Chris Powell column

By Chris Powell

Back when children attended school in Connecticut, before administration was forfeited to the teacher unions, and the kids had their first lessons about government, they were taught the division of responsibility. That is, the federal government is responsible for issues affecting the whole country, state government is responsible for issues affecting the whole state, and municipal government handles issues particular to a city or town.

So imagine how confusing it must be now for students in New Haven.

They don’t go to school at all and probably won’t return for another few months no matter what happens with the virus epidemic. “Remote learning” is available to them but it is indeed “remote,” since many don’t participate or only pretend to, as they lack parents or have parents who, already poor, have been crushed by the epidemic and are stressed out. As measured by proficiency tests, even before the epidemic the education of most students in New Haven was minimal.

Those students in New Haven who are literate enough to read the city’s newspapers or interested enough to watch television news about the city may know that while city property taxes are destructively high, city government is always broke and begging for more money from state government in Hartford or Yale University downtown.

Just from everyday living the kids also may know that crime is rampant in the city and that it’s not so safe for them to go outside. Four people were shot in New Haven on Thanksgiving Day alone. Last Sunday evening a 14-year-old boy and a 16-year-old girl were shot as they walked along a city street together.

Even staying home is no guarantee of safety for kids in New Haven. In June a recent graduate of Hillhouse High School who had been a basketball star there was killed when a bullet apparently meant for someone else was fired into the house where she slept, an outrage now forgotten outside the city.

Nevertheless, a few days after the Thanksgiving shootings Mayor Justin Elicker announced his appointment of a 16-member Climate Emergency Mobilization Task Force for the city — a year and two months after the Board of Alders had authorized the task force to address the “emergency.” The mayor’s office said the task force will “tackle climate change in New Haven” and “aim to end community-wide greenhouse gas emissions by or before December 31, 2030.” The task force also will try to discern how “to safely draw down carbon from the atmosphere.”

Those may be nice objectives for government somewhere, but in the meantime who will take responsibility for New Haven if not city government itself?

For example, is city government committed to balancing its budget by 2030, ensuring that city students perform at grade level by 2030, and making city streets safe by 2030 — or even by a century from now?

And if city government can’t commit to that much, which is just the ordinary work of municipal government everywhere else, how can it presume to vanquish greenhouse gas emissions and remove carbon from the atmosphere?

The members of New Haven’s Climate Emergency Mobilization Task Force might perform infinitely greater service by helping the police patrol the city and by mentoring some of the city’s thousands of fatherless and neglected children.

The climate change stuff could be left to the federal government, which soon will have a politically correct administration, just as state government already has one.

For as those administrations busy themselves with climate change and neglect their own more immediate responsibilities, they will be glad to let New Haven and Connecticut’s other cities remain in effect concentration camps for the poor.

Of course New Haven’s Climate Emergency Mobilization Task Force is just more of the city’s own politically correct posturing as the swelled heads at Yale encourage those in charge of the city to think that it has the expertise and moral authority to run the world when it can’t even run itself. There is no harder work than running an impoverished city, but when city government makes itself ridiculous as New Haven’s so often does, it gives the rest of government another excuse to turn away and the city’s remaining unpoor residents another reason to move out.

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

By Chris Powell

Now that the Democratic majorities in the General Assembly are increasing as a result of last month’s election, visions of sugarplums dance again in the heads of those who think that “property tax reform” and spending more on municipal schools can save Connecticut’s cities and their poor students.

It’s a reminder of the popular definition of insanity: doing the same thing over and over and expecting a different result. Of course that could double as the definition of persistence — persistence being, as Coolidge said, the prerequisite for problem solving. But even for the persistent there comes a time to cut one’s losses, and that time has come in Connecticut for “property tax reform” and spending more on schools.

These two causes long have been intertwined and have been addressed by governors and legislatures going back to the state Supreme Court’s decision in the school financing case of Horton v. Meskill in 1977, after which Connecticut began reducing the reliance of municipal schools on local property taxes. The Education Enhancement Act of 1986 put still more money into schools. In 1988 came the Education Cost Sharing Act, which established a detailed formula for state grants to schools. The formula has been revised frequently since then, but on the whole for more than 40 years state government has arranged a dramatic increase in spending on schools.

What are the results? Only that Connecticut’s teachers are usually among the best paid in the country. Student performance is unchanged and remains horrifyingly low in the cities, just as municipal property taxes in Connecticut remain among the highest in the country and city property taxes are as awful as city school performance.

That is, there is no such thing as “property tax reform” in Connecticut and there can never be any. There can be only more compensation for municipal government employees, who have first claim on municipal revenue because of collective bargaining and binding arbitration laws and the law prohibiting school systems from reducing spending even when enrollment collapses.

As for student performance, even the state Education Department admits that it has no evidence that increasing per-pupil spending improves learning. Indeed, the social science suggests that educational performance is almost entirely a matter of parenting — that children from two-parent households generally do far better in school than children from single-parent households, since they get much more attention, stimulation, encouragement, discipline, and opportunities at home and thus are better prepared for school.

So why does Connecticut’s unintelligentsia keep pursuing “property tax reform” and spending more on education? It’s because these pursuits are great camouflage for ensuring the contentment of the unionized municipal employees who constitute the army of the state’s majority party. The army must be well paid lest the party risk losing an election to anyone who might wonder why taxes never go down and school performance never goes up despite all the “reform.”

Why do so few seem to notice and protest that tax and education policies never reach their nominal objectives?

News organizations, weakening financially, are growing timid even as Connecticut is full of well-financed special interests that clamor to perpetuate the status quo. Prominent among them is Connecticut Voices for Children, which would be more aptly named Connecticut Voices for Higher Taxes and Expelling the Rich. The organization considers billionaires more of a threat to children than fatherlessness. Last week the organization issued its umpteenth report calling for “tax reform” — that is, raising the state income tax on the rich, as if the rich don’t already produce most income tax revenue, and imposing a punitive property tax surcharge on their mansions, as if the mansions don’t already pay more in property taxes as well.

While he is a Democrat, Governor Lamont seems reluctant to tax the rich more, lest they join Connecticut’s merely well-to-do in their longstanding exodus to states that have lower taxes because they are not yet controlled by the government employee unions.

But maybe if the rich were driven out, eliminating that option for raising taxes, Connecticut at last could have a serious discussion about its most expensive mistaken premises of policy.

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

By Chris Powell

As was inscribed on the pedestal of the statue of college founder Emil Faber in the movie “Animal House,” “Knowledge is good.” But knowledge can be overpriced, as the growing clamor about college student loan forgiveness soon may demonstrate.

President-elect Joe Biden and Democrats in the new Congress will propose various forms of forgiveness, and this will have the support of Connecticut’s congressional delegation, all Democrats.

Student loan debt is huge, estimated at $1.6 trillion, and five Connecticut colleges were cited last week by the U.S. Education Department for leaving the parents of their students with especially high debt. There are many horror stories about borrowers who will never be able to pay what they owe.

But those horror stories are not typical. Most student loan debt is owed by people who can afford to pay and are from families with higher incomes. Relief for certain debtors may be in order, but then what of the students who sacrificed along with their parents to pay their own way through college? What will they get for their conscientiousness? Only higher taxes and a devaluing currency.

Student loan debt relief should not be resolved without an investigation of what the country has gotten for its explosion of spending on higher education. Has all the expense been worthwhile?

Probably not even close. A 2014 study by the Federal Reserve Bank of New York found that many college graduates end up in jobs that don’t require college education. A similar study a year earlier by the Center for College Affordability and Productivity reported that there were 46 percent more college graduates in the U.S. workforce than there were jobs requiring a college degree and that degrees were held by 25 percent of sales clerks, 22 percent of customer service representatives, 16 percent of telemarketers, 15 percent of taxi drivers, and 14 percent of mail carriers.

Of course that doesn’t mean that college grads who went into less sophisticated jobs didn’t enjoy college, learn useful things, and increase their appreciation of life. But those who accrued burdensome debt only to find themselves in jobs that can’t easily carry it may feel cheated.

Some consolation is that college grads tend to earn more over their lifetimes than other people. But is this because of increased knowledge and skills, or because of the credentialism that higher education has infected society with? If it is mere credentialism, college is a heavy tax on society.

Public education in Connecticut may be more credentialism than learning, since, on account of social promotion, one can get a high school diploma here without having learned anything since kindergarten and can earn a degree from a public college without having learned much more, public college being to a great extent just remedial high school.

Some people in Connecticut advocate making public college attendance free, at least for students from poor families. But even for those students would free public college be an incentive to perform well in high school once they discover that they need no academic qualification to get into a public college and that they can take remedial high school courses there?

Even the student loans and government grants to higher education that underwrite important research and learning are largely subsidies to college educators and administrators, whose salary growth correlates closely with those loans and grants. Many college educators show their appreciation by resenting having to teach mere undergraduates instead of being left alone to do obscure research that has no relevance to curing cancer or averting the next asteroid strike. They prefer to strut around calling each other “Doctor” and “Professor” until the cows come home reciting Shakespeare.

Connecticut’s critical neglect, and the country’s, is lower education, not higher education, especially now that government is abdicating to the ever-grasping teacher unions by closing schools, where the threat of the virus epidemic is small. This suspends education, socialization, exercise, and general growth for the young without protecting those most vulnerable to the virus, the frail elderly. Forgiving college loans won’t be much more relevant to education than that crazy policy.

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

By Chris Powell

America’s oldest continuously published newspaper is now the country’s newest paper without an office of its own. The Hartford Courant announced last week that it is terminating its lease on the building it has occupied for 70 years just across Broad Street from the state Capitol, the building from which the paper once dominated the news of state government and all Connecticut.

The Courant’s employees will keep working from home, as many journalists have been doing during the virus epidemic. The Courant already had arranged to shutter its press and have its printing done by the Springfield Republican in Massachusetts, where many other Connecticut papers (including the Journal Inquirer) now are printed.

So while disconcerting, the working from home and the press outsourcing aren’t new. Technology long has made them possible and sometimes more efficient. But since the virus epidemic will end eventually, or at least government will realize that destroying the economy is no way to protect the frail elderly, what’s new here is that the Courant brazenly has left unanswered whether it ever again will have a place of business in Hartford or nearby.

This implies that the newspaper, part of the Tribune chain, is preparing for a change of ownership. There long has been turmoil among the chain’s biggest shareholders — rich guys and investment houses — and there has been much speculation that its papers may be for sale as a group or individually.

The Courant no longer has use for the large space taken by its press, and with everything computerized — not just news reporting but also advertising design and page creation — much newspaper work fairly can be done remotely, though the loss of newsrooms impairs formulation and execution of news coverage. Without a lease for excess real estate, the Courant’s balance sheet will look better to a buyer, and a buyer will have complete flexibility in choosing another headquarters.

But will a buyer want to pay Hartford’s outrageous property taxes any more than WFSB-TV3 did when it moved from Constitution Plaza downtown to Rocky Hill in 2007?

The Courant’s abandonment of its headquarters has renewed controversy over chain ownership of newspapers. Respectable opinion at the moment is that local ownership is better because of its superior commitment to place. The reporters union at the Courant already had appealed for local angels to buy the paper, and last week’s announcement prompted U.S. Sen. Richard Blumenthal to endorse new ownership, while U.S. Sen. Chris Murphy denounced “private equity firms and billionaires” and Hartford Mayor Luke Bronin chided “hedge funds.”

Yet local ownership also can be corrupt and self-serving, while chain ownership can increase a newspaper’s resources, as Hearst’s acquisition of eight Connecticut dailies has done.

As for those awful billionaires, none of those right thinkers is complaining about Amazon owner Jeff Bezos’ operation of the Washington Post or pharmaceuticals magnate Patrick Soon-Shiong’s rescue of the Los Angeles Times.

And ironically, while Courant employees resent the loss of their building, in heading for the big city and chain ownership some of them left papers that are keeping their local offices and aren’t run by hedge funds.

What the right thinkers seem to want is a rich guy willing to lose a lot of money with the Courant until someone figures out how to make regional and local newspapers profitable in the era of the internet, civic disengagement, social disintegration, burgeoning illiteracy, declining demographics, and an advertising-destroying epidemic.

The Courant is a shadow of what it was even a few years ago. Its circulation has fallen sharply, its staff has been slashed, and most of its local coverage, the most expensive part of journalism, has disappeared. But of course this is common to the industry. Traditional journalism — state and local government and community coverage — has become unprofitable, and not because of the internet, which, while competing for people’s time, seldom provides such journalism and, when it does, functions on charity, which is hardly a business plan.

No, people increasingly are just losing interest in their geographic community’s public life. Journalism about it may remain vital, but to get a better public life you need a better public.

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

By Chris Powell

Having been there, done that, and gotten a T-shirt reading “My Party Abandoned Me,” Governor Lamont seems to have given up on imposing tolls on Connecticut highways to fortify the state’s transportation infrastructure. But having just increased their majorities in the General Assembly, Democratic legislators are musing about raising gasoline taxes instead.

The big political problem with tolls remains that they are too visible and responsibility for them is too easily fixed with elected officials.

Not so with gasoline taxes. For gas pumps and receipts don’t show taxes, which are simply built into the prices displayed — and Connecticut levies not only a 25-cent tax on each gallon sold at retail but also a tax of nearly 9 percent on every wholesale gallon sold by distributors to retailers. The wholesale tax adds about 11 cents per gallon.

Since an amount equal to the wholesale tax revenue could be obtained by raising the retail tax, the main reason for the wholesale tax is to increase concealment of gas taxes.

On top of the political advantage of concealing gas taxes, some legislators think there is a good policy reason to raise gas taxes: that Connecticut’s now are lower than the national average. That is, these legislators think that Connecticut residents deserve to pay more for gas.

But Connecticut is practically in a depression, its economy much weaker than the national average because living here is already too expensive. Making Connecticut competitive requires avoiding tax increases.

Worse, every cent raised in new taxes reduces the incentive for state government to audit itself for efficiency and to economize, even as nearly every week produces an example of state government’s indifference to costs.

Last week it was an arbiter’s order to Central Connecticut State University to reinstate and pay $200,000 in back wages to an employee fired for criminal conduct alleged in his personal life. But the charges were dismissed. Apparently university administrators never heard of due process of law.

For months now amid the virus epidemic schools have provided little education and thousands of students with neglectful parents have disappeared, but schools still cost the same or more. Businesses that don’t produce as usual have had to reduce compensation for their employees or close, but not public education, where even before the epidemic there was no link between pay and performance.

When certain people prattle that “we’re all in this together” they don’t seem to notice that even as they have kept their jobs at full pay they are lecturing those who have lost their jobs and income. Despite the hard times, there is little sacrifice in government. No, we’re not “all in this together.”

Legislators and others who want to raise taxes for transportation infrastructure contend that transportation is supremely important. But it is never so important as to prompt them to propose economizing elsewhere in state government and transferring the savings to transportation. Indeed, nothing in state government lately has been important enough to prompt economizing elsewhere. A few months ago state government began paying its employees $350 million in raises and nobody in authority said the money should be diverted to transportation. For in Connecticut the compensation of government employees always comes first.

So the public’s only leverage over state government is to oppose any tax increases until there are sweeping efforts to audit and economize. A gas tax increase will do less for transportation than it will insure that everything wasteful, ineffective, and corrupt in government stays as it is.

Government remains wasteful, ineffective, and corrupt because the state’s political class — those people who pay attention — is mostly on government’s own payroll and because most people in the private sector, mere taxpayers, pay little attention. That’s why Connecticut should require referendums on all tax increases. A state constitutional amendment would be needed to require referendums for state tax increases, but ordinary law could require them for municipal tax increases.

Such referendums would prompt more mere taxpayers to pay attention and maybe push a few members of the political class to search for efficiencies and question priorities in government before trying to raise taxes when they want to spend more on something.

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

By Chris Powell

While Governor Lamont remarked the other day that state government doesn’t have enough money to rescue every business suffering from the virus epidemic and the curtailment of commerce, most people think the federal government has infinite money and can and should make everyone whole.

Sharing that view, Connecticut U.S. Sen. Richard Blumenthal this week went to the railroad station in West Haven to join Catherine Rinaldi, president of the Metropolitan Transit Authority, in calling for an emergency $12 billion federal appropriation for the MTA, which runs the Metro-North commuter railroad line from New Haven to New York City. Metro-North has lost 80 percent of its passengers and fares because of business curtailments and the shift to working from home.

There are two problems with the appeal from Blumenthal and Rinaldi.

First, there is no need to keep Metro-North operating on a normal schedule when most passengers are missing. Except for railroad employees, no one is served by running empty trains.

Indeed, curtailment of commuter rail service might make time to renovate the tracks and other facilities. Rather than furloughing railroad employees, hundreds of them might be reassigned temporarily to collect the trash that litters the tracks between New Haven and New York. The savings on electric power from running fewer trains still would be huge.

The second problem is that the federal government’s power of money creation is infinite only technically. While nothing in law forbids the federal government from spending any amount, money is no good by itself. It has value only insofar as it has purchasing power — only insofar as there are things to be purchased, only insofar as there is production, and with so many people out of work or working less during the epidemic, production has fallen measurably. Operating empty trains won’t increase production, but spending $12 billion to operate them may worsen the devaluation of the dollar, whose international value recently has fallen substantially amid so much money creation.

So it might be far better to add that $12 billion to public health purposes.

The $12 billion desired by the MTA is only a tiny part of the largess imagined by the incoming national administration and many members of Congress who will be returning to Washington next month. They are contemplating another trillion dollars in bailouts, and that’s just for starters. Such is the damage done to the national economy by the epidemic and government’s often clumsy responses to it.

Amid all the seemingly free money, some people are starting to enjoy lockdowns or at least finding them tolerable, especially those who, like many government employees, get paid as usual whether they work or not.

This week two Hartford City Council members, Wildaliz Bermudez and Josh Mitchtom, called on the governor to use the state’s $3 billion emergency reserve to pay everybody to stay home for a month and to stop most commercial operations in the name of slowing the spread of the virus. Bermudez and Mitchtom seemed unaware that the emergency reserve is already expected to be consumed by the huge deficits pending in next year’s state budget. The reserve won’t come close to covering all the shortfalls.

But then getting paid for doing or accomplishing nothing is a way of life in Hartford, encouraged by state government’s steady subsidy of so many failures in the city.

Last week a group of 35 doctors went almost as far as those Hartford council members, urging the governor to close gyms and restaurants and to prohibit all “unnecessary” gatherings so as to stop the virus and prevent medical personnel from being overwhelmed. It didn’t seem to bother the doctors that those businesses and their employees already have been overwhelmed by commerce-curtailment orders, suffering enormous losses, including business capital and life savings. The doctors are inconvenienced now and may be more so but they won’t be losing their life savings and livelihoods.

The governor is trying to strike a balance among all these interests. Every day presents him with another difficult judgment call that upsets someone. He may be realizing that Connecticut is just going to have to tough it out and accept some casualties all around.

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

By Chris Powell

Again last week most of the coronavirus-related deaths in Connecticut — 70 percent — occurred in nursing homes. What was the policy response?

The teacher unions demanded that all schools terminate in-person classes and convert to “remote learning,” which for many students– those who need schools most — means no learning, and which for most other students means much less learning.

And New Haven Mayor Justin Elicker called for the state to retreat to stricter closure of commerce.

These responses were plainly irrelevant to what has always been the epidemic’s primary threat — to the frail elderly and the chronically ill. With their weaker immune systems and their already strained health, they will be, wherever they are housed, far more vulnerable than children in school or diners in restaurants. But in pursuit of protecting them can the frail elderly and chronically ill be isolated more than they already are without breaking what remains of their connection to their families and their desire to live?

Closing schools, restaurants, and stores won’t change the virus fatality rate in nursing homes. It probably will have little effect on fatalities generally. It will inflict much more damage on education and the sick economy.

Governor Lamont is trying to avoid such a retreat. But how long can he resist the worsening panic and often self-serving clamor, especially when news organizations fan hysteria, portraying what is mainly a threat to nursing home residents as a threat to civilization itself?

While nothing was made of it, the governor’s position got strong support last week from an essay published in The New York Times by two professors at Columbia University — Dr. Donna L. Farber, who teaches immunology and surgery, and Dr. Thomas Connors, who teaches pediatrics. The doctors wrote that separating children from their normal social environment deprives their immune systems of the crucial “training” they get from exposure to infectious organisms.

The doctors wrote: “The longer we need to socially distance our children in the midst of uncontrolled viral spread, the greater the possibility that their immune systems will miss learning important immunological lessons (what’s harmful, what’s not) that we usually acquire during childhood.

“There is already well-justified concern about the impact of prolonged virtual learning on social and intellectual development, especially for elementary and middle-school children. The sooner we can safely restore the normal experiences of childhood, interacting with other children and — paradoxically — with pathogens and diverse microorganisms, the better we can ensure their ability to thrive as adults.”

If those doctors are just Trump crazies, how did they get into Columbia and The Times?

But there’s one reason to be glad of the epidemic. It has caused the University of Connecticut to cancel the 3½-hour retreat it had planned for dozens of its executives with race monger Robin DiAngelo. She was to be paid $20,000 to tell the academics that white people don’t want to talk about race because most of them are racists.

Racist or not, many white people might be reluctant to talk about race simply because expressing disagreement about anything involving race risks getting called racist. Not since the Red scare of the early 1950s have such slander and intimidation worked as well in public discourse as they do today. Back then this was a tactic of the political right. Today the political left revels in it.

But the cancellation of DiAngelo’s visit shouldn’t get UConn off the hook. In August University President Thomas C. Katsouleas made a show of promising to crack down on racism at the university, but nothing came of it, even though a few students and a professor or two this year made racial accusations against the university and students they did not identify. These accusations have not yet been pursued in public, where the university, its employees, and students could be held accountable to the state.

So if UConn is serious about uprooting racism, it should start holding weekly public hearings about racism on campus, demanding specifics. Exactly who are the racists and exactly which policies are racist? The accusers and the accused should speak.

Or does everybody at UConn just want to keep striking righteous poses?

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

With Connecticut sure to struggle with the virus epidemic for many more months and state government sinking deeper into the financial disaster caused by the epidemic and government’s response to it, it is amazing that the most urgent objective of the enlarged Democratic majority in the General Assembly is to legalize marijuana.

It’s another trivial distraction for legislators, like the renewed campaign of state Sen. Cathy Osten, D-Sprague, to compel schools to teach American Indian history when they can’t even manage to teach the language students are supposed to learn everything in.

Why the urgency about marijuana?

The drug is already effectively legal in Connecticut when federal agents are not around. In recent years state law on marijuana has been dramatically weakened and police and courts hardly bother with such cases anymore.

Do Democratic state representatives want to increase access to marijuana to give weary people relief from their joyless lives under epidemic restrictions? Anticipating the catastrophe of the next state budget, do Democratic state representatives themselves want to get stoned on the House floor? Are they already high? Or do they just want to realize the bonanza in tax revenue they imagine from legal marijuana sales?

The incoming House speaker, Rep. Matt Ritter of Hartford, says he doesn’t care about the money. But even if he really doesn’t, other legislators do.

Indeed, if the legislation to legalize marijuana doesn’t put a hefty tax on sales, there is little point to it and it probably won’t pass. For without the new tax revenue to spend, few legislators would take the principled libertarian position to let people do as they please with themselves. If there were many principled libertarians in the House Democratic caucus, the House already would have voted to legalize not just marijuana but all popular hallucinogens as well as prostitution and casinos operated by people who don’t claim to be distantly related to two of the many Indian tribes that inhabited the state centuries ago.

House Democratic leaders see the marijuana legislation as providing not just tens of millions of dollars in tax revenue every year but also ethnic patronage, if not quite as grand as the ethnic patronage of the Indian casinos. The legalization idea includes an “equity commission” to ensure that “communities” in which drug law violations, convictions, and imprisonments have been greatest will receive, as reparations for their lawbreaking, favoritism in obtaining licenses for retailing marijuana. (Of course these “communities,” long impoverished by pernicious welfare and education policies, are heavily Democratic.)

What will people who declined to break drug laws get from the legislation of the House Democrats? If they express doubts about it they’ll be lucky not to be called racist.

Yes, drug criminalization has been a disastrous failure, possibly ruining more lives than illegal drugs themselves. Reparations are necessary and just. But such reparations should restore the victims of the “war on drugs” with education, rudimentary jobs, training, and basic housing for a limited time, not with the opportunity to profit along with state government by increasing the risk of turning others into zombies and addicts.

Repealing Connecticut’s marijuana laws is one thing. Putting state government into partnership with marijuana retailers is another. For right or wrong, federal law continues to criminalize marijuana and classify it with the most dangerous and addictive drugs.

No state is obliged to match federal law in every respect, but for Connecticut to license and profit from the marijuana business would be nullification of federal law, as state government and some municipal governments are already nullifying federal immigration law. Defaulting on his obligations under the Constitution, which requires the president to “take care that the laws be faithfully executed,” President Obama told the Justice Department to stop marijuana law enforcement in states that didn’t want it, and President Trump has defaulted too.

President-elect Biden will probably neglect his obligations in this respect as well, but some future president may have more integrity. So until state and federal law can be reconciled, Connecticut should not go beyond repealing its criminal law on marijuana. That means simple indifference — no licensing and no taxing.

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

Many people want to get out of Hartford, just as many people already have gotten out, the city having lost a third of its population since 1950. The problem for the people who still want to get out is that many of the people who already have gotten out or have avoided the city don’t want Hartford following them.

So another federal lawsuit has been filed. It accuses the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development and Hartford’s Housing Authority of mistreating poor people who get federal housing vouchers, confining them to substandard apartments in what the lawsuit calls “low-opportunity” areas in the city instead of helping them move to “high-opportunity” areas.

Responsibility for this problem is widely shared. HUD fails to push low-income housing on the suburbs because they don’t want it. Since it already has too many poor and dependent people, the city wants to attract self-supporting people instead. The suburbs have enacted zoning rules that hamper or forbid low-income housing, because the poor are a burden, using more in services than they pay in property taxes.

As a result poverty remains disastrously concentrated in Hartford and Connecticut’s other cities, where its pathologies feed on themselves.

So state law should aggressively override the most exclusive zoning regulations. It is outrageous that 25 of Connecticut’s 169 towns forbid apartments and 60 require single-family homes to be built on at least an acre, thereby excluding many self-supporting people.

But the bigger problem with housing remains poverty itself. For why should any town be happy about taking residents Hartford would be happy to lose? Every news report on people trying to escape bad housing in Hartford shows that most of them are unmarried, uneducated, and unskilled women unable to support their many fatherless and disadvantaged children, who come to school unprepared to learn and can’t keep up. Such households create the very “low-opportunity” areas the lawsuit brought in their name complains about. If these households could support themselves, they could afford to escape to better housing on their own.

Zoning isn’t the only government policy that creates “low-opportunity” areas. For welfare policy subsidizes and incentivizes antisocial behavior — childbearing outside marriage and child neglect. That is why social conditions have only been worsened by the trillions of dollars spent to alleviate poverty in the last half century.

That problem won’t be solved by another lawsuit. Only courageous politics can solve it, and right now politics can’t even acknowledge it.

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What planet is state Sen. Cathy Osten living on? Last week Osten, a Democrat from Sprague, announced that she again will introduce legislation to require Connecticut’s public schools to teach American Indian history.

In a normal time this might be a reasonable idea but Osten doesn’t seem to notice that Connecticut is anything but normal these days. Schools are operating only nominally with little effectiveness amid the virus epidemic. Nearly two semesters of education already have been largely lost for many students and the next semester may be lost for them as well.

School performance in Connecticut was poor long before the epidemic, with most students not performing at grade level and most graduating from high school without ever mastering high school English and math.

While American Indian history should be part of more sophisticated history courses, it should wait for the basics of education, which are already much neglected. Amid the failure with the basics and the chaos of the epidemic, the last thing Connecticut’s schools need is tinkering with the lesser details of curriculum. And amid the financial catastrophe descending on state government, the last thing the next session of the General Assembly needs is more trivia like Osten’s legislation.

So why is Osten bothering with this? It’s because her district includes the Indian casinos and because, to maintain their ethnicity-based privileges, the casinos need to keep reminding everyone that the tribes of old were abused by the European settlers, even though the casino operators themselves were never oppressed and never earned their privileges.

That is, while unprecedented turmoil convulses Connecticut, Osten still lives on Planet Pander.

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

By Chris Powell

Amid the growing panic fanned by news organizations about the rebound in the virus epidemic, last week’s telling details were largely overlooked.

First, most of the recent “virus-associated” deaths in Connecticut again have been those of frail elderly people in nursing homes.

Second, while dozens of students at the University of Connecticut at Storrs recently were been found infected, most showed no symptoms and none died or was even hospitalized. Instead all were waiting it out or recovering in their rooms or apartments.

And third, the serious case rate — new virus deaths and hospitalizations as a percentage of new cases — was running at about 2%, a mere third of the recent typical “positivity” rate of new virus tests, the almost meaningless detail that still gets most publicity.

Recognizing that deaths, hospitalizations, and hospital capacity should be the greatest concerns, Governor Lamont last week recalled that at the outset of the epidemic he had the Connecticut National Guard erect field hospitals around the state and that 1,700 additional beds quickly became available but were never used. This option remains available.

The governor’s insight should compel reflection about state government’s policy on hospitals — policy that for nearly 50 years has been, like the policy of most other states, to prevent their increase and expansion.

The premise has been the fear that, as was said in the old movie, “if you build it, they will come” — more patients, that is. The demand for medical services, the policy presumes, is infinite, and since government pays most medical costs directly or indirectly, services must be discreetly rationed — that is, without public understanding — even if this prevents economic competition among medical providers.

So in Connecticut and most other states you can’t just build and open a hospital; state government must approve and confer a “certificate of need.” Who determines need? State government, not people seeking care.

Of course this policy was not adopted with epidemics in mind. Indeed, in adopting this policy government seems to have thought that epidemics were vanquished forever by the polio vaccines in the 1960s.

Now it may be realized that, while epidemics can be exaggerated, as the current one is, they have not been vanquished and the current epidemic — or, rather, government’s response to it — has crippled the economy, probably in the amount of billions of dollars in Connecticut alone.

That cost should be weighed against the cost of hospitals that were never built. Maybe they could have been built and maintained only for emergency use, and an auxiliary medical staff maintained too, just as the National Guard is an all-purpose auxiliary.

Also worth questioning is the growing clamor for virus testing. The heightened desire for testing in advance of holiday travel is natural, but testing is not so reliable, full of false positives and negatives. Someone can test negative on Monday and on Tuesday can start manifesting the virus or contract it and be without symptoms.

Testing may be of limited use for alerting people that they might well isolate themselves for a time even if they are without symptoms. But people without symptoms are far less likely to spread the virus than infected people who don’t feel well.

Only daily testing of everyone might be reliable enough to be very effective, but government and medicine are not equipped for that and it would be impractical anyway. Weekly testing of all students and teachers in school might be practical and worthwhile but terribly expensive, and only a few wealthy private schools are attempting it.

Contact tracing policy needs revision. Nothing has been more damaging and ridiculous than the closing of whole schools for a week or more because one student or teacher got sick or tested positive. As the governor notes, because of their low susceptibility to the virus, children may be safer in school than anywhere else.

Risk for teachers is higher but they also are more likely to become infected outside of school. They might accept the risk in school out of duty to their students, whose interrupted education is the catastrophe of the epidemic.

Meanwhile the country needs two vaccines — one against the virus itself and one against virus hysteria.

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