If Connecticut had even average annual investment performance from its underwhelming pension funds, our tax burden would dramatically decrease.
Connecticut’s previous treasurers provided this state, consistently, with one of the single worst investment track records of all 50 states, as our Yale research team found through an original, comparative 50-state analysis of state pension fund investment performance.
Chicago has just thrown out an incompetent, arrogant, and far-left Democratic mayor who presided over an explosion of crime and the collapse of the city's schools, only to elect a mayor pledged to even more extreme leftism with higher taxes and lower educational standards. The new mayor is a former lobbyist for the teachers union.
It's as if Chicago voters thought the city's decline has been a matter of mere personalities rather than policies too.
Chicago and Illinois show the future of cities and states that cannot put the government employee unions back into a subordinate position and put the public interest ahead of the special interest.
It can be done, or at least it could be done 45 years ago when Ed Koch, then a U.S. representative, ran for mayor of New York City as what he called "a Democrat with sanity.” The city was falling apart amid crime, incompetence, corruption, and failing schools while being cannibalized by the city employee unions.
Running on this platform -- "It's time we had a tough bargainer on our side of the table,” -- Koch unexpectedly won the 1977 New York Democratic mayoral primary and the election and then won re-election twice with more than 75% of the vote.
Hartford Democrats Hartford Democrats propose to increase the highest personal income marginal tax rates to 7.49% and 7.20% and establish a 1% and 0.75% surcharge on net gain from sale of capital assets for top earners.
Last week, as reported, something called the “Cap The Rent CT” campaign was launched online by the Connecticut Democratic Socialists of America, some Democrat politicians, and more than 200 supporters. As you might have guessed, this “Cap The Rent CT” campaign seeks to apply state-wide in Connecticut the type of rent control that exists in New York City.
This is happening as another, similarly well-organized group called DesegregateCT is rolling out its third try to thwart local control of zoning by denouncing local planning and zoning commissions as racist. This year’s campaign is a slight variation from their push in 2022 and their ambitious, multi-faceted attempt in 2021.
While some developers may see opportunity in activist efforts to override local zoning controls because it would remove obstacles to the building of large apartment complexes, I wonder if developers are aware of which way Connecticut laws are trending and their effect on the rental business model.
In 2022, Connecticut passed a law mandating a “fair rent commission” for every municipality with a population of at least 25,000. And last year Connecticut launched a new program to provide “free” legal services for low-income renters in eviction proceedings.
Last year, President Biden presided over a record crisis at the U.S. border with Mexico. This year, by every conceivable metric, that crisis got far worse.
In the 2021 fiscal year, we had more than 1.7 million encounters at the Southern border. That was a record … until this fiscal year, when it rose to almost 2.4 million. And the 2023 fiscal year, which began in October, has already seen more than 500,000 encounters — putting us on track to exceed this year’s record.
That’s not all. In 2021, there were nearly 390,000 known “gotaways” — migrants we know evaded U.S. Customs and Border Protection and slipped into the country; this year, the number of gotaways grew to more than 600,000. In 2021, there were 15 terrorism watch list arrests at the border; this year, that grew to 98 (and who knows how many violent criminals were among the gotaways).
As bad as that is, things are about to get worse when Title 42 — the Trump-era public health order that has allowed border officials to turn away hundreds of thousands of illegal migrants to prevent the spread of covid-19 — expires on Dec. 21. When migrants can no longer be expelled under this order, even more will try illegal crossings — and the floodgates will truly open. Yet the Biden administration is pushing for a cut in funding for detention beds in the omnibus spending bill from the current level of 34,000 to 25,000 just as the need for these beds will dramatically increase.
Apple CEO Tim Cook has been taking a beating over his company’s coziness with Beijing. It comes amid protests across China against the government’s strict Covid-19 lockdowns, including at a factory in Zhengzhou where most of the world’s iPhones are made. Hillary Vaughn of Fox News perfectly captured Mr. Cook’s embarrassment on Capitol Hill Thursday when she peppered him with questions.
“Do you support the Chinese people’s right to protest? Do you have any reaction to the factory workers that were beaten and detained for protesting Covid lockdowns? Do you regret restricting AirDrop access that protesters used to evade surveillance from the Chinese government? Do you think it’s problematic to do business with the Communist Chinese Party when they suppress human rights?”
A stone-faced Mr. Cook responded with silence.
When is $5 trillion still not enough? Answer: When you’re a progressive about to lose your grip on total power. That’s how to read Democrats’ attempt to jam Republicans into one last, lame-duck, spending hurrah.
Congress is marching toward a Dec. 16 expiration of government funding. Democrats want to stuff all 12 of Congress’s annual, overdue spending bills into a giant “omnibus” to finance government through September 2023. According to their media note-takers, the failure to pass an omnibus bill will result in one of two apocalyptic scenarios: a government shutdown, or the ruin of federal agencies forced to maintain spending at current levels.
Randi Weingarten left no room for doubt. “Critical race theory is not taught in elementary schools or high schools,” the American Federation of Teachers president said in a speech last year. Even if that’s true, a Pennsylvania father’s battle with a school district demonstrates that public-school teachers are being trained in the deeply divisive racial ideology.
In 2018 the Tredyffrin-Easttown School District near Philadelphia signed a contract with Pacific Educational Group. According to the school district’s website, the partnership’s purpose was “to enhance the policies and practices around racial equity.” The district assured parents in an online update last summer that no “course, curriculum or program” in the district “teaches Critical Race Theory.”
Our examination of those materials indicates that Tredyffrin-Easttown staff are being trained in critical race theory.
Perhaps districts like Tredyffrin-Easttown think they can shoo parents away by making a distinction between teacher training and curriculum. But what is the point of teacher training if not to inform teachers on how they should teach?
There is ample reason to worry that major economies like the United States are heading for a recession, accompanied by cascading financial turmoil. Some of the worst elements of both the 1970s and the 2008 crash are now in play, with equity markets likely to move deeper into bear territory.
NEW YORK – The global financial and economic outlook for the year ahead has soured rapidly in recent months, with policymakers, investors, and households now asking how much they should revise their expectations, and for how long. That depends on the answers to six questions.
First, will the rise in inflation in most advanced economies be temporary or more persistent? This debate has raged for the past year, but now it is largely settled: “Team Persistent” won, and “Team Transitory” must admit to having been mistaken.
The second question is whether the increase in inflation was driven more by excessive aggregate demand or by stagflationary negative aggregate supply shocks (including COVID-19 lockdowns, supply-chain bottlenecks, a reduced US labor supply, Russia’s war in Ukraine, etc.). This question matters because supply-driven inflation is stagflationary and thus raises the risk of a hard landing (increased unemployment and potentially a recession) when monetary policy is tightened.
That leads directly to the third question: Will monetary-policy tightening by the US Federal Reserve and other major central banks bring a hard or soft landing?
Government cannot use union contracts to nullify government's basic obligations to the public, a federal appeals court ruled last week in a case about the Connecticut state police union contract.
The contract had allowed troopers to prevent disclosure of misconduct accusations against them.
The court decision may be arguable law but its policy result is welcome. For the misconduct concealment provision in the state police contract is grotesquely subversive of democracy. Of course that is exactly how the government employee unions like it. For the unions, the less that is known about what they are extracting from the government, the better. The unions want the public kept ignorant.
The situation shouldn't have to get so complicated. Accountability in government is basic and there should be no obstructions to it. Connecticut's law letting union contracts trump the right-to-know law should be repealed and the unions should be reminded that they work for the public and not the other way around.
Unfortunately the public's control over its own institutions is being further curtailed throughout the country because of a loophole in federal military law.
While federal law prohibits unionizing by federal military personnel on active duty, the prohibition doesn't apply to members of state units of the National Guard that have not been called to federal service. So last month the U.S. Justice Department conceded to a lawsuit brought in Connecticut on behalf of National Guard members seeking to unionize.
This settlement is an invitation to unionization by National Guard members in every state.
Unionization may devastate the chain of command in state militias. So Congress should extend to state National Guard units the ban on unionization and Governor Lamont and the General Assembly should enact such a prohibition for Connecticut.
Red Jahncke hits the nail on the head: “Falling Markets Will Crush Government Budgets” (op-ed, May 17). He emphasizes declining tax revenues, but the fall in the markets will have at least two other major adverse budgetary impacts worth noting.
First, tens of millions of Americans are receiving income from pension funds... For state and local governments, where many pension funds are already only around 70% funded, this will force bigger employee or government contributions, benefit reductions or both.
Second, rising interest rates are going to sharply increase the interest payments of the federal government to bondholders.
