The Red Line

A 2015 study of Connecticut’s State Employees Retirement System (SERS) miscalculated the level of employee pension benefits, saying they were not “overly generous.” They were and, today, still are overgenerous.

Joe Markley, Ed Dadakis and Dan Quigley have sent letters to the editor to set the record straight about state employee compensation in response to attacks by state employee union apologists upon columns on The Red Line. The Red Line is grateful to Messrs. Markley, Dadakis and Quigley for their defense of fact-based journalism.

Give it to Connecticut Democrats. They never give up. They are determined to diminish local government to a status of virtual triviality in the name of progressivism and in their unquenchable thirst for ever more state tax revenue.

Last week, Governor Lamont invoked the KISS principle (Keep It Simple, Stupid) to explain his reordering of the sequence of eligibility for COVID-19 vaccinations. He should not stop there. The entirety of state government could use a rigorous application of the principle.

Last year, Yankee Institute released a study of state revenue sources. The study was simple. What it found was not. The study was just a one-page list of all the state’s revenue sources – all 344 of them.

Governor Lamont unveiled his proposed Connecticut Comeback budget last week. A comeback is unlikely given the long-festering problem of overgenerous and woefully underfunded compensation for privileged state employees.

For over a decade, state employee compensation has exceeded compensation in Connecticut’s private sector by about 40 percent, the biggest gap in the nation.

The consequence is that the State Employee Retirement Fund (SERF) is drastically underfunded. It is difficult to fund such wildly overgenerous benefits.

What now is an ongoing gravy train for state employees is ultimately a train wreck for them and the state.

The evidence is piling up that schoolchildren, teachers and staff are safe in schools. Indeed, the evidence suggests schools are the “safest place” for them to be, as CDC Director Robert Redfield said last November. Yet, teacher unions and other school employee organizations are ignoring mounting evidence that support Redfield’s words.

Last week, the Centers for Disease Control released its first two studies of in-school spread of COVID-19, first, a study of the experience of 17 Wisconsin schools that operated in-person from August through November.