Chris Powell: Mental illness isn’t a problem of shortage of treatment

At Connecticut Valley Hospital, in Middletown, Conn., a public hospital operated by the state of Connecticut to treat people with mental illness. Opened in 1868, it was historically known as Connecticut General Hospital for the Insane and is in a 100-acre historic district listed on the National Register of Historic Places.

MANCHESTER, Conn.

When confronting a problem most people instinctively look first for its cause and try to eliminate it.

But such logic doesn't apply so much in government, as indicated by government's response to what is reported to be an explosion of mental illness among young people.

Teachers and school administrators throughout Connecticut say many more of their students are seriously troubled these days.

The commissioner of the state Mental Health and Addiction Services Department, Nancy Navaretta, reported the other day that one in seven teenagers is mentally ill and that suicide is the second-leading cause of death for 10- to 24-year-olds. State government's child advocate, Sarah Eagan, added that 48 Connecticut children between the ages of 10 and 17 killed themselves from January 2016 through September 2022.

So members of Congress, including Connecticut's U.S. Reps. Rosa DeLauro and Jahana Hayes, are sponsoring what they call the Expanding Access to Mental Health Services in Schools Act, which aims to put counselors or clinics in more schools. Educators and social-service people in the state are cheering them on.

But even if the legislation was enacted immediately it would be many years before it had any effect on the problem. For the legislation just sets up a federal agency for overseeing the training, qualifications, assignment, and compensation of school mental health counselors.

The legislation would appropriate no money at the outset. Money might be appropriated eventually, though like everything else at the federal level these days, money for mental health would have to get in line behind money meant to continue the war in Ukraine and support illegal immigrants.

So government might be far more helpful if it investigated the causes of the increasing mental illness of young people. Exactly why are so many more young people becoming mentally ill?

At a recent gathering at a school in Waterbury, Representative DeLauro attributed the mental illness epidemic to bullying, stress, isolation, and social media. 

But young people always have faced bullying, stress, and isolation. Youth is the primary time of life for apprehension, depression, and mental disturbance. So why have the causes of mental illness in young people become so much worse in recent years? 

Schools are notorious for failing to act effectively against bullying, perhaps because political correctness does not permit seriously disciplining students for misconduct. With a little political courage, school policy could be changed.

Social media are new, but parents can disconnect their children from social media by restricting their use of mobile phones. 

Other causes of stress among children and society generally are easy to see, at least if you're not a member of Congress. In recent years inflation has been worst with the top two necessities of life, food and housing. Food banks and housing authorities in Connecticut report that food and housing inflation have made many people desperate and that even fully employed people are having much trouble supporting themselves and their families. 

But few members of Congress, and none from Connecticut, take any responsibility for inflation and the stress it has put on society. Members of Congress are content to congratulate themselves for the patronage goodies they are distributing that have been purchased not with tax money but borrowed money, money that the country never will be able to repay.

Parenting was already declining throughout the country long before government's inflationary response to the recent virus epidemic. A third or more of American children are growing up without a father in their home, thus lacking the moral, emotional, and financial support a father ordinarily would provide. Impoverishing many of these households, inflation has weakened the parenting of many more children.

Mental illness among young people might be addressed directly by aiming at its causes -- by knocking inflation down sharply and ending the welfare system's subsidies for childbearing outside marriage. 

But instead advocates of the Expanding Access to Mental Health Services in Schools Act envision a lot more government employment and regulation, as if the bigger problem is the shortage of treatment for mental illness and not the explosion of mental illness itself.

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

Chris Powell: Lieberman often brilliantly navigated around the political shoals

Sen. Joe Lieberman and his wife, Hadassah, riding the United States Capitol subway system in 2011

MANCHESTER, Conn.

Joe Lieberman was Connecticut's most consequential politician of his era, holding high office in the state for 40 of the 42 years between 1971 and 2013, 24 of those in the U.S. Senate. He was also often an insurgent and sometimes crossed his party's establishment in a big way but got away with it, probably because he was calm and genial and quietly exuded integrity even when causing controversy.

Lieberman's involvement in politics began in New Haven with the anti-Vietnam war campaigns of 1968 and 1970, when he was not long out of Yale University. He shocked observers by winning a primary against the state Senate's Democratic majority leader, Edward L. Marcus, of New Haven, who had been distracted by his campaign for U.S. senator.

Instantly Lieberman was a star. Soon he was Senate Democratic majority leader. His ascent was stalled by his defeat for the U.S. House from the New Haven district in 1980 after a terrible campaign. But he remained so well regarded that he easily won the party's nomination for state attorney general, in 1982, whereupon he transformed the office into what it is almost everywhere now -- a noisy platform as "the people's lawyer," hectoring and suing bad guys and gaining spectacular publicity if not spectacular results.

The attorney general's office offered Lieberman a double opportunity -- not just for constant publicity but also, in 1988, for challenging Connecticut's Republican U.S. senator, Lowell P. Weicker Jr., without having to risk losing the attorney general's office, where his term extended to 1990.

After three terms in the Senate Weicker had a national reputation, gained first by denouncing President Richard Nixon, a fellow Republican, amid the Watergate scandal, then by slighting Republicans in other situations as Connecticut became more Democratic. Republicans resented renominating Weicker and Lieberman saw his chance. Since his liberal credentials were solid, he struck some conservative poses to appeal to Republicans sick of Weicker, who notably included National Review editor and columnist William F. Buckley Jr., a Connecticut resident.

Republican defections to Lieberman were probably decisive, as he won by just 10,000 votes, seven-tenths of a percentage point. 

In the Senate Lieberman was a reliably liberal Democratic vote, and he easily won re-election in 1994. But in 1998 he had the nerve, rare among Democrats, to scold President Bill Clinton, also a Democrat, for his affair with an intern in the White House. While Lieberman voted against Clinton's impeachment, his criticism of a president from his own party was taken as evidence of integrity. So when the Democrats nominated Vice President Al Gore to succeed Clinton as president in 2000, Gore chose Lieberman as his vice-presidential running mate in large part to signify some independence from Clinton.

Gore and Lieberman won the popular vote but lost the electoral vote. Lieberman simultaneously ran for re-election to the Senate in Connecticut and easily won again.

Lieberman's support for the U.S. war against Iraq in pursuit of imaginary "weapons of mass destruction" cost him renomination by the Democrats in a primary in 2006 narrowly won by Ned Lamont, now governor. But running as an independent and receiving most Republican votes, Lieberman easily won re-election and remained in the Senate Democratic caucus.

The next year Lieberman supported Republican Sen. John McCain for president over the Democratic nominee, Barack Obama. Still the Senate Democratic caucus didn't dare expel him.

Lieberman worked well enough with Obama, though he has been blamed or credited for keeping a "public option" out of the "Obamacare" national health-insurance legislation, something perhaps to be expected from a senator from a state with a big insurance industry.

Lieberman retired from the Senate in 2013, but when he died March 27 at 82 he was still much involved in politics through the No Labels movement, trying to recruit a presidential ticket to provide an alternative to the awful Joe Biden and Donald Trump. In any event, No Labels gave up that effort.

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

Chris Powell: A heavy discounting of outrageous crime in Conn.; teachers aren’t underpaid

MANCHESTER, Conn.

Next time the governor and state legislators boast about the decline in Connecticut's prison population, remember the recent report in the Hearst Connecticut newspapers about the state Board of Pardons and Paroles.

By a vote of 2-1 after a hearing in January, the board approved parole for a Bridgeport man who had served only 26 years of a 60-year sentence for an especially outrageous crime in 1995. He kidnapped a 16-year-old girl from her home in Pennsylvania and took her to Bridgeport, where he imprisoned her for weeks, molesting her, stabbing her, burning her with a cigarette, and mutilating her, carving his name into her chest with broken glass.

Of course the perpetrator already had an extensive criminal record. For years after his conviction he denied the crime and brought fruitless appeals. He accepted responsibility only when seeking parole. 

Prosecutors opposed his application but the board granted it in large part because he had participated in various programs in prison. His victim said she did not oppose parole but is still recovering from her ordeal and just wanted it to be over.

Connecticut should want such hefty discounting of criminal justice to be over. But it won't be over any time soon.

While there is no constituency at the state Capitol for improving the ever-declining performance of students in Connecticut's public schools, there is a huge constituency for spending more money in the name of education even as student enrollment declines. That constituency is so large that no one at the Capitol dares to talk back to it even as it spouts nonsense.

More nonsense came the other day from Kate Dias, president of the state's largest teacher union, the Connecticut Education Association. "The critical thing to remember," Dias told education money seekers at the Capitol, "is we've never fully funded education."

But exactly what is "fully funded"? Dias didn't say, but "fully funded" seems to mean whatever the teacher unions want.

If education was "fully funded," Dias added, "my teachers wouldn't have a starting salary of $48,000. ... We've never actually done the really hard things that we need to do that would allow our teachers, our pre-K, everyone to make reasonable middle-class wages in Connecticut."

Teachers in Connecticut aren't middle class? According to the CEA's national affiliate, the National Education Association, the average teacher salary in Connecticut is $81,000, which doesn't count excellent benefits and much time off during the summer.

And if Dias is sore about an average starting salary of $48,000, that may be the fault of teacher unions themselves for negotiating contracts that allocate most increases in school spending to people who are already employed and union members. Why raise salaries for people who aren't paying union dues yet?

Where is the elected official or political candidate who dares to ask how increases in education spending correlate with student performance, or how student performance correlates with anything beyond family income and parenting? Any such elected official or candidate soon would find scores of teachers in his district vigorously supporting his opponent's campaign.

Indeed, that seems about to happen to state Sen. Douglas McCrory, D-Windsor, an administrator with the Capitol Region Education Council, who -- remarkably, since he is a Democrat -- may be the General Assembly's most vocal advocate of charter schools and school choice.

McCrory is being challenged for renomination by a school board member in his home town and by an official of a union that represents school employees in Hartford. 

More than improving education, McCrory's opponents may want to make sure that schools don't ever have to compete for students -- that school choice is limited to families who can afford private schools.

Special interests are political machines that are very good at getting their people to vote. The public interest has no political machine.

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

Chris Powell: What about respecting ‘diversity’ of views on abortion?

“The Genius of Connecticut,’’ by sculptor Randolph Rogers, a plaster version of the bronze statue (destroyed) originally mounted on top of the dome of the Connecticut Capitol, is exhibited on the main floor.

Soviet poster c. 1925, warning against midwives performing abortions. Title translation: "Miscarriages induced by either grandma or self-taught midwives not only maim the woman, they also often lead to death."

MANCHESTER, Conn.

Where is it written that the crazier Alabama, Texas, or Idaho get, the crazier Connecticut must get too? 

But that seems to be the premise of the leftist faction of the Democratic majority in the General Assembly when it comes to abortion.

Alabama lately became famous for the Bible-thumping decision of its Supreme Court that, as a matter of law, frozen human embryos must be considered children. Freed by the U.S. Supreme Court's reversal two years ago of its 1973 decision in Roe v. Wade, Alabama and other right-wing states have virtually outlawed abortion, many of them with the support of a majority of their residents. 

But Connecticut law on abortion is unaffected. Connecticut maintains the policy articulated by Roe: that abortion is legal prior to the viability of the fetus and that state government may restrict abortion afterward. As a practical matter, Connecticut also allows the abortion of viable fetuses if a pregnant woman and her doctor claim the law's mental-health exception for late-term abortions. No one challenges such claims.

That's still not enough for the many abortion fanatics among Connecticut's Democratic state legislators. They reportedly are about to propose an amendment to the state Constitution establishing a right to abortion at all stages of gestation. They already have proposed legislation to force medical providers to provide abortion services even if doing so violates their consciences or religious beliefs. Such a law would force the most sincere providers among them to leave the state if they would continue their careers.

The nominal rationale for the constitutional amendment is that someday public opinion in Connecticut may turn in favor of banning abortion. Nobody really believes that but such an assertion builds the political hysteria desired by the all-abortion, all-the-time movement.

The nominal rationale for the legislation forcing medical providers to violate their consciences or religious beliefs is that some rural areas of the state are an hour or so distant from abortion clinics -- as if some rural areas of the state aren't also distant from supermarkets, dentists, restaurants, bars, police stations, and all sorts of conveniences, and as if people don't account for this when choosing where to live.

The real rationale for the legislation is to stamp out contrary consciences and religious beliefs. Ironically, the people doing this stamping out tend to be the same ones who prattle about the benefits of "diversity." That is, it's great if people look different as long as everyone thinks and votes the same way. 

If you believe that there is something worth respecting in a viable fetus -- an unborn child capable of living outside the mother's womb -- get lost. There can be no “diversity” for you.

xxx

STOP HIDING CRIME: Figuring out what to do about former criminal offenders is a challenge.

State law already holds that part of the solution is to conceal many convictions. Now the General Assembly is considering whether to prohibit landlords from considering convictions more than three years old when evaluating potential tenants.

Criminal convictions follow people around and can burden them for a long time. But then why shouldn't they? Why shouldn't former offenders have to do more to prove themselves than people who have never caused trouble? Why should prospective landlords, employers, and romantic partners be obstructed in protecting themselves? Why should landlords and employers be obstructed in protecting their tenants and employees?

While the labor shortage may be reducing the reluctance of employers to hire former offenders, the housing shortage is worsening their plight. But the employment and housing problems faced by former offenders actually arise from something bigger than their criminal records: their lack of education and job skills, which often correlates with crime. 

Concealing criminal records helps former offenders only by increasing risk to everyone else. So the only fair solution is to improve education and facilitate housing construction. Since that's not likely to happen in Connecticut, state government should operate more halfway houses for former offenders as they rebuild their lives.

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

Chris Powell: Ban investors from taking over and looting charitable hospitals

“The Cunning Thief,’’ by Paul-Charles Chocarne-Moreau, depicting a thief about to steal a baked good.

MANCHESTER, Conn.

Connecticut Gov. Ned Lamont and state legislative leaders have not yet completed their health-care proposals for the new session of the General Assembly but they should include legislation forbidding the sale of nonprofit hospitals to profit-making entities. 

Many nonprofit hospitals in Connecticut have been acquired in recent years by large nonprofit chains, such as Hartford HealthCare and Yale New Haven Health, and so may not be vulnerable to acquisition by profit-making entities. But many other nonprofit hospitals in the state may be -- the ones owned by smaller chains of nonprofits and the few nonprofit hospitals that remain independent.

Good luck to anyone who can start a private hospital and make money from it. But state government must protect the nonprofit hospitals insofar as they have been built over many years by community charity and voluntarism and their capital properly belongs to the community. An investment company's 2016 acquisition of three Connecticut nonprofit hospitals -- Waterbury, Manchester Memorial, and Rockville General, in Vernon -- has resulted in the liquidation of that community capital for private profit. 

The investment company sold the real estate of the three hospitals, paid the money to its investors, and then leased the property back so hospitals could continue operating but with the added expense of rent. This was essentially what in high finance is called a leveraged buyout. More simply it is looting.

Now the three hospitals are insolvent, operating under financial duress, and being offered for sale but there appears to be only one potential buyer, Yale New Haven Health, and it wants a subsidy from state government to make the deal. It's starting to seem as if the hospitals may fail before a deal is made.

The same situation has unfolded recently in Massachusetts, where an investment company bought the six nonprofit hospitals of Caritas Christi Health Care and eventually liquidated their real estate for profit for investors. Now those hospitals are insolvent and in severe trouble as well.

In a statement last month the entire Massachusetts congressional delegation wrote that the investment company "stripped out and sold the property from underneath these hospitals, creating hundreds of millions of dollars in profits for private equity executives while leaving the facilities with long-term liabilities that are magnifying -- if not creating -- the current crisis." 

The acquisition of nonprofit hospitals by private investors is a racket. Connecticut should outlaw it. If nonprofit hospitals can't survive financially, their assets should default to state government, which should reorganize them in the public interest, not the private interest, so the charity that built them endures.

Can armed civilian patrols reduce the violent crime in Hartford's Garden Street neighborhood, where two people were shot to death Feb. 10? A city pastor, Dexter Burke of The Light Church of God, thinks so and is organizing the patrols as well as a block watch and trash-collection efforts.

Hartford police will welcome the extra eyes and ears if not necessarily the extra pistols to be carried, though the people in the patrols will be licensed.

Burke is tired of the prayer vigils led by another city clergyman that always pop up following shootings in the city. While television news often publicizes them, the vigils do no more than display the righteousness and ineffectiveness of their participants.

Burke's accusation that Hartford's police are "unwilling or unable" to protect the neighborhood is less justified, since Hartford is full of poverty and crime, not just around Garden Street. Of course Connecticut's other cities are full of poverty and crime too, and nobody ever does anything about that either -- or at least nothing effective. 

Citizen patrols and block watches may help but may not reduce crime as much as push it into other areas. Still, that might not be so bad, for with more crime in middle-class suburbs, maybe state government could be prompted to examine  why nothing it does to reduce poverty and crime has much effect.

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

Chris Powell: Conn. uses electricity to hide cost of government

Millstone nuclear-power plant, in Waterford, Conn. State officials see the plant as vital to the state’s energy security.

MANCHESTER, Conn. 

Feeling unusually put-upon by state government, Connecticut's two major electric utility companies, Eversource and United Illuminating, are pushing back, which is good, since, whatever their faults, they are too easily demagogued against, as nearly everybody hates electric companies, electricity being too expensive.

Connecticut has the fourth-highest electricity costs in the country. But now the utilities, which formerly only grumbled privately about the biggest reason, are talking openly about it: government policy. 

Ranking of state electricity costs.\

The forthcoming rate increases, expected to be around 19 percent, are reported to be entirely the result of two state government mandates. 

The first mandate requires the utilities to purchase the production of the Millstone nuclear-power plant, in Waterford, electricity that sometimes is cheaper than other sources and sometimes isn't. State government has concluded that keeping Millstone operating is vital to Connecticut's energy security.

The second mandate requires the utilities to keep providing electricity to customers who consider themselves too poor to pay for it, whereupon that cost is transferred to customers who don't consider themselves too poor to pay and whose rates go up.

Quite apart from those mandates, Eversource long has estimated that 15-20 percent of its charges to customers arise from state mandates having little or nothing to do with the cost of the production or delivery of electricity. 

Then there is the failure of Connecticut to import more natural gas, largely the result of New York's obstruction of new pipelines from the west

The co-chairman of the General Assembly's Energy and Technology Committee, Sen. Norm Needleman, D-Essex, accuses Eversource of trying to make customers pay for a cash-flow problem the company suffered as a result of its recent "wind-power investment gamble." But even there state government has to share responsibility. After all, why would electric companies "gamble" on wind power if government wasn't encouraging "green" energy and setting targets for accomplishing it?

The state government policies affecting electric rates are not necessarily wrong. But recovering their costs by hiding them in electricity bills, as Connecticut does, is dishonest. It deliberately misleads the public into thinking that the utilities are responsible for high rates when they are the work of government.

There is no social justice in requiring electricity users who pay their bills to pay as well for users who don't pay. The cost of people who don't pay their electric bills easily could be drawn against everyone from general taxation. Even the much bigger cost of subsidizing Millstone could be paid directly from general tax revenue. 

Of course other taxes might have to be raised, but then people would see that it wasn't the big, bad utilities that took their money but that their own state legislators and governor did. Then people would be prompted to make a judgment on the policies behind the extra costs.

But hiding the cost of government in the cost of living is practically a principle of government in Connecticut. State taxes and the cost of state government policies are concealed not just in electricity rates but also in wholesale fuel taxes and medical and insurance bills so that energy companies, hospitals, doctors, and insurers take the blame, just as electric companies do.

Indeed, hiding the cost of government in the cost of living is now a primary principle of the federal government as well, with trillions of dollars in government expense being covered not by taxes but by borrowing, debt, the resulting money creation, and thus by inflation, which most people imagine is a force of nature, like the weather, something beyond human control. 

Inflationary finance prevents people from asking their members of Congress inconvenient questions, such as how much more war in Ukraine, other stupid imperial wars, illegal immigration, Social Security, Medicare and new subsidy programs can we afford?

With their new candor about the origin of high electricity prices the utility companies are taking a big risk. Through the Public Utilities Control Authority, the governor and legislators can punish the companies expensively for telling the truth. But state government's deception of the public is already expensive.     

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

Chris Powell: Hoping for a reality transfusion about medical debt

— Photo by SantyBoyMX

MANCHESTER, Conn.

Connecticut Gov. Ned Lamont is acting as if he has a magic wand that can eliminate $650 million or more in medical debt owed by unfortunate state residents. He has been waving that wand for more than a year and waved it again the other week in his address to the new session of the state General Assembly. The magic is taking longer than expected.

The idea is for state government to pay $6.5 million to a charitable organization that purchases uncollectible medical debt from hospitals, whereupon the charity will offer the hospitals 1 cent per dollar of debt and the hospitals will agree to sell at that rate. Then the charity will inform debtors that they are off the hook.

But society won't be off the hook. For medical debt won't really be extinguished at all by this mechanism but merely transferred -- transferred to everyone else who uses hospitals. Indeed, uncollectible medical debt is already effectively transferred to the rest of hospital patients, private insurers and government insurers through the higher rates hospitals need to keep operating. Services have been provided without payment and their costs have to be recovered somehow.

While hospital rates must be negotiated with insurers and the government, as vital public institutions the hospitals can't be allowed to fail. State government is already deeply involved in negotiations to arrange Yale New Haven Health's purchase of three hospitals looted by the predatory investment company that acquired them several years ago -- Waterbury Hospital, Manchester Memorial Hospital and Rockville General Hospital. A direct or indirect subsidy to Yale from state government may be necessary.

As a practical matter most hospitals in Connecticut are already government agencies, with the government controlling most of what they do, either through statute, regulation, or insurance and reimbursement rates. Just this week the state Office of Health Strategy ordered Sharon Hospital not to close its money-losing maternity ward. A state government that claims the power to order a hospital to operate a maternity ward can claim the power to order forgiveness of medical debt and set debt forgiveness terms.

Key questions about the governor's debt forgiveness idea remain to be answered. 

Will hospitals sell much of their debt so cheaply? They haven't said.

Will government-facilitated forgiveness of medical debt incentivize more people to stiff the hospitals serving them? That seems likely, since the proposed income limits for people qualifying for debt forgiveness are far above poverty thresholds.     

Perhaps most important, since state government already has such power over hospitals, what's the need for a charitable organization to serve as intermediary in debt forgiveness?

The answer seems to be to provide political cover and obscure what will be going on -- the transfer of debt from individuals to the public and the concealment of more of the cost of government in the cost of living.

If state government arranged medical debt forgiveness and qualifications directly, by statute or regulation, the program would compete directly and clearly with all other demands on state government's finances. Every state budget might be forced to determine how much medical debt is to be forgiven each year. 

Instead an intermediary would disperse the expense of debt forgiveness in thousands of transactions, distributed unequally among hospitals, which in turn would distribute the expense unequally in hundreds more transactions with insurers, government agencies, and hospital labor contracts. Political responsibility and blame would land mainly on hospitals.

Why does medical-debt relief need such subterfuge? For the problem is a terrible consequence of the country's medical insurance system, whose creakiness is exposed every day by "Go Fund Me" or similar campaigns on behalf of people with catastrophic injuries or diseases whose treatment costs far exceed any insurance coverage. 

Though individuals or families may be blameless, just victims of bad luck, medical debt can follow them for lifetimes, ruining their credit.

Government is supposed to do for the people the crucial things they can't do for themselves. Covering medical care in catastrophic circumstances should be one of them. Let it be done directly, frankly, and without apology.

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

Chris Powell: Conn.’s foolish EV promotion program

Graphic by Mliu92

MANCHESTER, Conn.

Connecticut Gov. Ned Lamont and leaders of the Democratic majority in the General Assembly are planning to call a special session of the legislature next week to enact the strict California standards for auto emissions that were declined by the General Assembly's Regulations Review Committee in November. Back then two Democratic legislators on the committee from working-class districts seemed to understand that the California standards, outlawing sale of new gasoline-powered cars as of 2035, would leave the working class much poorer than the elites who can afford to toy with electric vehicles.

The governor is said to be giving assurances to legislators, especially those from racial and ethnic minority groups, that the ban on new gas-powered cars could be postponed by new legislation if the performance of electric cars doesn't improve as much as is hoped and if the necessary huge expansion of the state's electricity grid and production doesn't proceed fast enough. The governor and other advocates of the California standards insist that mass conversion to electric cars is inevitable.

But if electric cars are inevitable because they will be so good that everyone will demand them, why must consumer choice be prohibited? Why must Connecticut commit to an expansion of its electricity grid that will cost billions of dollars when there is no plan for it and no idea of how it is to be financed?

The inadequacy of electric vehicles was powerfully demonstrated by the recent frigid weather across the country, with thousands of EVs stranded because batteries don't hold their charges in extreme cold and charging stations are not nearly as common as stations only selling gasoline. And would the people of Connecticut approve outlawing new gasoline-powered cars in another 11 years if they had to decide right now on how to pay the conversion costs? Of course not.

The California standards legislation is mainly a lot of politically correct posturing to lock Connecticut into a future that almost certainly will  not turn out exactly as hoped. It is a "buy now, pay later" scheme whose cost is open-ended.

Repealing or postponing the California standards if things don't progress as hoped won't be so easy. By that time, various interest groups will have sprung up to profit from the new policy whether it's working or not and they may be influential enough to block any changes.

Hearst Connecticut newspapers reporter and columnist Dan Haar has noted the special tawdriness of the special session idea. The Democrats, Haar writes, want to enact the California standards before the legislature's regular session begins in February, while the public is not paying close attention and public hearings won't be required.   

Before anything is put into law, the governor and other advocates of the California standards should offer a detailed plan and specify its costs and its method of financing, thereby allowing the public to make an informed decision while there is still a choice about paying. 

Besides, Connecticut has far more compelling claims on public policy and public finance than whatever its gasoline-powered cars may be contributing to "climate change." Nothing Connecticut or even the whole country can do with auto emissions will come close to offsetting the carbon dioxide and pollutants that inevitably will be put into the atmosphere in coming decades by China, India, and the rest of the developing world.

State government has been prattling about equalizing, integrating, and improving public education at least since the state Supreme Court decision in Horton v. Meskill, in 1977, and 47 years and tens of billions of dollars in extra expense later nothing of substance has changed. Indeed, in recent years Connecticut's per-pupil costs have risen even as school enrollment and student performance have declined.

On top of that, homelessness and crime now are rising in the state amid other signs of social disintegration.

So why should anyone think that state government will succeed with a similarly grandiose project, conversion to electric cars, and that even if it was successful it would make any practical difference anyway?    

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

Chris Powell: Turn off the weather hysteria on TV news

— Photo by snowKing1

MANCHESTER, Conn.

Local television newscasts in Connecticut are usually trivial. But when winter comes and there is any chance of a few inches of snow, TV newscasts are liberated from all pretension to meaning, and they crown their triviality with redundancy.

As they did the other week, for several days ahead of a potential storm they strive to scare their audience about the dangers ahead. On the eve of the storm they devote most of each half hour to "informing" their viewers that the state Transportation Department and municipal public-works departments are preparing to plow, salt and sand the roads, as if this isn't what they always do and have done for decades. Reporters are often reduced to doing live dispatches from sand and salt barns. 

The obvious is repeated half hour after half hour, as if all meaningful activity in Connecticut has come to a halt and as if the state has never seen snow before.

During the storm itself the TV newscasts delight in broadcasting from their four-wheel-drive vehicles to inform their viewers that it's snowing, as if their viewers lack earlier technology -- windows.

Deepening the suggestion of doom, some TV stations give names to the winter storms they glory in, as the National Weather Service gives names to hurricanes. Since a hurricane must have winds of at least 74 miles per hour, it can do enough damage to prove memorable in some places and thus to merit a name. But to earn a name from a TV newscast, the only threat a winter storm needs to pose is to the relevance of the newscast itself, and indeed most such storms will not be memorable at all.

Meanwhile the newscasts will warn people with heart conditions against shoveling too much snow, and warn all viewers against putting their hands in a snowblower while it's running. Such is the estimation of the intelligence of the local TV news audience.

This charade of local TV newscasts is called "keeping you safe." But when the charade is operating, Connecticut has even less journalistic protection from wrongdoers and malfeasance. Indeed, that seems to be the point of the weather hysteria of local TV news -- to fill time with the trivial and redundant because it is so much less expensive than reporting about anything that matters, which usually requires investigation.

This principle of killing time is observed by local TV newscasts even when there is no weather to frighten people with. For the typical newscast is full of reports that consume 90 seconds to convey just 10 seconds of information.     

Of course newspapers, competitors to television, are full of triviality and redundancy too. But at least readers can turn the page and dispose of the product at their own pace. Viewers of live TV newscasts can't fast-forward past what they don't need to watch.

Presumably the triviality and redundancy of local TV newscasts continue because market research tells TV stations that triviality and redundancy are what their audience wants -- especially since most local TV news is broadcast in the morning when people are rising, dressing, making breakfast, getting ready for work, and seeing children off to school, and in the evening when people are reconnecting with family, making dinner, reviewing mail, and getting kids to do their homework.

The breakfast and dinner hours are not suited to profundity from TV, so during those hours local TV news usually provides what is only incidental information, less compelling than the immediate information of home life.

Even so, at least national television occasionally has done serious journalism.

So could local TV newscasts not find 10 minutes every other weekday for news that means something, news relevant to society's or government's performance, news that wouldn't be forgotten as fast as last week's Storm Jack the Ripper or yesterday's murders, robberies, fires, and car crashes?

Those things really aren't all Connecticut needs to know.

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

Chris Powell: In Connecticut and elsewhere, ‘dollar stores’ reflect poverty

— Photo by Michael Rivera

MANCHESTER, Conn

Like the rest of the country, Connecticut is seeing an explosion of "dollar stores,’’ such as Dollar General, Family Dollar and Dollar Tree, discount retailers that are causing alarm in some quarters because, while they sell food and consumer goods, they don't offer fresh meat, fruit, and vegetables and they are feared to be driving  traditional food markets out of business. As a result, some municipalities around the country are legislating to restrict or even prohibit "dollar stores’’.

Now, The Hartford Courant reports, a University of Connecticut professor of agricultural and resource economics, Rigoberto A. Lopez, has published a study supporting this resentment, linking the growth of "dollar stores’’ to unhealthy diets in "food deserts" and the failure of regular grocery stores.

But "dollar stores’’ aren't doing anything illegal or immoral. They wouldn't be successful if they weren't providing goods that people want and at low prices. Nobody seems to be accusing the "dollar stores’’ of using unfair trade practices or violating anti-trust law. If "dollar stores’’ are doing better than traditional grocery stores, competition is what a free-market economy is about. People can choose where to shop.

Critics of "dollar stores’’ don't like that. They seem to think that they should be allowed to decide not just where people shop but also what they eat. 

Of course there is a problem. "Food deserts" are real but retailers aren't to blame for them. Poverty is, and the expansion of "dollar stores’’ is largely a measure of worsening poverty for many in the country as a whole as well as in Connecticut.

Too many people don't eat enough fresh food quite apart from their ability to pay for it, and combine bad eating habits with poverty and the problem is worse. 

But poor households qualify not just for government housing, energy and income subsidies but also for federal food subsidies -- Food Stamps are now the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program -- and if they live responsibly they can afford fresh food if they want it, and if they can travel outside their "food deserts."

That's the other part of the problem. Like other retailers, full-service supermarkets won't make as much money by locating in poor neighborhoods as they will make in middle-class and wealthy neighborhoods. By avoiding poor neighborhoods, any retailer will suffer less theft as well.

So Hartford's city government is considering opening its own supermarket. Whether city government has the competence to run anything well is always a fair question, since the poverty of so many city residents is inevitably reflected in city government itself. But there probably will be "food deserts" in cities as long as their demographics are so poor. A city government supermarket in Hartford won't solve the problem.

Indeed, a good measure of the long decline of Hartford from what was considered the country's most prosperous city a little more than a century ago to a struggling one is the decline in the number of chain-owned supermarkets in the city -- from 13 in 1968 to only one or two today.

Because of this poverty there isn't much retailing left in Hartford generally. For years city residents have done much if not most of their shopping in West Hartford and Manchester. West Hartford's downtown long has been far more vibrant than Hartford's, because that is where the middle and upper classes -- the people who have money to spend, people who many years ago might have lived in Hartford -- have moved.

Blaming "dollar stores” for poor nutrition among the poor is just an excuse to ignore the causes of poverty. More than a study of the impact of those stores, Connecticut could use a study of what pushed Hartford and its other cities from prosperity to privation -- such as fathers who don't father, mothers who don't parent well on their own, schools that don't educate, policies that produce dependence instead of self-sufficiency, and government that takes better care of itself than its constituents. 

The decline was underway long before Ronald Reagan, Donald Trump or either of the Bushes became president. But even as the "dollar stores’’ spread across Connecticut, no one in authority seems to have any curiosity about what happened.         

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

Downtown Hartford in 1914, during “The Insurance Capital’s’’ heyday.

Chris Powell: Criminal convictions shouldn’t be a secret

MANCHESTER, Conn.

Connecticut law is full of mistaken premises, and more will be added in January when the criminal records of an estimated 80,000 people will be privatized -- not exactly erased but removed from public access under what is being called the “clean slate” law. The records involve convictions for misdemeanors more than seven years old and "low-level" felonies more than 10 years old committed by people not convicted of anything since.

The rationale for the new law is, first, that it's not fair that old convictions should be known, and, second, that public knowledge of convictions is a huge impediment to people seeking housing and employment.

But why shouldn't convictions be impediments to getting housing and jobs? 

Since most criminal charges are substantially discounted in plea bargaining to avoid trials, most people who have been convicted have already received extra consideration from the government. So what is fair about eliminating all trace of their discounted offenses? 

What is fair about depriving landlords and employers of basic information about people for whom they may become responsible? 

What is fair about keeping people ignorant of what their government has done?

Of course, society also has an interest in having everyone honestly employed. But people have to compete for jobs and housing, so why shouldn't people who have not committed crimes have an advantage over former offenders? Why shouldn't former offenders have to try harder to show they are worthy of trust?

Criminal convictions are not the biggest impediment to finding housing these days. The biggest impediment is the sharply rising price of housing that results from general inflation and the general scarcity worsened by municipal zoning. Connecticut is said to need at least 90,000 more housing units for its current population. If the state suddenly had another 390,000 units, rents would be much lower and landlords wouldn't be so picky about tenants. Eliminating public access to conviction records will not build more housing.

Criminal convictions are probably not the biggest impediment to obtaining jobs either. 

Gov. Ned Lamont himself hinted as much this month when he announced that the "clean slate" law would take effect in January. The governor noted that Connecticut has a labor shortage and "desperately" needs former offenders in the workforce. The worse the shortage of labor, the more that employers will be willing to overlook old convictions, if former offenders can demonstrate their ability to do the job -- and ability to do the job is almost certainly the biggest impediment to employment for former offenders.

Lack of a good upbringing, education, and job skills push people toward crime, and Connecticut, with a welfare system based on destroying families and a school system based on social promotion, is full of people who lack what they need to support themselves. Indeed, if one's education and job skills are strong enough, even the worst offenses may be readily forgiven.

Such is the lesson of the rocket scientist Wernher von Braun, the first hero of the United States space program. 

Von Braun's career during World War II was with the Nazi government of Germany. He designed the infamous V-2 rocket bomb, became a major in the criminal SS military force, and was awarded the Iron Cross by Adolf Hitler himself. (Years later a biography of von Braun was titled "I Aim at the Stars," prompting the American comedian Mort Sahl to say it should have been subtitled "But I Sometimes Hit London.")  

Nevertheless the U.S. government hired von Braun as soon as the war ended. His rocketry skills overcame any concern about his record as a Nazi criminal mastermind. 

Instead of presuming that erasing criminal records will somehow qualify people for housing and jobs, state government should provide a year or so of paid employment, basic medical insurance, and rudimentary housing for former offenders who are not yet able to support themselves, allowing them to build the creditable record everyone needs to gain employment and housing.

Better still, state government should fix the failures of its welfare and education systems. 

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

Chris Powell: Adios school integration, and college is way overpriced

Capitol Community College, in Hartford.

“The Problem We All Live With” (1964 oil) painting), by Norman Rockwell, dramatizes efforts to integrate Southern schools in the face of intense racism. U.S. marshals are escorting the little girl to a newly integrated school.

MANCHESTER, Conn.

For decades, even before the Connecticut Supreme Court decision in the school-integration case of Sheff v. O'Neill,. 27 years ago, educators have been telling the state that racial integration in education is crucial to better student performance, especially for children from minority groups. In response, Connecticut built and operated dozens of regional schools at a cost of billions of dollars to induce minority students from the cities and white students from the suburbs to mix voluntarily.  

While the regional schools have moved thousands of students around, they have produced little integration, particularly in Hartford, which was the center of the Sheff case. Student performance throughout the state has continued to decline. But the political correctness of it all has produced high-paying jobs for many educators and has made them feel better about themselves.

Whereupon last week the state community college system repudiated racial integration in education without anyone noticing it.

The system announced a partnership with Morehouse College, in Atlanta, through which students of color who graduate from Capital Community College, in Hartford, in two years with an academic average of at least 2.7 will be guaranteed admission to Morehouse as juniors on their way to a four-year degree.

Morehouse is a prestigious "historically Black" institution, and according to Connecticut's Hearst newspapers, state community college officials said "studies have shown that Black students who enroll in historically Black colleges and universities are more likely to earn their degrees and have more income than those who attend non-HBCU institutions."

Surprise! Racial integration is not such a boon in education after all.  

"HBCUs like Morehouse College inherently believe in the success of their students," community college system President John Maduko said, implying that other schools couldn't care less about how their students do.

So having long strived to integrate its students in primary education, Connecticut now will strive to resegregate them when they get to higher education.

The irony passed without comment from the state's education bureaucracy and the rest of state government. Have those billions spent on regional schools been wasted? Who cares? Now let's cost people billions more by making them all buy electric cars.    

Meanwhile, the even more expensive failure of higher education is getting less notice than the failure of lower education.

Bloomberg News reported last month that changes to the federal college student loan program made since President Biden took office have facilitated forgiveness of more than $127 billion in debt, which has been transferred to taxpayers.

The problem of student loan debt is presented as a matter of the heavy burden that prevents borrowers from advancing to homeownership and family formation.

But this is only a subsidiary scandal. The bigger scandal is the grotesque overpricing of higher education. If higher education was worth what is charged for it, millions of young people wouldn't be stuck with heavy debt for so long. They would get jobs paying them enough so that they easily could discharge their debt soon after graduating.

The loan system itself is largely responsible for inflating the cost of higher education. The more money is available, the more colleges and universities will absorb it, as by establishing courses and degrees that bestow few job skills. 

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 study a year earlier by the Center for College Affordability and Productivity reported that there were 46% more college graduates in the U.S. workforce than jobs requiring a college degree.

College grads often earn more than other people. But is this because of greater knowledge and skills or because of the credentialism that higher education has infected society with?

Nothing has been done about this problem, since college loans are less of a benefit to students than to educators and college administrators, the ultimate recipients of the money and a pernicious influence on politics. 

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

Our single-cell world

Entrance to Haddam Meadows State Park, in Haddam, Conn.

— Photo by Magicpiano

“I have been trying to think of the earth as a kind of organism, but it is no go. I cannot think of it this way. It is too big, too complex, with too many working parts lacking visible connections. The other night, driving through a hilly, wooded part of southern New England, I wondered about this. If not like an organism, what is it like, what is it most like? Then, satisfactorily for that moment, it came to me: it is most like a single cell.’’

–— Lewis Thomas (1913-1993), American physician, researcher, writer and health-care executive.

Chris Powell: Will Conn. politicians summon courage to ask Biden to retire?

Connecticut Sen. Richard Blumenthal said he was “concerned” about Biden’s low polls.

MANCHESTER, Conn.

Have the country's two major political parties ever been as disgraceful as they are today?

Many Republicans remain devoted to Donald Trump despite his dishonesty, recklessness, hatefulness, cruelty and authoritarianism. Or maybe Republicans are devoted to Trump because of those characteristics. For as he runs for president again, Trump continues to embody the contempt fairly felt by millions about their government, even if contempt is no way to run a country.

But that contempt is so high because of President Biden, a Democrat, and his candidacy for re-election. Republicans won't turn away from Trump while polls show him ahead of Biden. What is most remarkable and appalling is that while polls show that Democrats overwhelmingly want their party to nominate someone other than Biden, no Democratic leaders of national standing dare to represent them, even as polls say a "generic" Democrat might easily defeat Trump.

There also wasn't much courage in the Democratic Party in a similarly disastrous time, in 1967 and 1968, when the country was deeply troubled by the unnecessary and mismanaged war in Vietnam. But there was some  courage, though there were fewer mechanisms for challenging party leaders than there are today.

Back then party primary elections to choose delegates to national presidential nominating conventions were not common. But one Democrat, U.S. Sen. Eugene J. McCarthy, of Minnesota, answered the call for a challenger to President Lyndon B. Johnson, mobilized anti-war Democrats, showed that most Democrats wanted change, and caused the president to announce that he wouldn’t run for re-election in 1968.

While presidential primaries now are held in most states and Biden is a disaster politically, he is not being seriously challenged within his party, though supporting Biden empowers Trump.

In this regard Connecticut's congressional delegation, all five members of the House and both members of the Senate, is especially disappointing. Six of the seven are and long have been safe politically. The seventh, 5th District U.S. Rep. Jahana Hayes, has a competitive district but her greatest vulnerability as she seeks re-election next year will be running with Biden at the top of the Democratic ticket.

That is, all seven Connecticut Democrats in Congress could survive politically if they challenged the president's renomination. But they have had little to say about the disaster Biden's renomination would portend. Only U.S, Sen. Richard Blumenthal seems to have even acknowledged the danger, saying the other day that he is "concerned" about Biden's awful standing in the polls.

Gov. Ned Lamont, the state's leading Democrat, seems happy with the prospect of Biden's renomination and might prefer to preserve his high approval rating by staying out of national politics. But the governor usually has a good sense of how the political winds are blowing and surely has seen that they are filling Trump's sails. The governor might afford to spend some political capital by articulating what even most Democrats know about Biden -- that he shouldn’t run for re-election.

Confidentially, Connecticut's members of Congress might explain that if they admit that the president would serve the party and the country best by retiring, they might be cut off from the federal patronage that flows to the state. But how much patronage will Connecticut get under a Trump administration, which likely would come with Republican majorities in both houses of Congress?

As long as the Democrats seem likely to renominate Biden, thereby increasing the chances that the Republicans will renominate Trump, there probably will be stronger than usual minor-party candidates. Robert F. Kennedy Jr., shunned by the Democrats and now running independently, is getting unusually strong support in polls. The fusion ticket contemplated by the No Labels organization might do even better.

Then the national vote might be divided substantially four ways, putting almost every state in play in the Electoral College, risking strange results and leaving the country even angrier and more divided.

Even if Democratic leaders really believe that Biden is doing a good job, the people strongly disagree. Or maybe Democratic leaders secretly think that Trump's return wouldn't be much worse than four more years of Biden. 

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

-END-

Chris Powell: Maybe they can hide Conn. car tax

Toll booth on Connecticut’s Merritt Parkway in 1955. There are no longer toll roads in the Nutmeg State.

MANCHESTER, Conn.

Most Connecticut state legislators purport to hate the car tax -- that is, municipal property taxes on automobiles. A special committee of the General Assembly has been created to review the tax and suggest alternatives for raising the billion dollars it pays into municipal government treasuries each year.

Since cars are sold more frequently, collecting the property tax on cars is more complicated than the property tax on residential and commercial property. Since the property tax on cars is not escrowed as property taxes on mortgaged properties usually are, car taxes fall unexpectedly on many people when the bills arrive from the local tax collector. As the economy weakens, poverty worsens, and more people live from paycheck to paycheck, the car tax is resented even more.

Another complaint is that the car tax is unfair because identical cars may be taxed much differently among towns. But this isn’t peculiar to the car tax; it’s a function of differences in local tax rates. Similar residential and commercial properties are taxed differently among municipalities as well because of different tax rates, and different rates are not necessarily bad, insofar as some municipalities choose to spend and tax much more than others.

Eight years ago a state law reduced the disparities in car taxes, imposing a car tax cap of 32.46 mills. According to the Waterbury Republican-American, the car taxes of 54 municipalities are capped -- that is, their general property tax rate is higher than the car tax cap. The disparities in taxes on similar cars have been reduced but often remain sharp.  

A mill equals $1 of tax for each $1,000 of a property’s assessed value. Property tax is calculated by multiplying a property’s assessed value by the mill rate and dividing by 1,000. For example, a motor vehicle with an assessed value of $25,000 located in a municipality with a mill rate of 20 would have a property tax bill of $500.(The disparities in all municipal property tax rates result mainly from the concentration of poverty in the cities, which in turn results mainly from the concentration of the least expensive housing there and from the decision of municipal officials, under political pressure and the pressure of state labor law, to pay local government employees more generously, as well as from the inefficiency encouraged by large grants of state financial aid.

Inconvenient and unfair as the car tax may be, the real problem with it is that legislators and governors don't dislike it as much as they like the revenue it raises and the ever-increasing spending they require in state and municipal government. Indeed, the most obvious remedy for the dislike of the car tax isn’t even proposed -- to reduce municipal spending or reduce state spending and redirect the savings to municipalities.

As always, cutting spending is out of the question at both levels of government, even in the face of policies and programs that don’t achieve their nominal objectives. The broadest and most expensive policies and programs, like education and welfare for the able-bodied, are never audited for their failures. To the contrary, their failures are mistaken as evidence to do still more of what hasn’t accomplished what the public imagines the objectives to be.

That is, politically the status quo is loved far more than the car tax is hated.

Since even $100 million in spending cuts can’t be found in state and municipal budgets, how could state government find the billion dollars needed to eliminate the car tax?

Of course state Senate President Martin M. Looney, Democrat of New Haven, has his usual idea -- raising taxes on the wealthy, particularly on their capital gains. Progressivity in taxation is always a fair issue and matter of judgment, but in Connecticut it is meant less as justice than as protection for inefficiency and patronage.

Another idea is an 8 percent sales tax on homeowner and auto insurance policies. That wouldn't be more popular than the car tax, if people noticed it. But they wouldn't if it was levied against insurers on a wholesale basis, like the state’s wholesale tax on fuel and the taxes on electric utilities that are passed along hidden in electricity prices. Then the sales tax would be hidden in the price of insurance, and insurers, not state government, would be blamed for the price increases while legislators congratulated themselves for eliminating the car tax at last.

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

Chris Powell: Regulations for social media can’t substitute for parents

—Graphic by Jason Howie

MANCHESTER, Conn.
 
According to a report issued the other day by Dalio Education, the Connecticut-based philanthropy, thousands of children and young adults in the state are "disconnected" -- uneducated, alienated, unemployed or even unemployable.

Meanwhile, Connecticut Atty. Gen. William Tong had the state join a national lawsuit against Meta, operator of the social-media companies Facebook and Instagram, alleging that thousands more of the state's children are too connected to social media. Instagram particularly, Tong and other attorneys general claim, has grabbed kids with "addictive platforms" that have caused a "youth mental health catastrophe."

The attorneys general assert that this attractiveness to children violates state consumer-protection laws and the federal Children's Online Privacy Protection Act.

But the essential claim of the lawsuits is just that the "platforms" are too interesting to kids. A statement from Tong's office condemns "features like infinite scroll and near-constant alerts," features that "were created with the express goal of hooking young users. These manipulative tactics continually lure children and teens back onto the platform."

But the only new element here is the technology being used in pursuit of an objective, not the objective itself, which is as old as storytelling: gaining and holding on to an audience. That was the objective of troubadors, fairs and theaters, and then newspapers, magazines, radio, and television, long before computers and the internet. Newspapers, magazines, radio and television still sensationalize to grab audiences to sell advertising, just as Facebook and Instagram do, though Facebook and Instagram may do it better because their subjects are the members of their audience themselves.

Kids spent much less time gossiping about each other before the advent of the telephone. Before television they were far less fascinated by violence and guns. Before welfare for childbearing outside marriage they were far better raised and educated and healthier mentally and physically.

Any "addiction" here is not physical, as with drugs, but psychological. People can walk away from Facebook and Instagram if they have something else to do. Indeed, most users of Facebook and Instagram do have other things to do -- like make a living.

It's just the nature of young people to be self-absorbed, neurotic, insecure and idle, more so if they live in homes with little parental supervision and in a society that demands no educational accomplishment from them.

Citing company documents obtained by The Wall Street Journal, the attorneys general cite the indifference of Facebook and Instagram to the neurosis that its "platforms" can induce in children, especially girls. Of course, children probably shouldn't be exposed to some things until they are older, if then. But if Facebook and Instagram are destroying young people, it couldn't happen if their parents didn't provide them with mobile phones and computers that allow internet access to those "platforms."

Attorney General Tong blames Facebook and Instagram for the inability of children to get enough sleep, as if children didn't lose sleep because of other obsessions long before social media. But if some children still aren't getting enough sleep, who should be called to account first? The distractions that interest the kids -- that is, themselves and their friends and acquaintances? Government? What about their parents?

Whether they are "disconnected" or too connected, children need constant attention from parents so they remain engaged with life without becoming alienated, neurotic, self-absorbed and obsessed. Is a government that increasingly throws gambling, marijuana and transgenderism at children, a government that lets just about any danger bypass immigration law and infiltrate the country, really fit to regulate children's use of social media even in their own homes, as the attorneys general suggest?

In the land of the First Amendment, is government really fit to prevent any particular mechanism of expression from reaching young people? If so, how would that be any different from the supposed "book banning" many of the attorneys general oppose?

Or might the country do better in regard to social media, "disconnection," and other troublesome issues if it stopped destroying the family with welfare policy and education with social promotion?

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

Chris Powell: Why it’s so hard to believe that crime is down in Conn.; social disintegration continues

MANC HESTER, Conn.

Few people in Connecticut have the impression that there recently has been less crime in the state. Most people seem to feel that crime here is exploding.

But last week the state Department of Emergency Services and Public Protection -- the state police -- reported that crime in Connecticut is down on an annual basis: 4 percent overall, with a 3 percent reduction in violent crime, a 13 percent reduction in murders, and an 18 percent reduction in robberies.

What explains the dichotomy?

The leader of the Republican minority in the state House of Representatives, Vincent Candelora, of North Branford, interviewed last week by WTIC-AM1080's Will Marotti, said plainly of the crime report, "Nobody believes those numbers."

There may be a good reason not to believe them. After all, four months after an outside audit concluded that state troopers may have issued thousands of fake traffic tickets, perhaps to sabotage an effort to discern racial discrimination in traffic enforcement, the state police still haven't produced an explanation. While Gov. Ned Lamont hasn't publicly criticized anyone about the scandal, he is seeking replacements for the department's top two executives.

But the public's disbelief and the loss of state police credibility don't mean that the crime numbers have been falsified like the traffic tickets. The disbelief may arise from other factors.

xxx

Social disintegration is worsening and becoming more distressing even if it doesn't always result in arrests and crime data.

More children than ever are skipping school and more parents than ever are letting them. Even before schools were closed during the COVID, epidemic student performance was crashing, diminishing young people's job qualifications and earning potential, while Connecticut's manufacturers complain that they can't find skilled workers for thousands of jobs.

Homelessness and drug abuse are rising again. Contempt for law and decency seems to be rising as well, with crimes becoming more brazen even if not more numerous. Car thefts and shoplifting are up, and reckless and discourteous driving and road rage seem to have exploded.

Severe inflation has made times harder and people seem more confrontational. Last week alone Connecticut police officers shot and killed three men in separate incidents, all appearing to involve men who threatened an officer with guns.

Last week the state's biggest teacher union complained again about disrespectful students, and the Connecticut Hospital Association complained that patients and visitors increasingly are assaulting hospital staff. But arresting students and maintaining order and learning in schools have become politically incorrect, and while the hospitals said they aren't going to take the abuse anymore, let's see if they start to call the police.

Connecticut may remain, as Governor Lamont said in response to the crime report, "one of the safest states in the country," but the comparison with other states is little consolation. Connecticut long was better than other states, and now many people feel as if the state is falling apart, even if not quite as fast as the rest of the country.

Maybe the crime report and public perceptions don't really conflict as much as they seem to. For the report covers calendar 2022 and social disintegration may have worsened greatly in the 10 months since.

And maybe journalism has made social disintegration seem worse than it is. For the substance of journalism in the state has been much reduced in recent years as its audience has been fractured by social media and civic engagement has declined. These trends have diminished the profitability of news organizations and caused them to eliminate staff, especially for matters of government, and to devote more coverage to crime, accidents, and fires, which is usually easier and less expensive while it crowds out more important news.

"If it bleeds, it leads" long has been the rule for local television news and it is being followed more diligently. This may hold on to audiences but also may give a misleading impression that encourages people to move to Florida. But that state has plenty of crime, accidents and fires, too, even if victims there don't freeze to death. 
    
Chris Powell has written about Connecticut government and politics for many years (CPowell@cox.net).

Chris Powell: Could Conn. suburbs get city life without its nastiness?

A shell in which to put housing?

—Photo by Justin Cozart

MANCHESTER, Conn.

Maybe a couple of the state's problems can solve each other. 

Many suburban shopping malls are fading and failing as many people increasingly shop from home via the Internet and have their purchases delivered. With its COVID hysteria, government keeps scaring them against going out, and with the economy’s problems, many people can't afford to buy as much.

Meanwhile, Connecticut has a desperate shortage of housing, and soaring housing prices are a major cause of the worsening poverty in the state.

So property developers here and around the country are interested in converting fading and failed malls to housing or attaching multi-family housing to them. 

Since mall property is already in commercial use and fully equipped with utilities, zoning obstacles and neighborhood objections should be much reduced, and new residents on site might substantially increase the customer base for retailers and professional services remaining in a mall. If enough housing at malls was built, housing costs would diminish for everyone.

A project successfully combining a shopping mall with a lot of new housing might create a walkable environment with much less need for cars -- making something resembling city life available in the suburbs without the poverty-induced nastiness that has overtaken most cities.

Sustaining rather than eradicating poverty would remain big business for government, but any substantial increase in housing might do more to reduce poverty than any other government social program.

xxx

New Haven sometimes seems to be striving to embody the metaphor about rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic.

The city's Peace Commission may think that it has achieved the big objective cited on its Internet site -- averting nuclear war -- but it seems to have been surprised by Gaza's recent attack on Israel. And though crime continues to plague New Haven while more than three-quarters of the city's schoolchildren are not performing at grade level, many being chronically absent, the other day a committee of the city council found time for a different issue: whether the city should become the first municipality in Connecticut to prohibit the sale of menthol cigarettes.

The Federal Food and Drug Administration is also moving to ban menthol cigarettes. The rationale offered is that menthol flavoring in cigarettes appeals especially to children and members of racial minorities. The unstated rationale is that children and racial minorities can't be persuaded to avoid smoking.

A municipal ban would be only pious posturing. It would not stop city residents from crossing the city line to buy menthol cigarettes in adjacent towns. Indeed, a ban well might create another contraband market in the city. Even federal law and state law haven't prevented deadly drugs like heroin and fentanyl from ravaging New Haven and other cities. 

Besides, a municipal ban on menthol cigarettes would be laughably hypocritical, insofar as New Haven has approved five marijuana dispensaries in the city, though marijuana presents health risks as serious as those of menthol cigarettes. But somehow marijuana has become politically correct. 

Why are New Haven's elected officials bothering with this silliness? Probably for the same reason that state legislators also spend so much time on the trivial. It distracts from their irrelevance to the big dangers of everyday life and Connecticut's longstanding problems that are never solved as the state continues to decline.

xxx

Electricity rates aren't the only place where state government imposes hidden taxes. 

A recent report in the Connecticut Mirror reminded about another tax-hiding mechanism, the state's tax on bulk sales of gasoline, which lately has been about 22 cents per gallon. Gas stations pay the tax to wholesalers and recover it from their customers at the pump, where the retail sales tax is added, another 25 cents per gallon.

Drivers have some idea of the retail sales tax, especially since state government reduced it temporarily after the gas price spike resulting from Russia's invasion of Ukraine and the international sanctions on Russian oil. But few people know about the wholesale tax.

The wholesale tax on gas is another way state government encourages people to blame industry for high prices when government itself is largely responsible.

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

Chris Powell: State police scandal seems to broaden; ‘banned books’ scam

MANCHESTER, Conn.

Announcing the retirement of his state police commissioner, James C. Rovella, and deputy commissioner, Col. Stavros Mellekas, Connecticut Gov. Ned Lamont prompted speculation that the festering scandal over fake traffic tickets may turn out to be far more extensive than has been indicated.

The governor explained the departures as a matter of his wanting a "fresh start" with the state police for his second term. But his second term began nine months ago and the audit reporting many racial discrepancies with traffic tickets issued by state troopers wasn't released until five months later.

Four investigations are underway -- by the U.S. Justice Department, the U.S. Transportation Department, one commissioned by the governor and assigned to a former U.S. attorney, and one by the state police department itself. The tickets under review are suspected of misreporting the race of the motorists, thereby concealing racial discrimination by troopers. If innocent mistakes in data entry caused the discrepancies, one of those investigations might have concluded as much by now. But even the state police themselves have not provided any firm explanation.

If the misreporting was not innocent but dishonest or malicious, firings will be necessary to maintain public confidence, even as the state troopers union already has voted no confidence in the department's management while failing to provide any explanation of its own about what happened.

The audit found misreporting was probable with the tickets written by as many as 130 current or retired state troopers, so dozens of troopers might have to be dismissed or otherwise disciplined. The problem wouldn't end there, since the implication of any trooper in official dishonesty may prompt challenges to his testimony in criminal cases already decided and risk undoing them.

Additionally, as crime and traffic violations are becoming more brazen amid general social disintegration and increasing mental illness, the state police are understaffed, and dismissals or suspensions will worsen that understaffing.

Connecticut needs its police more than ever, but they are no good if they lack integrity. Integrity is their foremost qualification. If state troopers have been lacking integrity lately -- and lax discipline in some recent cases suggests as much -- solving the problem will have to go far beyond replacing the commissioner and his deputy.

xxx

Connecticut's librarians and some elected officials and advocates of using schools to indoctrinate students without their parents knowing about it recently celebrated a misnomer self-righteously: what they called Banned Books Week.

No books are banned in the United States. The recent controversies are about challenges to books in school and public libraries and school curriculums -- whether certain books, especially those of a sexual nature, are appropriate for certain ages or appropriate for stocking in a school or public library at all.

Appropriateness is always a matter of judgment and thus always a fair issue. While some challenges may be crazy or bigoted, the real issue is always whether in a democracy the public has the right to express its judgment on the management of public institutions and to seek to have that judgment implemented through elected officials, or whether librarians and school administrators are always right and must not be questioned.

But addressing the real issue candidly would diminish the power of the people in charge by legitimizing questions about their judgment. So instead the people in charge frame the issue as that of "banning" books, since banning books is plainly fascism and commands little support.

Of course dismissing the public's concerns about the operation of public institutions is fascism too, but now that Connecticut is run by the political left, fascism is thought to be impossible here.]

The irony is that if keeping a book out of a library or curriculum is "banning" it, librarians and school administrators themselves are the biggest book banners. For libraries and curriculums are usually very small while the supply of books is virtually infinite, so librarians and school administrators are always having to choose against millions of books, including some pretty good ones.

What vindicates their choices? That's what Banned Books Week is for.  

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

Chris Powell: Government underwrites lethal child-neglect culture

MANCHESTER, Conn.

Why did a 2-year-old boy fall to his death through a window of his third-floor apartment in Hartford in July?

A long report by the Connecticut Mirror the other day attempted to answer that question. It attributed the boy's death to "generational poverty" and, more so, to government's failure to make sure that the boy's mother had everything she needed to raise her five children, all under 13, on her own, since the children's father or fathers were not providers. 

If only, the report lamented, government had given the woman free day care and longer classes about parenting and had applied current housing code standards to the family's apartment building, which was exempt because of its age.

Well, maybe. 

But the report did not address the most compelling issue as it strove to acquit the woman of the manslaughter and risk-of-injury charges she faces for having left her children unattended in squalor as she went to work as a part-time taxi driver, purportedly expecting the 2-year-old's father to arrive soon to watch the children. It could not have been surprising that he was fatally late.

That is, how does a woman of limited education and job skills who can't support herself come to have five children but no husband or other committed helpmate in the state that gave rise to the constitutional right to contraception and sometimes seems to consider abortion the highest social good?

One pregnancy may be an accident. Five are not. Five children born to someone unprepared to support them is irresponsibility, though political correctness forbids any such acknowledgment.

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But the Mirror report inadvertently hinted at an explanation.

First, the report said, the woman always wanted to be a mother. Of course, many people want to be parents, but some still know that parenthood imposes obligations of preparedness.

Second, and perhaps crucially, the report elaborated: "When she was in high school, she moved in with an older man. Her family sent her to Connecticut after graduation to get her away from him, but she had little beyond the clothes on her back when she moved. She lived in a homeless shelter for several months and rang the Salvation Army bell at Christmas to earn money to pay the security deposit for her first apartment. When she got pregnant with her first daughter, she qualified for a housing choice voucher. ...

“She paid $469 per month for the apartment, and her housing choice voucher covered the rest of the $1,550 rent.”

Of course in addition to that heavily subsidized housing there would be free medical insurance and food and other benefits. So who needs to be prepared, competent, self-supporting, and responsible and have a committed spouse when government will lavish money on irresponsibility that holds children hostage?

And so the disastrous cycle began again -- four more children without a spouse, more dependence on government, more child neglect, mental illness for one of the children, and the horrible death of the 2-year-old boy, following constant problems that prompted frequent visits by social workers from the state Department of Children and Families, on which Connecticut spends more than $800 million each year to minister to thousands of similarly dysfunctional households with similarly neglected children, without ever establishing as a matter of policy that this is no way to live since it imposes a catastrophic burden on both the children held hostage and society.

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Few children monitored by DCF fall out of third-story windows, but some die after ingesting narcotics left within their reach, others suffer serious injuries at the hands of their reckless custodians, and many come to school far behind in social development or with learning disabilities and behavioral problems. The $800 million spent annually by DCF is only part of the cost of this lifestyle, a cost that extends to schools, courts, and prisons.

That is, what is called the child-protection system pays for and thus rationalizes, institutionalizes, and encourages child neglect.

While the poor may be demoralized, like everyone else they respond to financial incentives. They are not stupid. But government can be, and journalism doesn't always make it smarter.

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