Chris Powell: Why are Conn. and R.I. giving EB piles of money to do what it would do anyway?
USS Nautilus moored in Groton at the Submarine Force Museum.
What was the necessity of Connecticut Gov. Dannel Malloy's award the other day of $80 million to the Electric Boat Division of General Dynamics in Groton? {Rhode Island is giving the very rich company $34 million in incentives to expand at Quonset Point.}
The governor said that in exchange for the money, the company will increase its local employment by 1,900 people over the next 16 years, a state subsidy of $42,000 per job. But the federal government already had given the company the extra submarine work that was requiring that expansion of its workforce.
That is, the Malloy administration is paying EB to do what it was doing anyway, and as a military contractor EB is already getting all its money from government.
So was the state's payment necessary to keep EB in Connecticut, to prevent the company from moving to another state? That seems improbable, given EB's huge facilities in southeastern Connecticut and Rhode Island. They would not easily be relocated. Further, any risk of relocation would not speak well of Connecticut's congressional delegation, whose agitation for more submarine construction is partly responsible for the extra work coming to EB. With the federal government spending billions more on submarines, EB probably would not have minded being required to stay put.
While the governor called the state's payment to EB a "partnership," it looks more like corporate welfare from an administration that senses that, with its constant increases in taxes and business regulations, it has crippled the state's economy and feels ever more vulnerable to extortion by major corporations.
And does the Navy really need the extra submarines? As long as military contracting is such big business in Connecticut, that issue will get no more serious inquiry from the state's political leaders than the war in Afghanistan, now in its 18th inconclusive year.
xxx
SUBVERTING THE CONSTITUTION: The General Assembly and Governor Malloy are moving to put Connecticut into the "national popular vote" system of determining the votes of the state's presidential electors and thus determining the election of the president. Under the proposal Connecticut's electors would be required to vote for the candidate who led the national presidential vote.
There are many problems with this plan, starting with its subversion of the Constitution by undoing the Electoral College without a constitutional amendment and it making a compact among states without the approval of Congress as required by the Constitution.
Advocates of the "national popular vote" system say it would ensure that every vote for president counts, but it wouldn't. For it would nullify the votes of states on the minority side and diminish the influence of Connecticut and other small states, whose electors now represent more voters than the national average. The proposed system would have canceled Connecticut's votes in the 2004 presidential election, when Democrat John Kerry carried the state but lost the national vote to Republican George W. Bush. Connecticut's advocates of the "national popular vote" system seem to think that this state can never be on the minority side nationally, but it has been.
And just how is the national popular vote to be officially counted and totaled? There are no such counts and totals. The secretaries of the 50 states count only their own state's votes and certify their electors
The Electoral College has its disadvantages but so does the "national popular vote" system. The proposal would allow political corruption in "sanctuary states," nullifiers of federal immigration law -- particularly California and New York -- to steal more than their allotted electoral votes and control presidential elections by facilitating voting by their millions of illegal immigrants.
Chris Powell is a columnist for the Journal Inquirer, in Manchester, Conn.