Chris Powell: Bribing Conn. voters won’t lessen poverty

Demonstration in Washington, D.C.

- Photo by Djembayz

MANCHESTER, Conn.

Connecticut Gov. Ned Lamont's address this week welcoming the General Assembly back to work was reminiscent of the old lament about election years -- that people in a democracy are easily bribed with their own money. 

Such a bribe was the highlight of the governor's remarks -- his proposal to issue “tax rebates," $200 for single people, $400 for married couples. Meanwhile people around the state, most of them associated with the governor's own party, are clamoring for state government to appropriate more money for social needs state government still neglects. 

Many of those needs are more compelling than the needs or wants of many of the people who will receive those “tax rebates." But who will be candid about the incongruity? 

That is, the “tax rebates" are needed most to help re-elect the regime so that it can hold power for another four years in the name of addressing all those unmet social needs, though those needs seem only to increase as more is spent in the name of alleviating them. Seldom are any problems actually  solved.

The governor's address inadvertently acknowledged that poverty has been worsening in Connecticut during his administration. 

Once upon a time in Connecticut most parents could feed their children before sending them to school. Indeed, once upon a time most children in Connecticut had two parents. Now many children in Connecticut -- most children in the cities -- have only one parent, if that, and many arrive at school unfed and distracted by hunger. It's a big problem. So the governor would have all public schools provide free breakfasts.

Not long ago most working people in Connecticut had jobs requiring a skill level, and their compensation included adequate employer-sponsored medical insurance. Not anymore. Today many young people in Connecticut graduate from high school largely uneducated and qualified only for menial work. As a result more adults are working in minimum-wage jobs once considered entry-level. So the governor wants state government to offer a “public option" program of medical insurance for people who don't qualify for Medicaid, insurance for the destitute.

The governor said he will appoint a special commission to study the funding of elementary and high school education. It would have been better to study why poverty is worsening. For everyone in state and local government already knows that funding lower education is always a tug of war between state taxes and municipal property taxes, with most of the money ending up with members of teacher unions, who control most municipal spending by virtue of the binding arbitration of their contracts.

Nearly every legislative session tinkers with school funding formulas without ever improving student performance. Formula tinkering is just the illusion of concern and action, since student performance is not a matter of per-pupil spending at all, but almost entirely a matter of per-pupil  parenting, which can't be discussed though it is at the center of the poverty problem.

The governor noted that Connecticut's high housing prices are impoverishing people who don't own their housing. But he seems to expect far more housing construction than is likely to result from the state's new law restricting municipal zoning. With 169 cities and towns in charge of housing development, there will be little urgency and accountability. What's needed is a state housing development agency to acquire and take control of the sort of vacant or underused city and inner-suburb properties the governor cited in his address, and to contract for middle-income housing to be built on them urgently.

Instead the other day the governor proposed to apply rent control to apartments owned by out-of-state landlords, a demagogic form of expropriation that will inhibit  housing creation.

As most legislative sessions do, the new one will produce a lot more spending, which will be euphemized, as the governor did in his address, as ‘‘investment," a presumption that government spending is always productive. It isn't. After all, as the Lamont administration's most recent scandal has shown, state government lately has “invested" hundreds of thousands of dollars in Hartford Sen. Douglas McCrory's girlfriend.

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