—Graphic by Samuel James
A black tie wedding reception held at the Society Room in Hartford, Conn. It needn’t be this fancy!
MANCHESTER, Conn.
You’d never know it from the constant clamor by Connecticut’s news organizations and politicians about “domestic violence,” but the wisdom of the ages may still apply insofar as two people can keep living as cheaply as one — at least if they can stand each other. Not all married people in Connecticut or throughout the country are trying to kill their spouses.
For a study published Oct. 5 by the Pew Research Center confirmed the old saying. The study reported that married and romantically partnered couples in the United States are more prosperous and healthier than single people.
The study’s bad news is that the married share of the population has been declining for 30 years and a larger share of the population now remains single well into adulthood.
Of course in theory single life may leave people with more options. Unfortunately their greater chance of getting stuck in poverty or illness may curtail their options. While in some respects people curtail their options by marrying, in other respects their greater prosperity increases their options.
The growth in the single adult population implies the disaster that the country long has been facing with childrearing. Children can’t have too many people to love, protect, and encourage them, but these days millions of children are lucky to have even one parent or guardian and so they start life at a disadvantage, compounded by government’s failure to draw policy conclusions from studies like this new one.
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What has the Republican Party done this year to earn the resounding approval it has gotten in the most recent national poll by the Gallup organization?
Nothing. The Republicans have just sat around like everyone else watching as the incompetence of President Biden and his administration makes the country miss Donald Trump.
According to Gallup, more people now consider the Republicans superior to the Democrats on both economic issues and international affairs. Some polls even show Trump leading Biden in a hypothetical presidential rematch in 2024, though it is hard to imagine Biden maintaining the necessary stamina for even another year.
Of course 2024 is a long way off. But campaigns are already starting for next year’s elections for Congress, and the Democratic majorities there are paper thin. A switch to Republican majorities seems likely.
More than dissatisfaction with the Biden administration would be required to make next year’s Republican nominations for governor and Congress desirable in overwhelmingly Democratic Connecticut. But in addition to crime, Connecticut is full of serious issues that state government long has overlooked. Maybe the national polls will encourage Connecticut Republicans to try getting more relevant.
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Now that the supply of dollars has been cut off with the fall of the U.S. puppet regime in Afghanistan, Reuters reports that officials of Western governments and the United Nations are working to turn the spigot back on to prevent the country’s economic collapse. The new theocratic fascist Taliban government is no more capable of running the country than the puppet regime was. Indeed, Afghanistan is hardly a country at all, more like a grouping of medieval tribes.
The plan, Reuters says, is to get money to the Afghan people without also underwriting the Taliban. This is a silly delusion.
For a gangster regime like the Taliban easily can confiscate whatever it wants from the people, and any money sent to and kept by the Afghans will make them more content to be ruled by the gangsters. But hunger and general privation may encourage Afghans to overthrow the regime.
The Biden administration’s abrupt withdrawal from Afghanistan forfeited to the Taliban military equipment worth hundreds of millions of dollars. The Taliban can sell that equipment to Iran or China and already may have begun to do so. In any case under U.S. occupation the Afghans had their chance to build and sustain a decent government. Being so primitive, most Afghans couldn’t have cared less, and the United States was stupid for thinking they ever might have cared.
If the Afghans are hungry or need medicine, their country has great mineral wealth and can sell the mining rights to China, which, having a gangster regime itself, will have no problem underwriting gangsters elsewhere.
Chris Powell is a columnist for the Journal Inquirer in Manchester.
