Chris Powell column

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.

By Chris Powell

Not so long ago censoriousness was a phenomenon of the political right. Mere liberals were called communists and spies and drummed out of their jobs. The political right sought to ban books and writers as subversive or dirty. Peace demonstrators were called commies too and assaulted by rightists.

Today censoriousness is a phenomenon of the political left, especially here in Connecticut.

At a Senate hearing last week Connecticut U.S. Sen. Richard Blumenthal hectored Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg for refusing to terminate the account of right-wing provocateur Steve Bannon.

Two weeks ago a Stratford police sergeant was suspended without pay for three days and ordered to undergo “implicit bias training” for having written on Facebook that the Black Lives Matter movement is a “terrorist organization” because it is against police. The sergeant was not accused of any misconduct on the job. He was punished only for expressing a politically incorrect opinion in his personal life.

Also two weeks ago the leader of a Manchester group of social justice warriors went to a restaurant in East Windsor to confront its manager about the supposed racism of a supposed noose hanging from the restaurant’s ceiling.

The “noose” was only the wrapped electric cord of an antique soldering iron that long had been part of the restaurant’s decor. But the social justice warriors eagerly construed it as a tribute to the Ku Klux Klan, as if it really was a noose, as if it really could be used to hang anyone, as if it really had been meant to suggest hanging anyone, and as if, before electrocution and lethal injection, hanging wasn’t the primary method of capital punishment rather than something aimed at Black people particularly.

While no one had accused the restaurant of mistreating anyone, of course the restaurant manager declined to dispute the silly accusation — declined to tell the social justice warriors that everything is not necessarily about those who take offense, or that, just as a cigar is sometimes just a cigar, sometimes a wrapped electric cord is just a wrapped electric cord. Instead the manager went beyond apologizing and removing the soldering iron and cord; he also invited the emissary of the social justice warriors to inspect the rest of the premises to alert him to anything else they might find offensive.

The manager well understood the social justice warrior message, which was straight out of gangsterism: “Nice little business you got here. Shame if something should happen to it” — like a picket line chanting angry slogans and scaring customers away, something the social justice warriors indeed had been contemplating.

Amid this explosion of censoriousness, where is the civil liberties union? Most of the time it’s just striking politically correct poses itself as freedom of expression is lost.

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Doing the right thing for the wrong reason is still better than doing the wrong thing, even if President Trump excels at bad motives. Now he seems to want to get U.S. soldiers out of Afghanistan before he leaves office, to secure something of a political legacy. U.S. soldiers have been in Afghanistan for almost 20 years without result, and Trump has had four years to bring them home, but better late than never.

This bothers Connecticut U.S. Sen. Chris Murphy, who aspires to be a foreign policy expert. “I support a swift and orderly drawdown of U.S. forces from Iraq and Afghanistan,” Murphy says, but “not on President Trump’s political timeline. The Afghan government is engaged in sensitive negotiations with the Taliban over the country’s political and social order, and we should use our leverage to help them get the best deal possible.”

Withdrawal policy, Murphy concludes, should be left to the incoming president.

How respectable sounding — and how empty and false. For nearly everyone knows that Taliban promises will be unenforceable and quickly betrayed, that as ruthless fanatics amid anarchy the Taliban will win, that most Afghans don’t care enough to fight fanaticism, that whatever the United States bestows on the Afghan “government” will fall to the Taliban, and that Americans themselves have no reason to care, Afghanistan long having become Vietnam all over again.

Murphy is striving to serve the imperialist Washington establishment, not Connecticut or the country.

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

By Chris Powell

Maybe it will turn out to be only a fluke, but amid the renewed panic about the virus epidemic there is some interesting detail in the monthly death statistics of the state Department of Public Health.

In the first three months of the epidemic — March, April, and May — there were 4,174 more deaths in Connecticut than in those months last year. Many if not most of these deaths were those of frail residents of nursing homes, which were unprepared for the epidemic.

But as precautions were imposed by the extraordinary orders of Governor Lamont — business closures, mask wearing, and such — and as medicine discovered better ways of treating the virus than shoving ventilators down people’s throats and praying, deaths throughout the state diminished sharply. While the epidemic continued to rage in the next three months — June, July, and August — total deaths in the state then were down 151 from deaths in those months a year earlier.

That’s where this year’s monthly death statistics end, totals for September and October not having been compiled yet.

Of course making anything of this data presumes a relatively constant population in the state from last year to this year. But not everyone in Connecticut is moving to Florida, which suffers the epidemic too, and many people have moved here from New York. The point of this data is that some people are always getting sick and some are always dying without necessarily being noticed and that the daily new virus cases and “virus-associated” deaths reported by the governor and trumpeted on television newscasts may not provide the most accurate impression of what’s going on.

New virus cases really don’t disclose much by themselves. As more people get tested, of course more will test positive. Indeed, the experts used to say that there were probably 10 undetected virus cases in the general population for every positive test. If that hypothesis remains correct and the virus is as deadly as its terrifying publicity implies, Connecticut would have seen hundreds of thousands more “virus-associated” deaths than the fewer than 5,000 reported as of this week.

In fact 98% of the people who test positive for the virus are not driven to a cemetery or even a hospital but simply sent home to recover as if they just had a bad cold or to see if they even get sick, since most have only mild symptoms or none at all. Further, tests produce many false positives or positives for virus loads that are too small ever to cause symptoms or infect others.

In this respect Connecticut may be grateful to Governor Lamont’s communications director, Max Reiss, who, having tested positive a week ago but having experienced no symptoms, prompted the governor, his other top assistants, and the state’s two U.S. senators to put themselves in quarantine and await their doom or reprieve. Their survival, generally expected, will be not only welcome but a useful lesson: The virus may be bad enough but it is not the plague.

Lamont is not panic-stricken as other governors are. He increasingly focuses on hospitalizations and deaths rather than mere cases — and hospitalizations and deaths constitute a daily measure, a serious case rate, that typically is less than half the daily “positivity” rate of virus tests that news organizations love to scare their audiences with.

The governor also seems far more sensitive than most officials to the catastrophe being inflicted on children by conversion of schools to “remote learning.” Unfortunately his leaving school openings to local option isn’t keeping school administrators and parents from panicking, and even administrators who aren’t panicking are running short of the staff needed to remain fully operational. A single virus case or positive test can send many staffers home for a week or more to wait it out in quarantine, as with the governor’s office.

But even preventing the crowding of hospitals cannot be government’s highest objective.

Most of all government must keep society functioning, and as is suggested by the worsening mayhem in the cities, the violent mental illness and domestic abuse, the food queues, the business failures, the destruction of the capital of families, the widening despair, and the political hatefulness, society is coming apart, even in Connecticut.

Life inevitably requires facing risk, sometimes less and sometimes more — like now.

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