Chris Powell column

By Chris Powell

Many in Connecticut, including most of its news organizations, are gushing about President-elect Joe Biden’s choice of state Education Commissioner Miguel Cardona, a Meriden native, to be secretary of the U.S. Education Department. News reports say the president-elect picked Cardona in large part because of the support he and Governor Lamont have given to keeping schools open amid the virus epidemic.

This gush couldn’t be sillier.

For most schools in the state are not really open but operating entirely with internet classes or alternating erratically between in-person classes and internet classes. Since March when the governor began exercising emergency power to rule by decree during the epidemic, he has dictated to businesses, restaurants, and even churches, but he has only urged schools to stay open, declining to order them to do so, lest he offend the teacher unions, the most feared special interest. His position and the commissioner’s in favor of keeping schools open has been only a pose, though those gushing about Cardona misrepresent it as policy.

Having been commissioner for less than a year and a half, Cardona can’t be blamed for not having changed much about Connecticut’s schools. But then he can’t be credited with much either. The embarrassing gap between the performance of white and minority students, which has caused years of hand-wringing, has not diminished during Cardona’s tenure, nor has student performance improved generally. Nor has there been any candid acknowledgment from anyone in authority that school performance is not at all a matter of school financing but mostly a matter of parenting and that the state’s main education policy is only social promotion, which cripples education.

Able as Cardona may be, having been a teacher, principal, and assistant superintendent, he has not made Connecticut’s schools any more of an example and has no national reputation.

So why his selection by the president-elect? It is because of his heartening personal story and, more so, his Puerto Rican ancestry. The Democratic Party is obsessed with racial, ethnic, and gender balance, the president-elect has been told that he must have a Hispanic in his Cabinet, and choosing Cardona mobilizes political correctness against support for putting a national teachers union leader in the education secretary’s office. Choosing Cardona also avoids having to choose between the leaders of the two largest unions.

Indeed, not being a teachers union leader may be the highest qualification that can be expected from an education secretary appointed by a Democratic president. Besides, Connecticut should know better by now than to expect much from ethnic firsts in high positions in government.

Until the 1980s the state’s political parties put much effort into balancing their state tickets by ethnicity, often splitting the gubernatorial nominations between Irish and Italians, assigning to Poles the nominations for the old congressman-at-large seat, and reserving treasurer nominations for Blacks and secretary of the state nominations for women. There was often room somewhere for a Jew, and political anti-Semitism was extinguished with Abraham Ribicoff’s narrow election as governor in 1954. A woman easily made it to the top when Ella Grasso was elected governor 20 years later.

But ethnicity in politics doesn’t resonate much in Connecticut anymore, perhaps because the state has grown up a bit politically and because, while the rise of someone from a disadvantaged group is always encouraging, it has happened often enough for people to realize that, if just given a chance in power, the disadvantaged can disappoint as much as anyone else and that no matter who wins, taxes go up but student test scores don’t.

Education in the United States is almost entirely local and the federal education secretary has little authority over it. Mostly he can distribute federal money, highlight what he considers improvements, and make noise.

President Trump’s education secretary, Betsy DeVos, has not been very expert but at least knows that teacher unions serve teachers, not students. If Cardona even hints at such understanding, his ethnicity won’t save him or the president from the fury of the unions, which already may be resentful that they aren’t getting all the patronage they expected.

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

By Chris Powell

So much for Governor Lamont’s supposed reluctance to raise taxes. Last week the governor and his commissioner of energy and environmental protection, Katie Dykes, proposed putting Connecticut into an interstate compact that would not just raise gasoline taxes but, worse, conceal and shift responsibility for them.

Under what is called the Transportation and Climate Initiative Program, gas wholesalers operating in the state would have to bid for government-issued credits for the carbon emissions produced by the gas they sell. Whatever the wholesalers pay for the credits will be passed along in prices and ultimately be paid by drivers. The program’s expectation is that higher prices will cause people to drive less. But no increase in Connecticut’s gas tax would have been legislated plainly.

The proposal is just an elaboration on the “gross receipts tax” Connecticut already levies on gas wholesalers. At the moment it increases retail gas prices by about 11 cents per gallon, quite apart from state and federal sales taxes on gas.

The governor and the commissioner touted the program as a mechanism for reducing carbon pollution and raising money for less-polluting forms of transportation. But the same objectives could be pursued simply by legislating an increase in the state’s gas tax, now 25 cents per gallon. The interstate compact is needed mainly to confuse and mislead people into thinking that any increase in gas prices results from the greed of the big, bad oil companies.

This desire to confuse and mislead is far more objectionable than the potential increase in the gas tax itself.

Fortunately Connecticut’s participation in this racket will require the approval of the General Assembly, and maybe a few brave state legislators will oppose it in the name of honesty and accountability.

* * *

The latest virus epidemic relief legislation from Congress totals nearly $900 billion, runs longer than 5,000 pages, contains billions of dollars in special-interest pork and foreign aid — and Connecticut’s delegation concurs with President-elect Joe Biden that it’s not enough.

But what may be most remarkable about the legislation is that there is so little discussion about where this huge amount of money is to come from. It will be framed as borrowing via U.S. government debt instruments that will be largely monetized through purchase by the Federal Reserve if foreigners decline to purchase them, as they already are starting to shy away from U.S. government debt.

This raises the prospect of more devaluation of the dollar. Its consequences already include the enrichment of the country’s wealthy through the massive inflation of stock prices, far beyond what can be justified by corporate earnings, and the impoverishment of the working class, which owns few financial assets and relies overwhelmingly on wages even as it is suffering huge unemployment and underemployment because of the epidemic and facing rising prices for necessities like food and medical insurance.

It’s not clear why any money appropriated here should be directed anywhere beyond people who have lost work or income because of government closing orders.

While President Trump, sulking after his defeat for re-election, seems to be striving to spite Congress and the whole country with his increasingly erratic behavior, including his belated threat to veto the epidemic relief legislation, he’s right about one thing. That is, another $600 per person in income support is too low amid the damage done to the working class.

* * *

But no one in Connecticut needs to go all the way to Washington to see special-interest pork being exalted as the economy crashes. This month the State Bond Commission approved $2.8 million in borrowing to pay for improvements to the football field used by Berlin High School, where retiring House Speaker Joe Aresimowicz is coach of the football team.

Because of the epidemic the state’s high school students can’t even play football these days, there is no telling when they might be permitted to play again, and many of them are at risk of losing their housing and aren’t eating very well as their parents are long overdue on their rent and queue for groceries from charities.

But just as there’s always room for Jell-O, in state government there’s always room for patronage pork.

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

By Chris Powell

When the first legal challenge to Connecticut’s system of financing local education was filed 45 years ago, the complaint was inequality — that since school finance was based on the local property tax, rich towns spent much more per pupil than poor towns and had more successful schools. This correlation was misconstrued to mean that per-pupil spending determined student performance.

The complaint of inequality remains the big complaint today, and during a recent internet conference call a group of ministers from Connecticut’s cities badgered Governor Lamont about it.

But the ministers and others clamoring for equality in per-pupil spending don’t really want it, and if they were ever pressed, they might admit they don’t. After all, what exactly is meant by equality in education?

If equality in per-pupil spending is the objective, it could have easily been achieved long ago. State government could legislate an amount per pupil to be spent in all school systems without exception. Presto — equality.

But equality in per-pupil spending would contradict what Connecticut considers a principle of education: local control. This principle is eroding, since state government increasingly tells school systems what they must do. But some do much better than others, so local control produces inequality.

For while the clamor for equality emphasizes school spending, mistakenly presuming that spending determines performance, the clamor really wants equality of results, though 40 years of higher spending in the poorest school systems have failed to improve results.

That’s because school performance is determined almost entirely by community demographics — by parenting, preparation for school. Communities with more two-parent households have better schools than those with more single-parent households.

This correlation reveals the causation, while the long failure of higher spending has disproved any link with performance.

Amid this long failure those in authority in Connecticut might be expected to question their policy premise. Even the city ministers who badgered the governor the other day should know better. But then the ministers may want to distract from an examination of the real problem — the disproportionate child neglect and abuse in their communities. If that problem was ever acknowledged, it might cause someone to ask what causes it, and then even bigger controversy might break out.

The spending approach to school performance is a double failure, for it also has been touted as property tax relief in the poorest jurisdictions. State government now covers more than half of school expenses there but their property taxes have kept rising anyway. The extra funding never reaches taxpayers. Instead it is absorbed by school staff compensation, because Connecticut’s collective bargaining, binding arbitration, and minimum spending laws make it essentially illegal to control school spending.

Preventing control of spending is the real objective of education policy.

Having launched the fool’s game of educational equality with its decision in 1977 in the first school financing case, Horton v. Meskill, the state Supreme Court quit playing two years ago with its decision in Connecticut Coalition for Justice in Education Funding v. Rell. The court realized that educational opportunity is a complicated political matter for the General Assembly and governor to decide by legislation — and that the courts don’t want to run the schools after all.

Better late than never, but there is no recovering the 40 years wasted in tinkering with school funding formulas.

At least in that internet conference call with the ministers the other day Governor Lamont seemed to resent being scolded about school spending. Maybe he knows the complaint is bogus. Since some of the ministers were from New Haven, the governor noted that the city has closed its schools for months and converted to “remote learning,” thereby canceling the education of thousands of students from poor households. A third of New Haven’s students are now chronically absent.

The governor didn’t mention it, but New Haven’s schools have been closed largely at the demand of their teachers. The teachers don’t really want equality in per-pupil spending any more than the ministers do. They just want more, which doesn’t educate anyone, but so what? It still enriches them.

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

By CHRIS POWELL

Frank Capra’s 1946 film, “It’s a Wonderful Life,” to be broadcast again tonight at 8 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.

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, ruthless landlord, and board member, played by Lionel Barrymore, proposes dissolving the Building & Loan, 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 a few 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 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 question of how things can be organized to ensure that everyone has a good chance to earn his way in decency. But the great joy of Christmas is that the answer has been given, that we are not lost, that the country has been 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.

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

By CHRIS POWELL

Legions of the politically correct are insisting that President-elect Joe Biden’s wife, Jill, be given the honorific title “Doctor” because she holds a doctorate degree in education, which she received largely on the basis of a mediocre term paper. Objections to her honorific are being denounced as sexist and anti-intellectual, an insult to all women with doctorate degrees, as if men haven’t gotten such degrees and claimed the title too and as if all doctorate degrees signify learning and service commanding special respect.

But journalistic style long has been to confer “doctor” only on those holding degrees in medicine and dentistry, and the reason for this was hilariously demonstrated last March when television show hostess Whoopi Goldberg remarked on “The View” that she hoped that if Joe Biden was elected president he would appoint his wife surgeon general.

“She’s a hell of a doctor,” Goldberg said. “She’s an amazing doctor.”

Of course Mrs. Biden has no more qualifications to practice medicine than Goldberg has to pontificate on TV while advertising her ignorance.

The problem is that people generally associate “doctor” with medical authority, so conferring the title on those with other degrees causes misunderstanding.

But with the explosion of what likes to call itself higher education there are now millions of people around the world with non-medical doctorates who like to style themselves “Doctor” to pose or intimidate though their usefulness may be less than that of elevator operators and lamplighters.

The higher education industry long has thrived on this pretension, though elements of the working class quickly caught on to it, as was indicated by an episode of the “Dobie Gillis” television show in the early 1960s.

Having advanced from high school to junior college, Dobie tells his skeptical father, a grocer, why a certain professor is so great: because he has a doctorate, a Ph.D.

Dobie’s father asks: “What kind of doctor is that?”

Dobie explains: “You know, Dad — a doctor of philosophy.”

Dobie’s father knowingly replies: “Oh, yeah — the kind that don’t do nobody no good.”

Back in the days of “Dobie Gillis” a Connecticut educator of working-class origin, an Army veteran of combat in World War II who never would have gotten to college without the GI Bill, became a Ph.D himself but instead sought to democratize higher education for the working class. He had seen the “doctor” racket up close and he was not too pompous to acknowledge it. He said the title was most useful for getting restaurant reservations.

* * *

When beggars die there are no comets seen.

The heavens themselves blaze forth the death of princes.

As it was in Julius Caesar’s time and Shakespeare’s, it remains today in Connecticut.

Last week Devon Dalio — eldest son of Connecticut’s richest resident, investment fund manager Ray Dalio — was killed in a car crash in Greenwich and it became international news. Governor Lamont issued a statement mourning the loss, since Ray Dalio and his wife, Barbara, are prominent philanthropists and his neighbors in Greenwich.

Three days later the Connecticut Post reported that four young men had been shot at a bar in Bridgeport, two of them fatally. In Waterbury the Republican-American reported that shootings in that city have more than tripled this year and people in some neighborhoods are afraid to go outside. And the Hartford Courant and Journal Inquirer examined the great increase in drug overdose deaths in the state this year.

Neither the governor nor anyone else in authority issued any special lament for these losses. After all, such stuff is all normal now. Its casualties are nobodies, practically beggars, not princes.

Of course some of this social disintegration can be attributed to the virus epidemic and the closing orders that disproportionately impoverish the working class, people less able to work from home. But this disintegration was underway in Connecticut long before the epidemic and state government has undertaken no inquiry into its causes — and isn’t likely to do so as long as the people who suffer most from it keep providing the huge pluralities that sustain the power of the oblivious, indifferent, ineffectual, and self-serving.

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

By Chris Powell

Government in Connecticut is often mediocre but it usually excels at clearing the roads during and after a snowstorm like last week’s. Maybe this is because while some failures are easily overlooked or concealed, there is no hiding impassable roads. They risk political consequences.

So people in Connecticut can have confidence that even the heaviest accumulations will not cause catastrophe — that their road crews will defeat the snow before anyone starves to death.

Then what explains the obsession of the state’s news organizations, especially the television stations, with celebrating the obvious when there is going to be snow?

First they tell us that the road crews will plow the roads again. Then they show us the plows, as if we have never seen them before. Then they interview someone or even the sand at a public works garage. Then they stand out in the snow to show that it’s falling. Then they broadcast from their four-wheel-drive vehicles as if snowy roads are a surprise. And when the storm has passed they spend almost as much time reporting that the snow fell and was plowed out of the way.

The actual information conveyed in these tedious hours could be distilled into a couple of short sentences, and even then it seldom would convey anything that couldn’t have been guessed.

Meanwhile the investment banks are looting the country, the state and municipal employee unions are looting state and municipal government, Connecticut’s cities are suffering horrible mayhem every day, and some longstanding and expensive public policies keep failing to achieve their nominal objectives — but nobody reports much about those things even when the weather is warm and sunny and offers nothing to scare people with.

Maybe market research has assured news organizations that people crave to be told what they already know, since what they don’t know risks being scarier than a mere snowstorm.

But then news organizations should not call snowstorm reporting news.

Maybe it is meant only as entertainment, but then even reruns of “The Jerry Springer Show” might be more enlightening than watching snow fall on a TV screen when it’s also falling in even higher definition on the other side of the window.

After they have explained whatever is meant by their snowstorm reporting, maybe Connecticut’s news organizations can explain how they can call “tax reform” the proposals of state Senate President Pro Tem Martin Looney, D-New Haven, and his colleagues on the liberal side of the Democratic caucuses in the General Assembly.

For “reform” conveys a favorable judgment — “reform” always sounds good. But the accurate and impartial term for these tax proposals is increases, even when they are aimed at “the rich,” since “the rich” already pay far more taxes than everyone else.

Further, Looney and his allies long have said they want “the rich” to pay “their fair share,” but ever since the state income tax was enacted in 1991 no formula has been offered for calculating a “fair share.” In these circumstances “fair share” means only more, even as journalism again fails to question the terminology.

Ever since 1991 more taxes generally and more taxes on “the rich” particularly have not saved Connecticut as was promised back then. Instead Connecticut still faces huge state budget deficits, is the second most indebted state on a per-capita basis, is losing population relative to the rest of the country, and despite many public needs government here has made only one legally binding promise: to pay pensions to its own employees.

As a matter of law in Connecticut, all those other public needs can go to the Devil, and indeed are on their way, casualties of “tax reform.”

News organizations are just as misleading when reporting about Connecticut’s “defense” contractors. For manufacturing munitions isn’t automatically defensive, since munitions also can supply the stupid imperial war of the moment. Two decades of war in Afghanistan have not been “defensive” any more than a decade of war in Vietnam was.

The accurate and impartial term is military contractors even if, being full of military contractors, supposedly liberal Connecticut seems ready to abide any war, no matter how stupid, no matter how long.

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

By Chris Powell

While the master state government employee union contract’s ban on layoffs expires next July, no serious changes in personnel management that might favor the public can be expected. There are two reasons for this.

First, the remainder of the contract will remain in force until 2027, a disgraceful provision used three years ago by Gov. Dannel P. Malloy and the Democratic majority in the General Assembly to tie the hands of their successors and guarantee a decade of advantage to their party’s political army, the state employee unions.

And second, state government employees aren’t scared by the threat of layoffs. Protected by the contract, no unionized state employee will have to work any harder or suffer any loss of compensation if any colleague is laid off. A layoff threat could scare state government employees only if was aimed at a majority of them, and that won’t happen. Indeed, substantial layoffs probably would not ever be in the public interest anyway, since they would cause serious reductions in public service, even as there is need for more state employees in certain areas, like state police, health and medical services, and financial and professional regulation.

That’s why the Malloy administration’s frequent boasts of having slightly reduced state government employment were so empty. The staff reductions did not improve public service even as the total cost of state government employment still rose anyway because of raises and increased spending for the state employee pension fund.

Until employee compensation can be curtailed, it will be impossible to economize with state government personnel and improve public service. That’s why so little is to be gained from regionalizing municipal services, calls for which were recently renewed by some state legislators, including state Sen. Steve Cassano, D-Manchester.

Yes, towns can and do share animal control officers and schools, and they could share more, like police departments, and such sharing can eliminate the need for a position here and there. But while combining school systems may allow a superintendent’s position to be eliminated, an assistant superintendent may be hired. The same with police chiefs. Get rid of one and another deputy chief may be needed. In any case a single year’s worth of ordinary raises will far exceed whatever has been saved by eliminating or consolidating positions. Regionalizing mainly will provide cover for more raises.

The old Red-baiter Richard Nixon managed to get away politically with going to China and making nice with its communist regime, but it is almost impossible to imagine a Democratic governor in Connecticut doing such a brazen reversal and thereby alienating his party’s army.

So even Governor Lamont may not notice when he gains layoff authority next July. At least he will have no reason to want to notice.

* * *

FRAUD IS STILL A DANGER: This week’s votes by the 50 state components of the Electoral College have settled the question of who will be the next president. All that remains is for Congress to count the votes.

But the votes of the Electoral College do not settle the question of whether there was substantial fraud in the presidential election.

For there is fraud in nearly every major election, even if it is not enough to alter the result, and many people have put their names to complaints of irregularities or improprieties in the voting in Pennsylvania, Georgia, and Michigan, three of the “swing” states that determined the election’s result.

The election in Georgia was so close that even a little fraud could have altered the result there.

Investigating these complaints officially is crucial because this presidential election was conducted with an unprecedented volume of absentee balloting and there is growing clamor throughout the country, including in Connecticut, for extending it. But the more distance and intermediaries between voters and the casting and counting of ballots at polling places — the more handling of ballots — the greater the opportunity for mistakes and fraud and the more difficulty and delay in tabulation, which add to suspicion.

President Trump and some of his people may be demagogues but the mechanisms of this election were vastly different and questionable all the same. They should not be repeated without close study.

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

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.