The Red Line

The true fiber of this nation has been on brilliant display in recent weeks. While the president and his foreign policy and military advisors have disgraced the nation with their incompetence and worse, America’s military veterans have redeemed the nation’s honor with ingenuity and dedication in what has been called the Digital Dunkirk.

We just lost an unlosable war. Over the last five years, with relatively modest military resources and extremely low casualties – less than 70, we’ve been able to maintain relative stability in Afghanistan. Then, Biden pulled the plug.

Now, Afghanistan is a disaster, a stain on U.S. honor and values, and a defeat with incalculable costs for ongoing U.S. foreign policy.

While the Pentagon stopped releasing troop levels in 2017, the last reported level was about 10,000, although the AP reports that the Trump Administration planned as many as 14,000 troops in 2017. Yet the low casualty levels imply a general decline.

A military mission requiring 10,000 or fewer troops and involving such a low casualty rate is not a failure, quite the opposite. And how did Biden lose sight of the original mission? Now, how do we prevent Afghan-based terrorists from staging another attack on the USA or a key ally?

Afghanistan has been misconceived. It has been characterized as an unwinnable war, and the seemingly logical conclusion reached that it should be ended, because unwinnable wars are fruitless endeavors. That’s wrong. We did not need to win.

Have we won the Korean War? Almost three-quarters of a century after Korean hostilities ended, Korea is still divided. We haven’t defeated the communists in the North. Should we pull the plug?

We have stationed tens of thousands of U.S. troops there -- 23,000 troops today -- ever since the early 1950s. Today, South Korea is an inspiring success, a vibrant economy and society, and an important strategic ally.

Connecticut’s privileged state employees and its downtrodden private sector workers might as well occupy different planets.

Hundreds of thousands private sector workers lost their jobs during the pandemic. State workers have enjoyed a decade-long no-layoff guarantee, so not one was thrown out of work.

While private sector workers struggled to get by during the pandemic, state workers got two 5.5% pay raises, one eight months before and the second four months into the pandemic.

Local police and firefighters and predominantly private sector health care workers manned the frontline jobs during the pandemic, as did essential retail workers – in grocery stores, pharmacies, etc

Apart from our brave state police, corrections officers in prisons, staff at UConn Health Center, public transportation workers and some other areas not readily apparent, many, if not most, state workers did not face the public until last June 1st. They worked remotely or not at all.

Now, the union doesn't want at least 10,000 non-public facing office workers to have to come back as ordered by Governor Lamont effective July 1st. In early July, the union sued the state for these employees to have the right to work from home 100 percent of the time (at their own discretion), rather than the 50% provided in the contract. On Monday, Lamont caved to the union demand. Meanwhile, many businesses – not all - are calling remote workers back into offices.

Connecticut is in a full-blown jobs crisis.

The state workforce has shrunk by about 160,000, or 8.2%, from its pre-pandemic level of 1.93 million in February 2020, the worst decline in the nation. Only three other states have experienced drops of more than 5%.

Of Connecticut’s remaining workforce, about 140,000, or 7.9%, are unemployed - the highest unemployment rate of the 50 states.

Combined, 300,000 people, or 15.5% of the pre-pandemic workforce, have dropped out or are currently unemployed. The next worst level is 10.9% in Hawaii.

Being last is something that Connecticut is accustomed to, but to trail 49^th place by such a huge margin is alarming.

Yet, the Democrats who control the state seem clueless. Governor Lamont was mum about last week’s report of just 3,500 jobs gained in June. The gains occurred entirely in the public sector. Private sector jobs declined.

The state’s Congressional delegation is oblivious as well. Congressman Jim Himes (D, 4th District) sent an email to constituents last week trumpeting that “the strong June [national] jobs report surpassed expectations by adding 850,000 new jobs.” He included graphs of the national trends. He made no mention -- and, likely, had no knowledge -- of the dismal conditions in Connecticut.

Evidence is emerging that should begin to resolve national controversy on two critical issues, policing and jobs.

Eric Adams’ victory in the Democrat primary in the New York City mayoral race reveals that people of color do not want to “defund the police” as progressives demand.. According to an article in The New York Times, Adams “rejected calls to defund the Police Department and pledged to expand its reach in the city.” “Black and brown voters flocked to his candidacy…”

On the economic front, last week brought welcome news of a big jump in national employment in June (next week, we’ll find out whether Connecticut participated). Yet a new study showed that the central feature of the first of President Biden's several multi-trillion-dollar programs is backfiring. The extension of the very generous supplemental $300 weekly unemployment insurance benefit to early September is hindering a jobs recovery.

According to The Wall Street Journal, twenty-two states have already stopped paying the supplement, and their unemployment rolls are dropping twice as fast as the rolls in the 24 states still planning to pay the supplement until its expiration in September. Four states are ending the benefit in July.

Surprise, real people – actual voters and potential workers - make decisions in their practical self-interest, not according to progressive dogma.

Blacks voting for Adams prefer more cops to keep the streets safe rather than more social workers to do more social work. The Times reported that Adams “focused much of his message on denouncing progressive slogans and policies that he said threatened the lives of ‘Black and brown babies’ and were being pushed by ‘a lot of young, white, affluent people.’”

Republican state legislatures are adopting resolutions banning the teaching of Critical Race Theory (CRT) in public schools. The bans are a reaction to Democrats mandating CRT in public education and in other dimensions of public policy. Bans and mandates are two sides of the same coin.

CRT is a bad penny, first because any version of history and sociology so controversial should not be taught in elementary, middle and high school.

One of the leading proponents of CRT, Ibram X. Kendi says “The only remedy to racist discrimination is antiracist discrimination. The only remedy to past discrimination is present discrimination. The only remedy to present discrimination is future discrimination.”

Is this what we want taught in public schools – that the sins and the oppression of ancestors determine the future of today’s schoolchildren, who are innocent in all respects?

The pandemic is largely over. Now, the challenge is to revive the economy.

In practical terms, that means transitioning from policies supporting people who are out of work to policies encouraging people to get back to work. There is a fierce national debate about how fast to transition. Connecticut is on the wrong side of the debate – and cannot afford to be.

The number of workers in the state’s workforce has plummeted during the pandemic by 188,000 since February 2020, according to federal statistics. This is a drastic 9.7 percent decline, by far the biggest drop in the nation.  Only three other states have had declines over 5 percent.

These are workers who are not looking for work or who have left the state.  

As drastic as it is, the workforce decline is not the entire story.