Chris Powell: Hugely paid Conn. trooper goes bonkers as he approaches pension-racket trough

MANCHESTER, Conn.

No wonder state Connecticut state Trooper Matthew Spina hates his job, just as he told the motorist he abused with five minutes of crazed rage during a traffic stop in New Haven two weeks ago, a tirade famously captured on cellphone video, posted on the Internet, and viewed internationally:

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-8338643/Connecticut-trooper-goes-rage-filled-tirade-speeding-motorist-gave-finger.html

The trooper screamed at, bullied and threatened the motorist, searched his backpack, handcuffed him, and stomped on his possessions before uncuffing him and letting him go without arresting or ticketing him for anything, since the motorist had done nothing illegal.

In the video Spina expresses contempt for the public he polices, and he rejoices that he has only 14 months to go until retirement. These remarks invite a review of his payroll records at state Comptroller Kevin Lembo's wonderful OpenCT internet site. It turns out that in at least the last five years Spina has been working so much that his overtime earnings have nearly equaled or exceeded his base annual salary of almost $100,000:

https://openpayroll.ct.gov/#!/year/2020/employee/9F1B517080F4571F5AABFA4741065909

Last year Spina made $99,000 in regular pay, $97,000 in overtime, and another $7,000 in miscellaneous pay, presumably private-duty pay, another sort of overtime, for a total of $203,000. Forty percent of Spina's earnings of $76,744 so far this year has been overtime, so he is on track for another $200,000 year -- if he can maintain some semblance of sanity, if his supervisors don't see that overwork may be impairing his fitness, and if he is not suspended or dismissed for his misconduct, which has spectacularly besmirched the state police.

Why might Spina drive himself crazy with overwork? It's probably so he can participate in the part of state government's pension system that has become a racket. The system offers troopers pensions that are payable immediately upon 20 years of service, and it calculates pension payments by taking half the average of the salaries of a trooper's three highest-earning years.

Thus Spina seems close to qualifying for an annual pension of about $100,000. The Yankee Institute for Public Policy says more than 1,600 retired state employees already enjoy pensions that large.

This is even better than it looks. For Spina seems to be only middle-aged, and achieving pension entitlement by middle age through government employment and not retiring but instead taking other employment for 15 years or so has become a hallowed and lucrative tradition in Connecticut. The pension system is often used not just for a secure retirement but also for accumulation of great wealth during a second career, long before a beneficiary stops working.

But if Spina does not complete 20 years of service as he plans to do next year, he will not qualify for a state pension until he turns 65. In that case he probably would have to keep working another 15 or 20 years in a different job.

So how will the state police department handle the Spina case?

The trooper has been transferred to desk duty while his misconduct is under investigation. Given the department's habit of concealing or minimizing misconduct by troopers, Spina may receive no serious discipline at all, or the department may delay any discipline until Spina completes the 14 months he needs for his 20-year qualification, thereby making discipline meaningless.

The bigger issue here is whether, now that state government's finances have been devastated by the virus epidemic as well as by pension obligations, and many state residents have been ruined financially, Connecticut can afford a pension system that allows its beneficiaries to use it not just for secure retirement but for a life of luxury.

Chris Powell is a columnist for the Journal Inquirer, in Manchester.

Chris Powell: In the COVID-19 crisis, both sides threaten liberty; block those raises!

MANCHESTER, Conn.

Fortunately it was just another brief bout of MAGA-lomania the other day when President Trump declared that he would decide when states lift the health and safety restrictions they have imposed because of the virus epidemic. Several governors, including Connecticut's Ned Lamont, quickly protested that the Constitution reserves such power to the states. New York's Andrew Cuomo protested most colorfully, noting that the president is not a king.

But amid the epidemic constitutional rights are under assault by many elected officials throughout the country, Democratic as well as Republican. Several states are imposing or threatening to impose penalties on religious services that exceed recommended attendance levels, in spite of the First Amendment's guarantees of freedom of religion and assembly.

Connecticut isn't immune to such assaults. Lamont skirted the Second Amendment's guarantee of the right to bear arms by telling gun shops they could remain open only by appointment. State Attorney General William Tong has joined other state attorneys general in a lawsuit to suppress publication of plans for guns that can be made by 3D printers, and this week Tong urged the federal government to criminalize such publication -- that is, to criminalize mere information, as if the First Amendment doesn't also guarantee speech and press rights.

The objection to making guns with 3D printers is that they can be manufactured without legally required serial numbers. But any gun can be, and the designs for many weapons have been published. If mere information can be criminalized in regard to gun designs, it can be criminalized for whatever government doesn't want people to know. Of course there would be no end to that.

Trump can't tell states when to lift their health and safety restrictions. But neither can Tong tell people what they can publish and read, no matter how politically incorrect it may be.

xxx

Yankee Institute investigative journalist Marc Fitch this week reminded Connecticut that as of July 1 state government employees are due to start receiving raises costing at least $353 million a year. Fitch noted that Democratic governors in New York, Pennsylvania and Virginia are suspending state employee raises until the immense financial cost of the epidemic can be calculated.

So the Yankee Institute urged Governor Lamont to suspend the raises as well, but it's not clear that he can. For the raises are part of state government's current contract with the state employee union coalition, one of the many lamentable legacies of Connecticut's previous administration, and the federal Constitution forbids states from making any law impairing the obligation of contracts.

It's bad enough that the wages and benefits of state and municipal government employees have been completely protected even as the governor's own orders have thrown tens of thousands of people out of work in the private sector. For state government to pay raises while unemployment explodes in the private sector and state tax collections collapse would be crazy, more proof that nothing matters more to state government than the contentment of its own employees, whose unions long have controlled the majority political party.

But the governor is not helpless here. Using his emergency powers he could suspend collective bargaining for state employees and binding arbitration of their contracts for six months at a time or "modify" those laws to strengthen public administration during the emergency. He should do so, for as the treacle on television says, we're all supposed to be in this together.

Chris Powell is a columnist for the Journal Inquirer, in Manchester.

Don Pesci: A measles epidemic of tolling gantries coming in Conn.?

Hey, working suburban women who voted for the toll guy for governor -- get out your wallets. Multiple reports in Connecticut’s media advise us that Lamont eked out a win over Republican gubernatorial nominee Bob Stefanowski with some encouragement from suburban women, many of whom hold down jobs to which they travel – by car, not by largely empty FastTrack-powered buses.

During his gubernatorial campaign, Gov. Elect Ned Lamont was warm on tolls – but the tolls, working suburban women and others were told, would be levied only on out-of-state trucks, a dubious constitutional gambit. Rhode Island, the state from which Lamont lifted the idea, is now embroiled in law suits on the issue.

A little more than a week after the election, it was reported by the indispensable Yankee Institute that a new study commissioned by the Connecticut Department of Transportation calls for 82 tolling gantries on Connecticut highways. A note provided on a map furnished by the study authors reads, comfortingly, “Locations are for preliminary planning purposes only.”

The mapped major transportation arteries are pock-marked with red dots (see map above)— gantry locations that make the state look as if it had come down with an advanced case of measles. In a somewhat sour note, the study remarks that “fairness” in toll collections should be paramount: “Fairness – tolls should be set to ensure collection of revenues from CT as well as out-of-state auto and truck trips.” But fairness, Connecticut’s taxpayers will understand lies, like beauty and truth, in the eye of the beholder.

Speaking of fairness, Yankee notes wryly, “The study was previously kept under wraps by DOT Commissioner James Redeker and was the subject of a complaint to the Freedom of Information Commission by Sen. Len Suzio, R-Meriden. In July, Redeker cited the results of the study in testimony before the state Bond Commission but refused to release the study until today.” Len Suzio is no longer in the Senate, having been purged by politicians he has in the past unmercifully annoyed.

The Connecticut DOT has not yet produced a study showing the number of times tolling limited to a targeted subset has not, sooner or later, trickled down to a much broader base. And in fact, that is the case with nearly all taxes. The federal income tax began as a temporary tax on millionaires levied to pay for Civil War debt during the Lincoln administration. But in the course of time, the reinstituted income tax trickled down to non-millionaire working suburban women whose votes now have hoisted Lamont into a gubernatorial seat to be vacated in January by the most unpopular governor in the United States, Dannel Malloy, the author, along with a now revivified majority in the General Assembly, of two hefty tax increases.

If Connecticut’s onerous progressive tax system – which is the primary cause of budget instability – is ever to be reformed, the state might consider moving to a fair or flat tax in which every citizen in Connecticut pays the same rate and is therefore equally invested in state politics. The very rich, many of whom pay fewer taxes than their secretaries (see Warren Buffett on this), would pay the flat tax rate rather than shelter their assets through legalized chicanery, and the poor could be recompensed after having paid the tax. Collections would be simple, and large legal firms hired by the very rich to avoid paying crippling taxes would move on to more profitable pursuits.

Progressivism is little more than a political lure dangled before a credulous public to persuade them to vote for limitless spending that benefits politicians who shortly devise other means – tolling? – to further empty the pockets of working suburban women and all their other targets. Toll gantries placed approximately every 6.6 miles on interstates 95, 84, 91, 395, 691 and 291 and routes 2, 9, 8 and 15 would allow the state to take a major bite from working suburban women, among others. According to the study, Connecticut could collect more than $1 billion per year from electronic tolls.

If there is anyone in the state who believes that tolling – count the gantries – will be long limited to out-of-state trucks, perhaps his or her voting rights should be taken from them and given to the guy behind the tree. Mocking those who believe the claims of politicians that they will be exempted from paying taxes, the late Louisiana Sen. Russell Long offered the following short pearl of wisdom in verse: “Don’t tax you, don’t tax me, tax the fellow behind the tree.”

Don Pesci is a Vernon, Conn.-based columnist.

Don Pesci: In Conn., expenditure always rises to exceed income

Connecticut’s gubernatorial “debate” – Where are Lincoln and Douglas when you need them? -- between Ned Lamont and Bob Stefanowski appears to be stuck on a single “how” question: How will Stefanowski implement his campaign pledge to eliminate Connecticut’s income tax, once considered a final solution to the state’s debt problems, now a millstone around the neck of Connecticut.

The media coverage of the debates has been diverting, but most reports have been stuck in a single groove, playing over and over the same starkly abbreviated section of a larger unheard song, rather as if inconvenient questions launched in Lamont’s direction will upset the balanced apple cart that has been constructed over a period of three decades by the Democrat General Assembly hegemon in charge of state finances. Stefanowski has said his pledge to eliminate the income tax within the space of eight years is an aspirational goal that will become operational two years into his gubernatorial administration, which means, yes, Stefanowski will reduce taxes and – much more importantly – reduce spending.

Spending in Connecticut has increased threefold within the space of four governors: present Gov. Dannel Malloy, a progressive Democrat, two Republican governors, Jodi Rell and John Rowland, who, it will be recalled, pledged during his first run for governor to axe the tax – Rowland had second thoughts once he had been elected – and Lowell “instituting an income tax during a recession would be like pouring gas on a fire” Weicker, a nominal Republican who was in fact more Democrat than the Democrat pope of Connecticut at the time, then Sen. and now movie industry big shot Chris Dodd.

Stefanowski's idea is this: Taxing and spending are causally connected. If you increase taxes, spending increases will follow. In fact, that has been the rule in Connecticut’s economy ever since Weicker in 1991 poured gas on the fire. The Weicker tax saved state legislators the necessity of reducing spending, and the gals and guys in the state legislature – dominated for the last 30 years by progressive “we need more” Democrats – are very grateful indeed.

The good times now are gone. Businesses in the state have fled a government that cannot reverse its perilous race towards the yawning abyss; companies in Connecticut are looking towards a barren future under unappeasable tax-starved progressives, which further will reduce company profits – the surplus money that makes it possible for businesses to expand, hire more workers, increase wages and contribute a “fair share” in taxes to Connecticut’s dwindling state coffers. As a consequence of runaway spending, Connecticut’s economic growth is now the laughing stock of the nation.

So then, here are five “how” questions rarely, if ever, put to Lamont by Connecticut’s strangely incurious media:

1) How will Lamont curb spending, permanently and long term, in Connecticut? We have passed the point at which the state’s economy will respond positively to revocable tax credits, or to bribes given to homegrown companies to remain in the state, or to seed money given to outside companies to put down shallow roots in the state’s parched ground. A voting public that has come of age in the age of pointless political effusions made by politicians trolling for votes has, one hopes, developed an internal resistance to political posturing. Since spending is driven by ever increasing taxation – which is, in a nutshell, the whole history of Connecticut since 1991 – would Lamont favor legislation requiring a super-majority in the General Assembly to increase taxes? No effusions please. A “yes” or “no” will be sufficient.

2) Lamont has winkingly proposed a toll tax on heavy trucks in Connecticut to provide money for the transportation fund, which – big surprise – is out of cash – big surprise -- because a Democrat controlled General Assembly has raided dedicated funds across the state to satiate its largely political need to provide salaries and benefits to state workers in return for votes. Border toll installations, as Lamont well knows, cannot be re-erected without costing the state more money in penalties than his tolls on trucks would bring in. Therefore, any tolling in Connecticut must be congesting tolling, which means mucho tolling gantries throughout the state. Assuming the tolling infrastructure has been assembled, how long does Lamont think it would take before tolling is applied to grandma in her 1991 Chevy? One month? Two months?

3) Isn’t the precipitating cause of increased taxation in Connecticut the unhinged appetite among non-Stefanowski progressive legislators to move entrepreneurial capital from the private to the public sphere, the better to satisfy the insatiable appetite of state unions for salary and benefit increases? How will Lamont curb this appetite? Remember, largely owing to the pro-union efforts of Malloy in SEBAC agreements, salary increases are “fixed” until 2027, and Governor Lamont will not be able to use threatened layoffs as a bargaining chip in his negotiations with state unionized workers. Connecticut is one of the few states in the union that sets state worker salaries and benefits through negotiations between its governor and union honchos. Should the legislature present Lamont with a bill that sets salaries and benefits through legislation instead, will he sign it?

4) Over a period of three decades and more, “fixed costs” in the state – those costs over which the General Assembly has unconstitutionally abandoned all control – have steadily increased; so that, presently, the General Assembly has effective governance over only half of its expenditures, according to a Yankee Institute study. How will Lamont increase this figure to, say, 100 percent?

5) Finally, how do Lamont’s policy prescriptions differ from those of the departing governor Malloy, approval rating 21 percent, which is 21 points lower than that of President Trump at 42 percent?

Don Pesci is a Vernon, Conn.-based columnist.

Don Pesci: How to fix Connecticut's fixed-cost problem

"Sisyphys'' (1548–49), by Titian.

Jim Powell asked in an eye-opening piece in Forbes magazine 67 months ago, “How Did Rich Connecticut Morph Into One Of America's Worst Performing Economies?"

A partial answer, freighted with supportive data, has now been advanced in a piece commissioned by The Yankee Institute titled “Above the Law: How Government Unions’ Extralegal Privileges Are Harming Public Employees, Taxpayers And The State." 

Everyone, both inside and outside the state, is intimately familiar with the bad news most of us have internally affirmed during the past few decades. Consider the rise in the Connecticut’s “fixed costs,” a fixed cost being one that can be reduced only by extraordinary, politically unlikely efforts: “In 2006, fixed costs constituted only 37 percent of the state’s budget; by 2018 that amount was 53 percent.” In 2016, the Census Bureau reported that Connecticut was one of only eight states to lose population. Fixed costs are strangling the state’s economy and pushing taxpayers and workers out of state.

Chris Powell, who lately retired as managing editor of the Journal Inquirer newspaper, in Manchester, Conn., was asked some time past what should be done about “fixed costs,” to which he replied, “Unfix them.” A fixed cost is one that legislators who have pledged their troths to unions are disinclined to unfix for politically insidious reasons. So long as decision-making in matters of salaries, pensions and benefits remain in the hands of unions negotiating in secret with obliging governors, cowardly legislators subject to reelection will be more than happy to deed their budget responsibilities to others who will "fix costs" so that they then cannot easily be ameliorated by constitutional means.

During Gov. Dannel Malloy’s first term in office, taxes in 2011 increased by $2.5 billion, a record jump that included a 20 percent surcharge on corporate profits. Another $1.3 billion hike occurred in 2015. So onerous are Connecticut taxes that the Tax Foundation “rated the state as 44th in the nation for tax burden, and the second worse – 49th – for property taxes.” Coincidentally, the non-partisan Office of Policy and Management and the Office of Fiscal Analysis showed “a combined downward revision of $1.6 billion in projected tax revenue for fiscal years 2018 and 2019 compared to estimates provided just five months earlier.”

The state was taxing more and getting less, not a surprise to anyone familiar with the law of diminishing returns. At some tipping point in the tax scale, tax increases produce less revenue. Steadily increasing labor costs reduce a state’s ability to meet other more important obligations – especially when the state is averse to implementing long term, permanent reductions in spending.

The late Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher famously said that the trouble with socialism is that “sooner or later, you run out of other people's money.” The same holds true in a progressive state like Connecticut, in which labor costs continue to rise but further taxation is no longer possible because there are limits, economic and political, to taxation . If you cannot reduce labor costs through sensible and necessary measures, and if you cannot meet rising costs through tax increases, the only remaining option open to you, if you are a professional politician, is to commit hara-kiri and deed the intractable problems to your successor – the path chosen by Governor Malloy, who had declined to defend his ruinous policies by running for a third term in office.

The way out of the dark and forbidding forest is the way in – in reverse. Connecticut must move “fixed costs” into the fixable column overseen by elected legislators. This can be done in part by removing pensions and benefits from items negotiated during union-administrative contractual lovefests. Better still, why not allow elected legislators to set all presently negotiated items through statute? By eliminating union contracts and collective bargaining altogether, the General Assembly will simply be reassuming its constitutional obligations; it is the legislature, not the governor in conclave with unions, that is constitutionally obligated to appropriate and expend tax money. It is our elective system of government that holds legislators responsible for getting and spending, and this constitutional authority cannot be farmed out to unions and arbitrators without fatally damaging our republican form of government. Who died in the Constitution State and left unions, arbitrators and cowardly House and Senate leaders our bosses?

In a summary section of “Above The law,” the Yankee Institute provides common sense reforms that, if instituted, “will restore democracy to the Constitution State and secure fairness for taxpayers." These reform measures include:  ending the supersedence of labor contracts over state law; prohibiting unelected arbitrators from writing law; promulgating a law requiring unions to undergo regular recertification elections by workers; require the publication and public distribution  of all government union reports; limit collective bargaining to wages only; prohibit government employee layoffs based solely on seniority; allow all government workers  to opt into union membership every year; at the same time, allow workers to refuse union membership and represent their own interests; enact right-to-work laws for private sector employees now operative in 28 states; eliminate card check and make secret ballot elections the sole method by which workers may select or vote out a union; and lastly, enact meaningful and long term public pension reform.

A government that cannot regulate itself cannot sustain itself as a representative republic, but must eventually become a fixed, inalterable administrative state that abolishes self-rule through constitutionally prohibited means – such as distributing constitutional obligations to unelected bodies unanswerable to the people.

Don Pesci is a Vernon, Conn.-based columnist.

Chris Powell: One last reason to be in journalism

These remarks were made Oct. 9 at a meeting celebrating the Yankee Institute for Public Policy's 30th anniversary, held at the Hartford Club. HARTFORD

Thank you for your Truth Teller Award. Now if I can get the State Employee Bargaining Agent Coalition's Lie Teller Award I'll have a matched set.

Somebody told me that this award means I'm the best newspaper columnist in Connecticut. Of course I'm grateful for that thought -- indeed, these days anyone should be grateful just to be read. But such praise reminds me of what Bill Buckley said when Lillian Hellman was described as "the greatest living American female playwright." Buckley called it a little like marveling at the tallest building in Wichita, Kansas.

Awards prompt reflection about one's life, and I'm starting to appreciate how Groucho Marx felt when, in 1972, not long before he died, Roger Ebert asked him what he thought of his spectacular career on stage, in movies, and on radio and television.

Groucho replied: "I'd trade it all for an erection."

Back then such an observation would have been considered distasteful. Not anymore. If he was still around Groucho could parlay it into still another career in television, courtesy of the pharmaceutical industry and its ad agencies, and hardly anyone would be offended. Indeed, since half the country now is close to what was Groucho's age then, most people today probably would concur with him -- as I do, if for a more political reason.

In college I took a poetry course that introduced me to some fine things, like W.H. Auden's poem "In Memory of William Butler Yeats," as well as to the work of Yeats himself. Yeats had been the literary giant of Ireland, and when he died Auden wrote:

Now Ireland has her madness and her weather still,

For poetry makes nothing happen. ...

So much for poetry, I thought; Yeats and Auden should know. But maybe, I thought, journalism could make something happen, and it didn't even have to rhyme. So I left college early for the newspaper job.

I still think journalism can make something happen, or prevent something from happening, which can be just as good, and that's a reason for sticking with it. But journalism's efficacy is declining fast along with literacy and civic engagement amid the bane of civilization, the corruption of prosperity, so making something happen or preventing something is not so much my reason anymore.

No, I stick with journalism more out of spite. I just couldn't stand for certain people to think that nobody is on to them.

So here in Connecticut you may be stuck with me a little longer, just as Wichita is stuck with the Epic Center, the tallest building not only in that city but in all of Kansas though having only 22 stories. To learn the qualities of agreat journalist, you'll have to listen not to me but to Stanley Walker, who was city editor of the New York Herald-Tribune in the 1930s. Walker explained:

What makes a good newspaper man? The answer is easy. He knows everything. He is not only aware of what goes on in the world today but his brain is a repository of the accumulated wisdom of the ages.

He is not only handsome but he has the physical strength that enables him to perform great feats of energy. He can go for nights on end without sleep. He dresses well and talks with charm. Men admire him; women adore him; tycoons and statesmen are willing to share their secrets with him.

He hates lies and meanness and sham but keeps his temper. He is loyal to his paper and to what he looks upon as his profession; whether it is a profession or merely a craft, he resents attempts to debase it.

When he dies, a lot of people are sorry, and some of them remember him for several days.

Thanks again for your award. I will remember you always for it, and if you remember me through dinner tonight I'll consider it a triumph.

Chris Powell is the managing editor of the Journal Inquirer, in Manchester, Conn.