The new year will bring another round of wage increases for state employees and a new payroll tax for everyone else, and House Republicans are calling on Gov. Ned Lamont to suspend both in light of the pandemic.
Posts tagged as “Column of the Day”
Q;"Can I take time off if it's a friend and not a family member who is sick?"
A: "We do have a very expansive definition of family, meaning it could be people who are close to you but might not be related. What most people are concerned about is this definition of close affinity, and we are working hard to narrow that definition while still leaving it flexible enough to allow people to care for people who are close to them."
If you earn $40,000/year you'll pay $200 into the system and for that modest sum you get 12 weeks of paid time off at 95% of salary [$9,230],
In our time and place, nothing lends more authority to a field than calling it a science. Polling has particularly benefited from the rigor implied by its association with the true science of statistics, and its jargon of sample sizes, margins of error and the like. But faulty data defies the most stringent analysis, and that fact has undermined opinion surveys.
These data point to a distinct threat to Connecticut’s economic health. Personnel costs have to be part of the solution. July 1 will mark the expiration of the 10-year no-layoff guarantee for unionized state employees. The governor can use the mere threat of layoffs to secure meaningful concessions. What Gov. Lamont and legislators do to confront these problems will tell whether they are true leaders or mere servants of their benefactors in Big Public Labor.
Student loan debt is huge, estimated at $1.6 trillion, and five Connecticut colleges were cited last week by the U.S. Education Department for leaving the parents of their students with especially high debt. Many are the horror stories about borrowers who won't be able to repay.
Relief for certain debtors may be in order, but then what of the students who sacrificed along with their parents to pay their own way through college?
Student loan debt relief should not be resolved without investigation.
One can get a high school diploma in Connecticut without having learned anything since kindergarten and can earn a degree from a public college without having learned much more, public college being to a great extent just remedial high school.
Joe Biden has promised to rejoin the Paris Climate Accord, which President Obama signed in 2015 by executive action, which wasn't legally binding. Nevertheless, some green group may find a friendly federal court to produce that result, as occurred with the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals immigration program. To prevent the Paris Climate Accord from taking on such undue power, Mr. Trump should submit it to the Senate, and Majority Leader Mitch McConnell should schedule a quick vote. It would certainly be rejected—ratification requires a two-thirds vote—and it is unlikely any court could subsequently resurrect a legislatively tossed treaty.
Under Paris, China doesn’t even have to start reducing emissions until 2030. Meanwhile, under the original Obama-era agreement, America is required to slash emissions by 26 to 28 percent in the next five years. But Biden has promised to go further, entirely eliminating carbon emissions from the electric sector by 2035 and imposing strict gas-mileage standards to reach zero emissions by 2050.
While people admire the Governor Lamont's calm and conscientious manner, they may lose patience as his plan for returning Connecticut to normal starts reversing. His reversal amid fears that the epidemic is surging again should prompt reconsideration of the measures being used to set policy.
After many false starts — including the zero-tolerance policy that drove family separations — the Trump administration got a handle on the border thanks to its “remain in Mexico” policy and “safe third country” agreements with Guatemala, El Salvador, and Honduras.
The Trump administration managed to get Mexico to agree to the so-called Migration Protection Protocols. This meant that asylum-seekers from countries other than Mexico could be made to remain in Mexico while their claims were adjudicated in the U.S. Also, under the safe-third-country agreements, asylum-seekers could be sent to Guatemala, El Salvador, or Honduras (whichever wasn’t their home country) to apply for asylum there.
