Posts published in “Connecticut Newspapers”

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Republican American, CT Examiner, Journal Inquirer - April 4-6 ... For the second time in roughly a decade, over 100,000 private sector workers in Connecticut have lost their jobs, while not a single state employee has been laid off in either nstance. For almost the entire decade, state workers have enjoyed contractual no-layoff guarantees, presently extending to 2021.

Not only that, following the Great Recession, state workers got three 3 percent annual pay raises, and, now, they are to get a 3.5% wage hike in just three months – on the heels of a 3.5% pay raise last July 1^st.

That’s unfair, almost cruelly so in face of the unfolding economic ravages of COVID-19.

Union leaders talk about “sacrifices” by state workers. That's shameless disinformation.

Governor Lamont should place a call immediately to Daniel Livingston, the chief negotiator for the State Employee bargaining Alliance Coalition (SEBAC) representing unionized state workers, and demand that workers forgo the July 1^st pay raise and that retired state workers give up cost of living increases for the next decade at least.

The issue of fairness and social justice does not involve only the element of shared sacrifice in times of hardship. For
almost two decades, Connecticut state employees have enjoyed amongst the highest pay and benefits among state workers nationwide.

Their compensation has been
significantly higher than that of state’s private sector workers in all years – good and bad. In 2010, the state’s Commission on Agency Options looked at 2008
compensation data and found average state worker wages of $65,746 and benefits of $39,752 versus average private sector wages of $59,313 and benefits of
$14,861 – for a staggering compensation premium of more than $31,000, or 42%.

In 2014, scholars at the American Enterprise Institute (AEI), Andrew Biggs and Jason Richwine, looked at 2009-2012 data and found that very same premium of 42%, which was the highest of the 50 states. The next highest premiums were 35%, 34% and 26% for Pennsylvania, New York and Illinois, respectively.

In 2019, AEI’s Biggs compared private sector compensation to public compensation at all levels of government in all 50 states. From 1998 to 2017, private sector worker compensation grew only 38%, lagging compensation for federal workers, state and local workers, and teachers which grew 67%, 44% and 40%, respectively.

Biggs found that Connecticut state and municipal workers’ compensation grew 77% over this period compared to a 6% increase in the state’s private sector. In 2017, Connecticut public sector workers enjoyed a whopping 51% compensation premium over the state’s private sector workers.

This is a gross social injustice, but it is more than that. Public sector compensation has overwhelmed the state budget
and economy.

Public sector workers should embrace this reality and realize that it imperils their own jobs, wages, and health care and retirement benefits.

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Connecticut is Not New York City, Where Strict Shutdown Policies Are Needed. CT Governor Lamont Should Issue and Follow Evidence-Based Connecticut-Specific Guidelines For Continuing His Schools and Business Shutdown and, Ultimately, For Lifting It.

CT Examiner, Republican American, CT Hearst newspapers - March 22 -26 ... The coronavirus is not the only threat we face. As I wrote in The Hill on last Thursday (3/19) and The Wall Street Journal editorialized last Friday, the 20th,, we may face a far greater threat from a collapsed economy, which would devastate everyone’s financial resources and their medical condition.

This should be of special concern in Connecticut which entered the current crisis already economically anemic and financially shaky.

While this may not be popular to say, we should rethink shutdown policies in Connecticut. Actually, it may not be unpopular. A new Pew Research
Center poll shows that 70 percent of Americans see the virus as a major threat to the economy, while only 27 percent see it as a major threat to their own personal health.

It should be a priority to keep people working and return to work the tens of thousands suddenly being idled. The Connecticut Labor Department received 56,000 unemployment claims in the first four days this past week versus a weekly average of 2,500.

A deep recession or depression would bring an inevitable deterioration in public health along with economic pain. It would push us backward down the Preston Curve, which demonstrates that life expectancy varies directly with income level: wealthy societies are relatively healthy, poor ones less so.

We should balance the “incidence curve” with the Preston Curve, putting as much effort into moderating economic devastation as we put into flattening the incidence, or infection, curve to keep coronavirus hospitalizations below hospital capacity.

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There Are Access Points on I-95 About Every Mile. Trucks Could Dodge a Gantry by "Going Local" for Only a Mile.

There’s a new game in Connecticut. It’s called dodge-a-gantry. Right now, it is only a virtual game being played on Google Maps.

Governor Lamont's latest toll plan – he’s had many – is to toll only tractor-trailer trucks at just 12 highway bridges in the state. So what are truckers doing? They are getting ready to game Lamont’s proposed system. They are researching the best toll evasion routes, i.e. the best local roads to use to bypass the intended highway gantry locations.

The governor and his advisers have failed to take into account a unique and fundamental obstacle to imposing tolls in Connecticut.

Almost all existing toll roads in other states are limited-access highways. Vehicles travel for several miles between entry-exit access points. To exit and re-enter these highways in order to evade tolls is an onerous proposition. Actually, in most instances, it is impossible, because every entry-exit access point has a gantry or toll booth, where vehicles are logged in and out and charged for the distance they have traveled.

In contrast, Connecticut’s highways are uniquely open-access with short distances between entry-exit points.

In neighboring Massachusetts, the Mass Pike (I-90) has 24 entry-exit points (and 24 toll locations) over the 141 miles from West Stockbridge to downtown Boston. Here in Connecticut, I-95 has 91 access points over the 105 miles from Greenwich to Stonington.

Erecting tolls at all 91 would be absurd and exorbitantly expensive. Alternatively, gantries spanning across traffic on I-95 would invite trucks to jump off just before a gantry and re-enter a few miles further along just past the gantry.

The proposed high toll rates for trucks would provide motivation to truckers to evade the gantries.

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Donald Trump has been excoriated by critics for ordering the killing of the number one terrorist in the world, Qassem Soleimani. If he wasn’t number one, who was?

If Iran isn’t the very definition of an enemy and a threat to world peace, what nation is? Iran is a nation whose national slogan is “Death to America” and whose greatest aspiration is to wipe another nation off the map.

The president’s critics engage in some truly tortuous mental gymnastics to level their charges.

Take U.S. Senator Chris Murphy, Democrat from Connecticut. On New Year’s Eve, as Soleimani’s henchmen were ransacking parts of the U.S. embassy compound in Baghdad, he tweeted: “Trump has rendered America impotent in the Middle East.”

Simultaneously, Iran’s Supreme Leader – and Top Tweeter, Ayatollah Khamenei challenged the president with a taunting tweet: “You can’t do anything.”

Surprise: dead wrong.

Both Murphy and the Ayatollah responded, the former challenging the president’s authority to kill “the second most powerful person in Iran,” and Khameni with an ineffectual rocket attack.

Here’s one citizen’s after-action report.

Execution: If ever there were a surgical strike, this was it. Perfect execution. Two bad guys and their aides were eliminated without any collateral damage.

Authorization / Consultation: Despite delegitimizing semantics terming the killing an “assassination” and repositioning Soleimani as an anodyne national leader or military commander, he was the leader of the Quds Force, which was designated a terrorist organization by the U.S. State Dept long ago in 2007.

Critics want proof that Soleimani was planning an imminent attack, as if the Quds Force leader wasn’t planning attacks every single day of his life.

Windows of opportunity for surgical strikes open rarely and close quickly. Delay for significant congressional involvement might have jeopardized the opportunity. Moreover, POTUS operates in a White House that leaks like a sieve. Anonymous op-ed writers rove the hallways alongside whistleblowers, who communicate constantly and coordinate closely with anti-Trump Democrats and media reporters, who lionize these moles.

Justification: If Soleimani’s decades of mischief and his terrorist designation weren’t enough, Soleimani had just orchestrated an attack on an American embassy, sovereign territory under international law.

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Hartford is exploiting an anomaly in the Medicaid program to extract billions from the U.S. Treasury, not to finance health care, but rather to finance otherwise unaffordable state spending, primarily state employee health care and retirement benefits.

This anomaly, or “shell game” (the term used in a U.S. Senate committee report) operates through the hospital tax. While all states impose this tax, no state imposes nearly as high a hospital tax rate. That’s what former Office of Policy and Management Director Ben Barnes told me in late 2017. He said Connecticut’s hospital tax scheme requires explicit federal approval, because the roughly 9% rate exceeds a 6% threshold that no other state exceeds.

The Medicaid program is a federal-state partnership providing medical care to poor citizens, with the federal government reimbursing states for about one-half to two-thirds of allowable fees and costs that hospitals and others charge Medicaid patients for medical care.  Under Obamacare, Connecticut and other states expanded Medicaid in return for much higher federal reimbursement percentages on the patients newly covered.

Apart from this straightforward reimbursement arrangement, states provide hospitals supplemental payments, with the federal government matching the payments, in order to achieve various policy objectives. The hospital tax exploits this supplemental payment mechanism in a manner which the General Accountability Office criticized strongly in a 2014 report.

Let’s start with some fundamental questions. Why is government taxing hospitals, which only serves to raise the cost of the nation’s primary providers of health care. Many are non-profit. Why tax non-profits? Many are for-profit and already pay corporate income taxes. Why levy a second tax? Hospital taxes are truly strange and wonderful.

Just before Christmas, the Connecticut General Assembly went into a special session, to approve unanimously a plan to extend the state’s stratospheric hospital tax for seven years. The plan will generate about $675 million annually, including $375 million in federal matching funds.

The plan requires the approval of the federal Centers for Medicare and Medicaid (CMS), which may not be forthcoming. In mid-2018, a U.S. Senate committee took a look at hospital taxes and issued a report calling hospital taxes “a shell game” and singling out Connecticut as a major perpetrator.

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