MANCHESTER, Conn.
Nearly everyone on Connecticut state government's payroll, directly or indirectly, is beseeching Gov. Ned Lamont and the General Assembly to loosen the "fiscal guardrails" that have constrained spending and have allowed state pension funds to grow slightly faster than their obligations.

Leading the clamor to spend more are social-service groups and their legislative allies. They want the state's Medicaid program to cover diapers. They want another $9 million for community food banks, contending that more than 10 percent of Connecticut's population is "food insecure." And they advocate a $600 "refundable tax credit" for low-income households, cash for people who don't pay income taxes.

They hold news conferences where they cheer and congratulate each other as if they don't understand the disaster behind their proposals: the explosion of poverty in a state that purports to be doing well. 

The proposals indicate otherwise -- that more people can't support themselves and their children, even if for years now state government has not seemed to expect people to. Households headed by a single woman with little education and income and no significant job skills but with several young children to support are often cited in news reports as if their poverty is surprising. 

Such poverty is surprising only insofar as Connecticut simultaneously glories in free, round-the-clock contraception and abortion. Indeed, the other week the governor grandly announced the state's first contraceptives vending machine.

But the cause of the worsening poverty seems not to interest advocates of the new spending. Nor do they seem to wonder why poverty has worsened despite government's longstanding programs to alleviate it.

State government's bookkeeping is well monitored by the auditors of public accounts, but its  policies and programs are seldom audited for  results. Appropriating and bestowing money have become ends in themselves.

Breaking away from Trumpian Republicanism, Wall Street Journal columnist Peggy Noonan, once a top aide to President Ronald Reagan, offered some advice to Democrats last week. "Most of all," she wrote, "make something work. You run nearly every great city in the nation. Make one work -- clean it up, control crime, smash corruption, educate the kids."

Noonan meant well but misunderstands the situation. For from the Democratic perspective, the cities they control work very well -- they create and sustain the hapless underclass that is the rationale for the government class and that produces the election pluralities on which the party of the government class relies. A self-sufficient population is not the policy objective; perpetual dependence on government is.

For what else can explain the 60-year decline of cities in Connecticut and nationally and the horrifying failure of their schools? After all this time the people in charge can't be so stupid to have missed this. They must be assumed to intend  the most obvious results of their administration. Auditing the results would call those longstanding policies and programs into question and compel a change not just in policies and programs but a change in regime. 

So results must not be calculated. For prosperity isn't political power in Connecticut anymore. Poverty is.

'‘SANCTUARY'‘ IN NEW LONDON: Now that the federal government is starting to much more seriously enforce immigration law again, some cities are declaring that they really aren't "sanctuary" cities after all, or at least that they don't want to be known as such, lest the Trump administration try to penalize them for obstructing enforcement. 

Among these cities is New London, where Mayor Michael Passero recently told the city's newspaper, The Day, that while the city has a reputation as a "sanctuary" city, the City Council's 2018 resolution on immigration doesn't mention "sanctuary" at all and says only that the city will observe state and federal law and be a welcoming place.

In a technical sense the mayor is right. But then everyone in authority in New London seems to support Connecticut's "Trust Act," which forbids municipal police from most cooperation with federal immigration authorities. Since the "Trust Act" makes Connecticut a "sanctuary" state,  all  its municipalities are "sanctuary" cities. "Welcoming" is euphemism and no defense.]

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