Bailey Building & Loan in the Everytown of Bedford Falls.

The Building & Loan’s founder and chief executive, Peter Bailey, has died and its board of directors is deciding the institution’s future. The richest man in town, Potter, a misanthropic banker, cruel landlord, and Building & Loan board member, played by Lionel Barrymore, proposes dissolving the institution, and his callousness angers Bailey’s elder son, George, played earnestly by Jimmy Stewart, who has been working as assistant to his father.

*

POTTER: Peter Bailey was not a businessman. That’s what killed him. Oh, I don’t mean any disrespect to him, God rest his soul. He was a man of high ideals — so-called. But ideals without common sense can ruin this town. Now you take this loan here, to Ernie Bishop. You know, the fellow who sits around all day on his … brains, in his taxi. I happen to know the bank turned down this loan. But he comes here, and we’re building him a house worth $5,000. Why?

GEORGE BAILEY: Well, I handled that, Mr. Potter. You have all the papers there — his salary, insurance. I can personally vouch for his character.

POTTER: A friend of yours.

BAILEY: Yes, Sir.

POTTER: You see, if you shoot pool with some employee, you can come and borrow money. What does that get us? A discontented, lazy rabble instead of a thrifty working class. And all because a few starry-eyed dreamers like Peter Bailey stir them up and fill their heads with a lot of impossible ideas. Now I say. …

BAILEY: Now hold on, Mr. Potter. Just a minute. Now you’re right when you say my father was no businessman — I know that. Why he ever started this cheap, penny-ante building-and-loan I’ll never know. But neither you nor anyone else can say anything against his character, because his whole life was. … Why, in the 25 years since he and Uncle Billy started this thing, he never thought of himself. Isn’t that right, Uncle Billy? He didn’t save enough money to send Harry to school, let alone me, but he did help a few people get out of your slums, Mr. Potter. Now what’s wrong with that? Why, you’re all businessmen here. Doesn’t it make them better citizens? Doesn’t it make them better customers? You said that … what did you say a minute ago? “They have to wait and save their money before they even think of a decent home.” Wait? Wait for what? Until their children grow up and leave them? Until they’re so old and broken-down that they. … Do you know how long it takes a working man to save $5,000? Just remember this, Mr. Potter: that this “rabble” you’re talking about, they do most of the working and paying and living and dying in this community. Well, is it too much to have them work and pay and live and die in a couple of decent rooms and a bath? Anyway, my father didn’t think so. …

*

At the board’s insistence, George Bailey takes over in his father’s place to keep the Building & Loan going, and soon he forestalls a run on it, part of a general financial panic, by putting up the money he has saved for his honeymoon and by preaching to a mob of frightened depositors about how they should not withdraw their money but instead have faith in the institution, because their money isn’t kept in cash in the safe but rather is invested in the houses, the mortgages, the very lives of their neighbors.

Of course this is Capra’s metaphor for politics and the world: that there is progress when everyone is given a chance, a little capital and credit, when people play by the rules, look out for each other, and don’t take too much more than they need, and that selfishness is the ruin of everything.

Something like this — more or less a policy of helping to make middle-class everyone who aspired to it and would indeed play by the rules, a policy of democratizing capital and credit — made the United States the most prosperous country and the most successful in elevating the human condition.

But for some decades now the price of obtaining and maintaining those “two decent rooms and a bath” and the middle-class life to go with it has risen as real wages have stagnated, largely under the pressure of government’s unrelenting taxes and inflation in the name of services that have not really been rendered, a welfare system that has subsidized what somehow is not permitted to be called the antisocial behavior it is, and a plutocracy that has gained control of the economy and both major political parties.

There seem to be more people who, if too confused or demoralized to be dangerous, are still closer to being a “rabble” than the country saw even during the Great Depression.

Even at its best now Christmas is seldom more than an itinerant charity that, necessary as it may seem, tends to suppress the great political question of the day after Christmas, the Feast of Stephen: the question of how things can be organized to ensure that everyone has a good chance to earn his way in decency. But the joy of Christmas is that the answer has been given, that we are not lost, that the country was shown the way and can recover it — that society can work for all, that it really can be a wonderful life if enough selfless people make it a political one.

Chris Powell has written about Connecticut government and politics for many years. (CPowell@cox.net)

-END-

Immigration law enforcement can succeed without cruelty

By CHRIS POWELL

Democratic U.S. senators, led by Connecticut’s Richard Blumenthal, the ranking minority member of the Senate’s Permanent Committee on Investigations, held a hearing at the Capitol the other day to publicize mistakes and misconduct by federal immigration agents, particularly their arrests of U.S. citizens and their excessive use of force. The testimony, as Blumenthal said, was “troubling,” more so since members of the Senate’s Republican majority declined to attend lest they help embarrass the Trump administration.

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But everyone should be embarrassed.

Republicans should acknowledge that immigration enforcement has gotten reckless when U.S. citizens are not only being arrested but sometimes detained for days before their citizenship is established and they are released.

Democrats, including Blumenthal, should acknowledge that the immigration mess and its cruelty are largely their party’s fault, arising from their last national administration’s opening the borders, allowing millions of foreigners to enter without review, and claiming that nothing could stop it except new laws. When the Trump administration began enforcing the laws as they were, illegal entries were quickly brought way down.

Immigration law enforcement is necessary to protect the country, to ensure that immigrants are committed to a democratic and secular political culture, not theocratic fascism, and to restore fairness to the immigration system. But immigration raids and the resulting cruelty could be avoided by adopting a few simple policies.

First, Congress could require all employers to use the federal government’s internet-based “e-Verify” system of confirming a job applicant’s legal standing to work in the United States. The system compares employment forms submitted by applicants to employers against federal government records to confirm eligibility for employment. If an applicant’s records don’t match, an employer must not hire him.

The system isn’t foolproof but conscientious people can correct its mistakes. It’s not too much to demand that people maintain copies of their birth certificates or certificates of authorization to work in the United States.

Second, since it’s already a federal crime to hire illegal immigrants knowingly, enforcement should concentrate on employers rather than grabbing people off the street. Many employers too easily accept the word of applicants that they are legally entitled to work. Employers should be required to make job applicants produce proof of citizenship or eligibility to work. Nothing might discourage illegal immigration like the well-publicized prosecution and imprisonment of a few dozen irresponsible employers in each state.

Third, federal law should forbid states from issuing identification documents, including driver’s licenses, unless the requesters prove their citizenship. Having long issued such identification documents to illegal immigrants, states like Connecticut have been deliberately facilitating illegal immigration. 

Indeed, this racket may have started in New Haven in 2007 when the city introduced its Elm City Identification Card precisely to help illegal immigrants live in the city in violation of immigration law. Of course some people don’t drive and need some official form of identification other than a driver’s license, and states and municipalities should be able to provide it — but only when the applicant shows proof of citizenship or eligibility for long-term residency in the country.

And fourth, federal law should forbid providing any government services or benefits to illegal immigrants, including education, except for emergency medical care. 

If such procedures were in place, illegal immigration might end peacefully, since as a practical matter living in the country illegally would become all but impossible. Illegal immigrants would strive to become legal fast or they would return to their native countries voluntarily without risking capture and deportation.

Of course most Democrats in Connecticut oppose effective immigration law enforcement. They refuse to distinguish between legal and illegal immigration and want state government to keep obstructing enforcement. This is part of the national Democratic scheme to use illegal immigrants to increase the population in Democratic areas and thus to increase the number of Democratic congressional and state legislative districts. 

To most Democrats, gaining permanent control of the government is worth any amount of cruelty to their pawns.

——

Chris Powell has written about Connecticut government and politics for many years. (CPowell@cox.net)

-END-

Don’t ask government employees if state should raise taxes

By CHRIS POWELL

According to state Sen. Jan Hochadel, D-Meriden, Connecticut shouldn’t be afraid of taxing the wealthy more.

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In a newspaper essay last week Hochadel cited a study done last year by something called A Better Connecticut Institute. The study, the senator wrote, contended that “income taxes play almost no role in where high-earning individuals choose to live,” and that “when states raise taxes on top earners, the number of wealthy residents who actually leave is statistically insignificant,” only around 2%.

“Wealthy people, like everyone else, care about more than their tax bill,” Hochadel wrote — they also care about schools, public services, public safety, economic opportunities, and such.

Well, of course. But no one says the wealthy care only about taxes and not about those other things. They care about many things, including taxes. It is a matter of judgment and degree.

Besides, who exactly should be considered wealthy for tax purposes? 

The senator writes of “millionaires,” but when retirement savings are added, housing price inflation has made millionaires of tens of thousands of Connecticut residents who are not close to being plutocrats but still pay a lot in taxes. Millionaires are not as rich as they used to be.

Maybe certain billionaires don’t care about Connecticut’s income tax, but then why have so many state residents who are not billionaires been moving to Florida and other low-tax southern states as they near retirement and even before? Why are states that don’t tax their residents as much as Connecticut does growing economically and in population even as Connecticut’s economy is stagnant and its population might be decreasing if not for the illegal immigration state government encourages?

As Connecticut’s illegal immigration from Central America and the Caribbean suggests, migration is not entirely a matter of warmer winters. Those illegal immigrants see more money for themselves where there are colder winters. Contrary to Hochadel’s suggestion, money and people still tend to go where they are treated best.

Liberal Democratic state legislators like Hochadel have two reasons for framing their desire to increase state government spending as a matter of raising taxes only on the wealthy. 

First is that these legislators can’t make a good case for spending more on the merits of the spending itself, a case that would persuade the less than wealthy. For decades these legislators have been bleating about poverty in Connecticut and appropriating more to alleviate it without reducing poverty at all. Some state government policies plainly perpetuate poverty. No state government seeking to reduce poverty would subsidize childbearing outside marriage and run schools by social promotion as Connecticut does. But ministering to poverty and making it generational provides much political patronage for Democrats.  

Second is that while state government still neglects much human need, liberal Democratic legislators, being the tools of the government employee unions, don’t dare to examine the mismanagement, waste, fraud, and general excess in government, where much money could be saved. Reports in this regard by news organizations and the state auditors almost always pass without comment from liberal Democratic legislators. Most look away even from federal prosecutions of corruption in state government.    

Now that Connecticut has become a one-party state, Democrats have become the party of government for its own sake — not the party of efficient and effective government. Hochadel’s essay revealed her as an embodiment of this problem.

The organization whose study the senator cited in her essay, A Better Connecticut Institute, consists mainly of government employee unions, and Hochadel herself is an officer of the Connecticut chapter of the American Federation of Teachers.

That is, the institute represents mostly state and municipal government employees, who just happen to be the recipients of most state and municipal government tax revenue. 

Just as you shouldn’t ask the barber if you need a haircut, you shouldn’t seek advice from government employee unions about whether taxes should be raised so more money can be spent on their members. Bettering Connecticut requires much more than making government employees happy.

Chris Powell has written about Connecticut government and politics for many years. (CPowell@cox.net)

Hartford hints at best way to solve housing shortage

By CHRIS POWELL

State government and Hartford city government have figured out the easiest way to solve Connecticut’s desperate shortage of inexpensive housing. They just haven’t quite realized that they have figured it out.

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The solution was presented at City Hall last week by Mayor Arunan Arulampalam and Governor Lamont, who announced a $4 million project funded jointly by the state and the city through what is called the Connecticut Home Funds initiative. The project is to turn 18 blighted and abandoned residential properties, condemned by the city long ago, into 20 units of new, owner-occupied housing.

The properties are to be sold to builders for $1 and the program will help them finance construction. The builders will be required to sell the new houses to people of moderate income at a price that will permit them to be mortgaged for a monthly payment close to the neighborhood’s apartment rents. The program aims to increase Hartford’s homeownership rate, the lowest in the state at only 23%. 

The price control involved, while likely to be popular, may be tricky to manage and is mistaken anyway, since it aims to prevent “gentrification” even as Hartford, terribly poor, needs many more residents with higher incomes. 

The program’s selection of builders also may be troublesome since it is likely to be heavily influenced by political patronage. 

But then Connecticut is a one-party state, nearly everything in its government is contaminated by patronage, and advocacy of the public interest is so weak here that it’s hard to accomplish anything good without patronage.

What is crucial about the Hartford project is its hint that the best way to alleviate the housing shortage isn’t to fiddle with zoning regulations and state financial incentives to municipalities but simply to build housing wherever it can be built without aggravating the neighbors too much.

Hartford is hardly alone in being full of dilapidated and underused properties. Connecticut is pockmarked not just with deteriorating tenements but also vacant former factories and commercial buildings. Many city office buildings are half vacant as well now that so many people work from home via the internet. 

Most of these properties would be infinitely more beneficial and attractive to their neighborhoods if replaced by  new housing, single- or multi-family, or converted to mixed commercial and residential use — so much more beneficial and attractive that even the worst snobs might not mind new people moving into town to replace the eyesores. Most of these properties are already served by water, sewer, and utility lines, so housing construction would not chew up the countryside with more suburban sprawl.

But transforming dilapidated and underused properties into the housing Connecticut needs won’t meet the urgency of the moment unless, as Hartford has done, government gains control of the properties and clears the way to their replacement.

No builder or developer wants to spend months or years haggling with a zoning board and pretty-pleasing the neighbors, just as no one who needs housing — including the children of the very people who object to new housing nearby — wants to wait months or years for a decent home he can afford.

So addressing the housing shortage with the necessary urgency is a matter of identifying the properties where any housing would be better than leaving the properties as they are. That approach might create more housing in a year than the housing law Connecticut enacted this year after such controversy.

So an amendment to that law is in order. The law authorizes the state Housing Department to build housing on state government property. The department also should be authorized to condemn and take control of decrepit or abandoned properties anywhere in the state and arrange construction of housing there, and to solicit municipalities to recommend such properties for conversion.     

Connecticut has many places where any housing would be better than leaving things as they are. Identify them, level them, build housing on them, and bring housing prices down along with the state’s high cost of living.

Chris Powell has written about Connecticut government and politics for many years. (CPowell@cox.net)

-END-

More ‘public benefits’ bunk; and the big liability machine

By CHRIS POWELL

Hiding the costs of government social welfare programs in customer electric bills — the long-running scandal of Connecticut’s “public benefits” charges — is bad enough. But the other day Marc E. Fitch of the Yankee Institute’s Connecticut Inside Investigator disclosed that one “public benefits” charge has allowed the Public Utilities Regulatory Authority to pay to have itself lobbied by groups purporting to represent poor people.

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Something called the Nonprofit Accountability Group, based in Hartford, has been paid tens of thousands of dollars by PURA, money drawn from “public benefits” charges, to coordinate meetings involving utility rates, conduct outreach, and pay for transportation, child care, translation services, food, and even stipends for participants in its activities.

The money is paid through PURA’s Stakeholder Group Compensation Program, established by a state law enacted in 2023 to increase participation from “utility customers residing in an environmental justice community or receiving protection as hardship cases.”

But why should poor people particularly be trained to participate in PURA rate cases? Hasn’t the authority already discerned on its own that nearly everyone wants electricity bills to be lower? Doesn’t Connecticut already have an Office of Consumer Counsel and an attorney general’s office, amply staffed, to argue for holding utility rates down?  

And what about the conflict of interest the program creates for PURA? The agency is supposed to be an impartial judge in rate cases, balancing customer and utility company interests to achieve the public interest in adequate and efficient service and fair return on utility company investment. PURA can’t be considered impartial in rate cases when it is financing one side.

The Stakeholder Group Compensation Program looks like another patronage make-work racket like those lately contrived by state Sen. Doug McCrory, D-Hartford, and his girlfriend, the racket’s main beneficiary. 

The Republican leader in the state House of Representatives, Rep. Vincent Candelora of North Branford, wants a legislative committee to investigate the Stakeholder Group Compensation Program. But since the consumer counsel and attorney general are already doing the work at issue, the program should just be repealed. That will reduce utility bills more than the program itself does.

*

State government in Connecticut often seems like a big liability manufacturing machine, often getting sued over its negligence. The latest notable payout is $2.25 million to the family of visiting nurse Joyce Grayson, who was sexually assaulted and murdered in 2023 by paroled sex offender Michael Reese when she visited him at a halfway house in Willimantic to administer medication.

Reese probably never should have been at the halfway house. He had served 14 years in prison for stabbing and sexually assaulting a woman in New Haven in 2006, was released in 2020, and sent back to prison twice for violating his probation before being released again and murdering Grayson.

But Connecticut is the land of repeat offenders who are never put away for good until they kill or maim someone. So despite his probation violations Reese was released again with deadly results. In a plea bargain in August, Reese, 40, pleaded guilty and this time was sentenced to 50 years without probation or parole.

Grayson’s family has complained about state government’s failure to provide security to visiting nurses treating dangerous people outside prison. But the bigger failure here was the failure of the criminal-justice system, which could have imprisoned Reese longer after he twice violated his probation.

Grayson’s family sued state government, the visiting nurse company that employed her, and even the owner of the building occupied by the halfway house, and they appear to be sharing responsibility for paying the $2.25 million settlement. How much will be paid by state government isn’t clear. 

But in any case there is not likely to be any official attempt to calculate how much state government’s failure to deal properly with repeat offenders is costing Connecticut in lives and property. For the highest objective of criminal justice in Connecticut often seems to be only to keep criminals out of prison, reducing prison expense instead of crime.

Chris Powell has written about Connecticut government and politics for many years. (CPowell@cox.net)

A big payday for child neglect? And not all cruelty is Trump’s

By CHRIS POWELL

Everyone has heard the story about the boy who murdered his parents and then asked the court for leniency because he had become an orphan.

Connecticut now has a case that goes one better. 

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The “estate” of Jacqueline “Mimi” Torres — the 11-year-old whose decomposed body was found in a box in New Britain in October and who is alleged to have been fatally abused by her mother, Karla Garcia — is suing the state Department of Children and Families for $100 million in damages. Seventy-five million is for the fatal abuse of Jacqueline and the other $25 million is for abuse against her sister.

Who is Jacqueline’s “estate”?

It’s her father, Victor Torres, who lost custody of Jacqueline in January 2013 soon after her birth because he was in prison. After his release Torres regained joint custody with Jacqueline’s mother in May 2022. But he says he last saw the girl in June 2024, a few months before when police believe she was killed and her body stuffed in the box, which wouldn’t be discovered and opened for a year. Torres didn’t look very hard for her.

If Torres’ lawsuit is to be believed, the state Department of Children and Families owed the girl the care her own father failed to provide, having abandoned the girl. A real father might have insisted on being involved enough in her life to discover her abuse and avert her murder.

Now the $100 million claimed as damages by Jacqueline’s “estate” stands to reward Torres for his indifference and negligence.

The office of state Attorney General William Tong will defend the child welfare department against the lawsuit filed by Jacqueline’s “estate.” If the attorney general could take a break from joining federal lawsuits against the Trump administration, he might ask a state court to remove Torres as next of kin to the child he abandoned and from whose horrible death he now may imagine a spectacular payday.

* * *

From Tong’s bluster about the many federal lawsuits he has joined, people might think that all the neglect of the needy in Connecticut is the Trump administration’s fault.

But last week Connecticut Public Radio’s Sujata Srinivasan and Maysoon Khan reported about state government’s own neglect of hundreds of autistic children and their badly stressed parents.

The reporters found that a program underwritten by federal Medicaid provides respite care for parents of autistic children as well as live-in companions, job coaching, and other services. But state government hasn’t appropriated enough to cover all the 2,400 kids for whom such help has been requested, and the state Social Services Department has only about half the case managers it would need.

So some of the autistic children have been on a waiting list for 10 years.

Part of the problem is that the rates paid by state government to Medicaid providers remain disgracefully low and so people covered by Medicaid often have trouble finding health professionals to serve them. Even if the Social Services Department had all the case managers it would need to handle more services to autistic children, it probably would not be able to find many autism professionals willing to work for Medicaid rates.

Yet nearly every week state government announces millions of dollars in grants for less compelling things. 

Last month Governor Lamont said the state would give $121 million to QuantumCT, which he described as “a nonprofit that serves as the statewide coordinating body for advancing quantum technologies and convening industry and early-stage innovators, academia, and the public sector.” The General Assembly should check back in a year to see exactly what that meant and what, if anything, the money accomplished — after seeing if the Social Services Department has gotten around to the autistic kids. 

Meanwhile state employee unions are to be given raises of 4.5%, far higher than the raises being given in the private sector.

If these were Trump’s priorities, the people who run Connecticut would be screaming, “How cruel!”

Chris Powell has written about Connecticut government and politics for many years. (CPowell@cox.net)

If ‘public benefits’ require deception, get rid of them

By CHRIS POWELL

Misconduct by its recently disgraced and departed chairwoman, Marissa Gillett, has Connecticut’s Public Utilities Regulatory Authority on the defensive. Past utility rate decisions have been put in legal jeopardy, utility companies are getting angry and aggressive, Gillett’s Democratic allies in the General Assembly have been discredited for their complicity with her power grabbing and lies, longstanding criticism by Republican legislators has been vindicated, and state government’s infamous “public benefits charges” on electricity bills are becoming a political issue again.

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Some of those charges were recently removed by legislation with their financed transferred to state government borrowing, but most of the charges remain, comprising about 20% of customer electric bills, an estimated $1 billion annually. So at a Hartford Business Journal conference last month, a senior vice president of Connecticut’s largest electric utility, Eversource, Digaunto Chatterjee, called for removing the charges from electric bills entirely and financing their programs through the state budget.

For some time this has been the position of Republican legislators, who note that the charges function not only as a hidden tax but also as a tax on a necessity of life. But the electric companies, being heavily regulated and long having been scapegoated for Connecticut’s high electricity prices, had not been taking sides on the issue, lest they aggravate their adversaries.

Governor Lamont and most Democratic legislators are still resisting serious reform with the charges. The House chairman of the General Assembly’s Energy and Technology Committee, Rep. Jonathan Steinberg, D-Westport, says it makes little no difference how the programs financed by the charges are paid for — by footnotes on electricity bills or by regular state government appropriations and formal taxes.

Steinberg is wrong. For if the “public benefits charges” were eliminated, the programs they finance would have to start competing for appropriations along with everything else state government spends money on. They would become part of the budget process, where the items financed by the charges would get far more scrutiny from the governor, legislators, news organizations, and the public than they get now when they are buried in electric bills.

The HBJ reported last week that the “public benefits charges” consist of 63 fees that are summarized on electric bills in two line items, a format that virtually prohibits intelligent review. Of course that’s the way the governor and most Democratic legislators like it. They don’t think they would gain much politically from a billion-dollar reduction in electricity costs if it came with a billion-dollar increase in the state budget and taxes. Then they might face another billion dollars’ worth of controversy as they converted from a system where the charges and the programs they finance are hidden to a system where they would jostle against everything else government money is wanted for. Maybe in such a public process the governor and legislators would have trouble justifying some of the charges. Maybe they would feel compelled to reduce or eliminate some of the programs.

Moving the charges to the state budget would be best but it’s not the only way to increase transparency and accountability. A modest improvement might be for state government to keep the charges and their programs but to recover their costs with a formal sales tax on electricity — itemized in bold lettering at the top of all electricity bills.  

That would get people’s attention even if it failed to explain the programs being financed by the charges. 

Some of those programs may be necessary for the stability of the electrical system, but some are environmental niceties and nuttiness and some are simply welfare subsidies that are fairly resented by people who pay their own electric bills.

If the main objective of the “public benefits charges” is to pay for necessary things, they can be financed by the state budget and formal taxes. 

If the main objective of the charges is just to conceal government expenses and deceive people, nothing is worth that much and programs financed that way should be scrapped.

Chris Powell has written about Connecticut government and politics for many years. (CPowell@cox.net)

Blumenthal chastises merchants who are more honest than he is

By CHRIS POWELL

What would the holidays be in Connecticut without U.S. Sen. Richard Blumenthal warning his constituents about the perils of the season — dangerous toys, fraudulent business practices, Republicans, and the like? (Poking the Russian bear on its own doorstep has yet to make the senator’s list.)

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Eastern Connecticut State University tries to revive the ‘noble savage’ myth

Last week the senator affected alarm about merchants who advertise products available for purchase with deferred payments — “buy now, pay later” promotions. People who purchase something by agreeing to pay in the future may find when the bill comes due that their financial situation has deteriorated. Worse, the senator notes, being late with a deferred payment may trigger penalty interest charges. 

Of course anyone who has graduated from high school might suspect these risks. But then maybe the senator understands that many Connecticut high school graduates can’t read, write, and do math at a high school or even an elementary school level. 

In any case the senator overlooks an argument in favor of “buy now, pay later” purchases, an argument that members of Congress especially should understand: inflation and the decline of the value of the U.S. dollar and wages paid in dollars. Amid inflation certain goods — if not worn out, damaged, or perishable — may actually increase in value and, when payment has to be made, may be worth more than their original price.

Indeed, Blumenthal misses the great irony in his warning people against deferred payment schemes: his having been for the last 15 years an enthusiastic supporter of the federal government’s own “buy now, pay later” policy. 

For the federal government increasingly finances itself with borrowing, and its total debt now exceeds $38 trillion, an unfathomable number. 

Government debt is not necessarily bad; it can be productive. But this is a matter of degree, and in recent years the federal debt has gone wild, as indicated by the country’s recent severe inflation and the heavy burden of federal government interest payments, estimated at about a trillion dollars annually and rising.

Most of this debt is not for long-lasting capital projects that will benefit the country for decades but for ordinary operating expenses and income supports, with the interest requiring payment far into the future by people who never benefited from the debt. 

This is borrowing for current expenses, which used to be considered immoral. But in national politics today, especially among Democrats like Blumenthal, money is believed to be infinite. (Most Republicans know better without acting much better.)

Today in Congress if any Democrat sees a need, actual or merely political, he’ll put it into an appropriations bill, and, if he’s friendly enough with the ranking Democrat on the House Appropriations Committee, Connecticut Rep. Rosa DeLauro, she’ll put it into the next federal budget with no concern about the federal debt, inflation, or interest burdens.

Congressmen love this system because it lets them distribute infinite goodies, essential or not, and pay for them indirectly, not with taxes but with inflation, a disguised tax few voters understand or can fix responsibility for.

That’s why the merchants promoting deferred payments are actually more honest than the senator who is warning his constituents against them. 

Stick to a merchant’s deferred payment plan and you’ll pay only as much as you signed up to pay. But with the federal government, whose costs are increasingly financed by borrowing, debt monetization, and inflation, you pay now, later, and — since the debt is never actually repaid at all, but just keeps rising — you pay for the rest of your life as well for what you get or once got from the federal government, and for what you didn’t get but others get or used to get.

So what’s really more dangerous — the toys Blumenthal is scorning, whose small parts a 2-year-old might pull off and swallow or stick in his nose or ear, or a government that, when the kid turns 18, will welcome him into adulthood largely ignorant and unskilled but, as a taxpayer, already heavily mortgaged?

Chris Powell has written about Connecticut government and politics for many years. (CPowell@cox.net)

There’s plenty of guilt by association to go around in Connecticut

By CHRIS POWELL

Connecticut’s Democratic state chairman, Danbury Mayor Roberto Alves, thinks he has discovered the decisive disqualification for the two declared candidates for next year’s Republican nomination for governor — Greenwich state Sen. Ryan Fazio and former New Britain Mayor Erin Stewart — and presumably for any Republican seeking elective office in Connecticut.

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It’s a slight variation of the Democratic election strategy that has been in use for the last nine years: Just keep chanting: “Trump! Trump! Trump!”

Alves’ variation on the theme is to ask Fazio and Stewart, as he did in a recent newspaper essay, whether they would still like President Trump’s endorsement, now that Trump and the Republican majority in Congress are reducing or threatening to reduce federal food and medical insurance subsidies.

Those subsidies raise an important question: Whether their excesses, which include a lot of fraud, some of which has been manifested in Connecticut, can ever be eliminated without harming the deserving poor. One incident of such fraud was publicized again last week when former Bristol Democratic state Rep. Christopher Ziogas pleaded guilty to federal corruption charges involving Medicare and Medicaid, fraud in which Governor Lamont’s former social services commissioner was implicated, soon after which she retired.

State authorities did not prosecute this fraud — federal authorities did. Indeed, it’s a fair question as to whether state government in Connecticut ever will get serious about eliminating excesses in social welfare programs without the pressure of sharply reduced appropriations.

Alves is pitching guilt by association: Trump is a cruel megalomaniac and a Republican, Fazio and Stewart are Republicans who voted for Trump, therefore Fazio and Stewart are cruel megalomaniacs, and so are all others who voted for Trump, even reluctantly, perceiving him as the lesser evil.

All’s fair in love, war, and politics, and of course in the presidential election last year Republicans campaigned against Democrats as Alves is campaigning against Republicans now. Democrats who were supporting their party’s presidential candidate, first President Biden and then Vice President Kamala Harris, were accused of endorsing rampant inflation, illegal immigration, and transgenderism. Chanting “Trump! Trump! Trump!” as Democrats did last year failed to address these issues.

As Democratic state chairman, Alves could be especially attached to the Trump-chanting strategy because it might help avoid what should be the main issue in next year’s election in Connecticut — the record of the Lamont administration as the governor seeks a third term, as well as the longer record of the Democratic administration of the state since its last Republican governor, Jodi Rell, left office 14 years ago.

Connecticut has many problems: its long economic decline relative to the rest of the country; its high cost of living, especially with housing prices; its worsening poverty; and its many scandals of mismanagement in state agencies, scandals suggesting that the governor doesn’t pay enough attention. Awful as the president may be, Trump is not responsible for these problems.

It will be good if Fazio and Stewart can articulate these issues and it will be better still if they dare to specify alternative policies, especially toward the housing shortage. While the housing legislation just enacted by the General Assembly’s Democratic majority and the governor is mainly a sympathetic pose and is not likely to get much housing built, the Republican position on the housing shortage is mainly fear of the underclass.

But if Fazio and Stewart want to play Alves’ game about Trump’s endorsement, they could ask Alves whether the governor wants the endorsement of, say, Ziogas; his former deputy budget director, Konstantinos Diamantis, also just convicted on federal corruption charges; his disgraced former chairwoman of the Public Utilities Regulatory Authority, Marissa Gillett, who quit abruptly a few weeks ago when she was caught lying extravagantly; and former university Chancellor Terrence Cheng, who was removed for exploiting his expense account but still given severance pay of nearly $500,000.

Why can’t it just be taken for granted that both major political parties are terribly flawed? Maybe then there would be time to discuss issues.

Chris Powell has written about Connecticut government and politics for many years. (CPowell@cox.net)

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