Chris Powell: In Connecticut and elsewhere, to raise incomes raise job skills

In East Hartford near the Connecticut River on a gloomy day.

— Photo by JJBers

MANCHESTER, Conn.

East Hartford's new mayor, Connor Martin, has a vision and a prescription for his town of 51,000.

“We're no longer going to be this blue-collar town, this poor community that we get labeled as," Martin says. "We have to start raising the household median income, bring in revenue through economic development, and bring in retail, entertainment, and shopping.”

Great -- but how?

Raising incomes should be the objective of government throughout the country, especially since inflation-adjusted incomes for many people have been declining for years under the pressure of soaring inflation -- currency devaluation caused by the federal government's policy of financing huge increases in spending not through taxes but money creation. 

These days whenever presidents and members of Congress announce millions or billions to be spent on various goodies, there is little mention of how they are to be financed. Money creation is assumed to be able to do it, which means inflation. State officials are just as culpable for inflationary finance insofar as the goodies they announce are financed by federal grants.

Meanwhile, prices of necessities rise, real incomes fall, and most people can't understand why their living standards are sinking even as they are invited to credit the elected officials announcing goodies financed by inflation.

So how is Mayor Martin going to raise the incomes of ordinary people in East Hartford?

He's not going to do it by reducing inflation, since municipal officials have no power to do so. Since the mayor is a Democrat, he won't even be asking Connecticut's members of Congress to reduce inflation, since, while they are among those responsible for it, they are all Democrats too. They will leave the inflation problem to the Federal Reserve, which has been raising interest rates to slow economic demand, create unemployment, and lower living standards some more.

East Hartford could raise the incomes of its residents as some other towns in Connecticut do it: by impeding inexpensive housing and keeping the poor out. While East Hartford has some good middle-class neighborhoods, it also has many dilapidated apartments and tenements that could be acquired by the town and razed, with the lots sold to developers for construction of condominiums and luxury apartments that current town residents could not afford. Such redevelopment is called "gentrification." 

Driving poor people out this way has the advantage of reducing the number of neglected and poorly performing schoolchildren, cutting education expenses.

Such policy wouldn't be very fair, but poverty is a burden, not a virtue, and Mayor Martin has acknowledged that East Hartford doesn't need more poor people. He's not alone in this. The mayors of Hartford and New Haven have said they would like to relocate many of their poor to the suburbs.

But how can incomes in East Hartford and other poor cities and towns be raised without making life even harder for the poor people there? 

No one in authority in Connecticut seems to have the policy for that. Indeed, policy in Connecticut works strongly against raising the incomes of the poor by failing to qualify so many of them to earn more. Welfare policy weakens the family while education policy -- social promotion -- sends young people into adulthood without the skills needed to earn good incomes.

Mayor Martin mistakenly equates "blue collar" with poverty. But "blue-collar" work can pay well and is often the work that society most needs -- machinists, mechanics, electricians, carpenters, plumbers, and such, people who do real things. Teaching and nursing may not be considered "blue-collar" jobs but they also pay well and are within reach of the working class. 

Manufacturers in Connecticut have thousands of well-paying jobs they can't fill because of a lack of qualified applicants.   

Can East Hartford increase the job skills of its many poorly performing young students, thereby increasing their earning power, while building the sound and affordable housing that would be needed to keep them in the state as their incomes rise? Can Connecticut?\

Any mayor who could achieve that might deserve to be governor, even president.

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

Chris Powell: Stupid Facebook post by GOP legislator distracts from Connecticut’s real problems

MANCHESTER, Conn.

Connecticut was pretty normal this week. The cities again were full of shootings and other mayhem. Group home workers went on strike because, while they take care of people who are essentially wards of the state, their own compensation omits medical insurance.

Hundreds of health-care workers were suspended for refusing to get a COVID-19 vaccination. Tens of thousands of children went to school without learning much, since at home they have little in the way of parenting and thus no incentive to learn.

The two longstanding scandals in the state police -- the drunken retirement party at a brewery in Oxford and the fatal shooting of an unarmed and unresisting mentally ill 19-year-old in West Haven -- remained unresolved, the authorities apparently expecting them to be forgotten. They're probably right.

And Gov. Ned Lamont called for sticking with football at the University of Connecticut despite its worsening record and expense.

Nevertheless, the great political controversy of the week was something else -- a Facebook post by state Rep. Anne Dauphinais (R.-Killingly). It likened the governor to Adolf Hitler on account of the emergency powers that Lamont repeatedly has claimed and his party's majorities in the General Assembly have granted him in regard to the virus epidemic even though there no longer is any emergency -- at least none involving the epidemic.

Rather than apologize for her intemperance and hyperbole, Dauphinais "clarified" that she meant to liken the governor to the Hitler of the early years of his rule in Germany, not the Hitler of the era of world war and concentration camps. This wasn't much clarification, since the Nazi regime established concentration camps just weeks after gaining power in 1933 and unleashed wholesale murder on its adversaries just a year later, on June 30, 1934 -- the "Night of the Long Knives" -- more than five years before invading Poland.

But so what if a lowly state legislator from the minority party got hysterical on Facebook?

Her name calling did no actual harm to anyone. The governor's skin is far thicker than that. Indeed, to gain sympathy any politician might welcome becoming the target of such intemperance and thus gaining sympathy.

Besides, Dauphinais's hysteria wouldn't even have been noticed if other politicians didn't make such a show of deploring it over several days. The top two Democratic and top two Republican leaders of the General Assembly went so far as to issue a joint statement condemning the use of political analogies to Nazism. In separate statements they criticized Dauphinais by name.

They all seemed to feel pretty righteous about it.

But meanwhile they had little to say about the state's problems that really matter, problems affecting the state's quality of life, problems on display throughout the week. Maybe they should thank Dauphinais for the distraction she provided them.

xxx

Will his support for University of Connecticut football be Governor Lamont's Afghanistan? Is the state just throwing good money after bad?

Now that Hartford wants to tear up Brainard Airport for commercial development, could Pratt & Whitney Stadium in East Hartford be leveled and Rentschler Field rebuilt as the airport it once was, replacing Brainard?

And will anyone ever take responsibility for anything at UConn?

Probably not. For even if UConn football is a disaster forever, it will cost far less than the disasters of Connecticut's education and welfare policies.

Why get upset at UConn football when the more Connecticut spends in the name of education, the less education is produced and the poorer students do, or when the more that is spent on welfare and social programs, the less people become self-sufficient and the more they become dependent on government?

The problem with UConn football is that results are still the object of the program and the public easily can see them -- the weekly scores during football season and the losing record.

By contrast, the education scores -- the results of standardized tests -- are publicized only occasionally and not on the sports pages, while the results of welfare and social programs are never audited and reported at all. With education and welfare, results are no longer the objective. They have become an end in themselves.

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

Pratt & Whitney (the aerospace company) Stadium at Rentschler Field, in East Hartford. It is primarily used for football and soccer, and is the home field of the University of Connecticut Huskies.