Chris Powell: Pot legalization and expanding gambling refute concern for health

Connecticut Gov. Ned Lamont and some state legislators are proposing a 75 percent tax on vaping products and a punitive tax on sugary soda on the grounds that they are harmful to health, especially that of young people. Meanwhile the governor and some of the same legislators are advocating legalization of marijuana for recreational use in the hope of raising a lot of tax revenue. They also want to put state government into the sports betting business and expand the state lottery's keno game -- as if marijuana and gambling don't also harm health.

Decades of drug criminalization have shown that contraband laws don't work, and as a practical matter marijuana long has been close to legal in Connecticut anyway, so pervasive that the police and courts stopped taking it seriously long ago. So it is hard to argue too much against legalizing marijuana. But legalizing marijuana is also an argument for leaving vaping and sugary soda alone.

Besides, punitive taxes on vaping products and sugary soda are less likely to discourage their use than to create lucrative black markets in them and make them seem even more fashionable to the young. Further, expecting a revenue bonanza from legalizing and taxing marijuana may be unrealistic, since if the tax is disproportionate, it will create a black market there too, as there already is with cigarettes.

Public health is nice but state government right now much prefers to get its hands on more money. It should drop the pretense.

Advocating tolls on Connecticut's highways, the governor and leading legislators also pretend that they want to improve the state's transportation system. But tolls have nothing to do with transportation, for if left alone, the transportation fund will have plenty of revenue from the gasoline tax and the sales tax on automobiles, which is scheduled to flow entirely to the transportation fund in the next few years.

But the governor proposes to divert auto sales taxes back to the general fund, robbing the transportation fund to cover state government's ordinary operating expenses.

That is, tolls actually will sustain collective bargaining and binding arbitration for state and municipal employees, social promotion in education, welfare policy that only perpetuates poverty, more political corruption in the cities, and the status quo of state and municipal government generally.

So what happened to the Ned Lamont whose campaign commercials declared, "Change starts now"?

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SCHOOL DISCIPLINE ISN'T SO RACIST: Congratulations, Manchester teachers. Your superintendent, Matthew Geary, suspects you're racist because far larger proportions of local black and Hispanic students are being disciplined than white and Asian students.

But those proportions only match the ethnic proportions of poverty and criminal justice everywhere. Blacks and Hispanics tend to be poorer and come from more disadvantaged households and thus more prone to misconduct.

While there is some racism in most large systems, it cannot explain much of the disparities in criminal justice and school discipline, especially now that Connecticut's courts and schools, paranoid about racial and ethnic disparities, strive for less punitive discipline and tolerate more disruption in school and society generally.

Indeed, pinning on racism the disproportions in student discipline just distracts from the real problem. As Ronald Reagan said, the United States had a war on poverty and poverty won. It's still winning because racial and ethnic disparities and welfare policy can't be talked about honestly, and now Manchester's school superintendent has gone over to the other side.

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