Chris Powell: Running empty trains won't increase production; some people seem to be enjoying their pandemic lockdowns

— Photo by Chianti

MANCHESTER, Conn.

While Connecticut Gov. Ned Lamont remarked the other day that state government doesn't have enough money to rescue every business suffering from COVID-19 pandemic, most people think that the federal government has infinite money and can and should make everyone whole.

Sharing that view, Connecticut U.S. Sen. Richard Blumenthal this week went to the railroad station in West Haven to join Catherine Rinaldi, president of the Metropolitan Transit Authority, in calling for an emergency $12 billion federal appropriation for the MTA, which runs the Metro-North commuter railroad line from New Haven to New York City. Metro-North has lost 80 percent of its passengers and fares because of business curtailments and the shift to working from home.

There are two problems with the appeal from Blumenthal and Rinaldi.

First, there is no need to keep Metro-North operating on a normal schedule when most passengers are missing. Except for railroad employees, no one is served by running empty trains.

Indeed, curtailment of commuter-rail service might make time to renovate the tracks and other facilities. Rather than furloughing railroad employees, hundreds of them might be reassigned temporarily to collect the trash that litters the tracks between New Haven and New York. The savings on electric power from running fewer trains still would be huge.

The second problem is that the federal government's power of money creation is infinite only technically. While nothing in law forbids the federal government from spending any amount, money is no good by itself. It has value only insofar as it has purchasing power -- only insofar as there are things to be purchased, only insofar as there is production and with so many people out of work or working less during the epidemic, production has fallen measurably. Operating empty trains won't increase production, but spending $12 billion to operate them may worsen the devaluation of the dollar, whose international value recently has fallen substantially amid so much money creation.

So it might be far better to add that $12 billion to public-health purposes.

The $12 billion desired by the MTA is only a tiny part of the largess imagined by the incoming national administration and many members of Congress who will be returning to Washington next month. They are contemplating another trillion dollars in bailouts, and that's just for starters. Such is the damage done to the national economy by the epidemic and government's often clumsy responses to it.

“Scene in club lounge,’’ by Thomas Rowlandson (1757-1827)

Amid all the seemingly free money, some people are starting to enjoy lockdowns or at least finding them tolerable, especially those who, like many government employees, get paid as usual whether they work or not.

This week two Hartford City Council members, Wildaliz Bermudez and Josh Mitchtom, called on the governor to use the state's $3 billion emergency reserve to pay everybody to stay home for a month and to stop most commercial operations in the name of slowing the spread of the virus. Bermudez and Mitchtom seemed unaware that the emergency reserve is already expected to be consumed by the huge deficits pending in next year's state budget. The reserve won't come close to covering all the shortfalls.

But then getting paid for doing or accomplishing nothing is a way of life in Hartford, encouraged by state government's steady subsidy of so many failures in the city.

Last week a group of 35 doctors went almost as far as those Hartford council members, urging the governor to close gyms and restaurants and to prohibit all “unnecessary” gatherings so as to stop the virus and prevent medical personnel from being overwhelmed. It didn't seem to bother the doctors that those businesses and their employees already have been overwhelmed by commerce-curtailment orders, suffering enormous losses, including business capital and life savings. The doctors are inconvenienced now and may be more so but they won't be losing their life savings and livelihoods.

The governor is trying to strike a balance among all these interests. Every day presents him with another difficult judgment call that upsets someone. He may be realizing that Connecticut is just going to have to tough it out and accept some casualties all around.

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

Conn. vs. Fla. may be equal contest

By CHRIS POWELL 

MANCHESTER, Conn.

With snowstorms seeming to arrive every few days, little room left for stacking 
the snow, road-salt supplies nearly exhausted, state and municipal snow-removal 
budgets in deficit, and the Connecticut General Assembly reconvening, many people in 
Connecticut feel that they have had enough of the state. 

It's little consolation to them that Connecticut may have the best snowplowing 
operation in the country, with the state's major roads almost always kept 
passable throughout even the heaviest snowstorms. For besides the extra snow, 
Connecticut's economy and standard of living are still declining, which may be 
the cause of most of the surliness here; the snow just makes people feel their 
resentments more keenly. 

As a result many of them look south enviously, especially to subtropical 
Florida, to which many Connecticut residents already have fled, either 
permanently or just for the winter. Indeed, when the University of Connecticut's 
basketball teams play colleges in Florida, the crowd often seems to favor the 
visitors. 

But while it may be harder to appreciate Connecticut after shoveling snow or 
falling on ice, Florida has its own climate disadvantages. In the late summer 
and  early fall Florida can be crossed by as many hurricanes as Connecticut suffers 
snowstorms in the winter, and the resulting property damage in Florida is far 
greater than that inflicted by snowstorms in Connecticut, just as 
weather-related electricity outages in Florida can last longer. 

Because of bad weather a few weeks ago it took three days and several flight 
reschedulings for a recently retired couple from Connecticut to escape the state 
by air for their new winter home in South Florida, one of those tightly 
regulated condominium complexes that forbid admission to anyone under 55. The 
couple had hardly begun breathing the state-income-tax-free air when a line of 
thunderstorms stalled overhead for 24 hours and dumped 14 inches of rain on 
them, flooding their new neighborhood, closing its roads, and incapacitating 
sewer lines and toilets for a couple of days. 

It wasn't a snowstorm; it was  worse. 

Not long after the couple got dried out and settled, some university researchers 
reported that alligators, which which infest South Florida, not only swim stealthily 
but also climb trees, in part for better surveillance of their prey. 

Told of the study, the new arrivals from Connecticut refused to be 
concerned. While they had not yet read their condo association's many rules, 
they figured that, in addition to excluding people younger than 55, there was 
probably one against alligators climbing trees on the property and eating the 
residents. 

They shouldn't count on it. Annoying as Connecticut's snow has been, at least it 
also has gotten in the way of the state's own many predators, both those with 
four legs and those with two. There's never much crime in bad weather. 

* * * 

Two executives of the Metropolitan Transit Authority came to Hartford last week 
so Gov Dan Malloy could reprimand them in front of the television cameras about 
the MTA's mismanagement of the Metro-North Commuter Railroad, whose many recent 
disasters have impaired service from New Haven to Grand Central Station in New 
York. The MTA executives duly promised improvements soon. 

But while the governor got to look tough, he really didn't increase 
Connecticut's leverage with the MTA, a New York state agency paid by Connecticut 
to operate the state's rail lines into New York. To gain such leverage 
Connecticut needs a plan, just as Metro-North needs a plan to improve rail 
service. 

Connecticut's plan might include demanding representation on the MTA's board, 
the renegotiation of Connecticut's contract with the MTA, and a study of how 
Connecticut could take over the management of its rail lines into New York. 

Until Connecticut has a rail-service-improvement plan that goes beyond scolding 
MTA officials on television, the MTA may assume that it can take its time about 
improving service here. 

Chris Powell is managing editor of the Journal Inquirer in Manchester, Conn.

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