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A ballroom, really?
Lakeville Journal
Apr 29, 2026
Saturday’s shooting targeted an event designed to defend the First Amendment freedoms Donald Trump has spent years undermining — labeling the press as “the enemy of the people”. His takeaway? Washington needs a new ballroom. Sen. Lindsey Graham agreed, “It’s very difficult to have a bunch of important people in the same place unless it’s really, really secure.”
This from a president who, within hours of his inauguration, shut down the White House Office of Gun Violence Prevention and has since ordered the rollback of background checks, defunded community safety programs, and made it easier to put weapons in dangerous hands.
So far this year, 69 children under 12 and 262 teenagers have been killed by gun violence — a number that grew since this was written. Firearms have been the leading cause of death for Americans ages 1 to 19 every year since 2020.
One man with a gun disrupted a dinner. Hundreds of children are dead.
The president’s solution? Build himself a ballroom. Call it a bunker if it helps.
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Letters to the Editor - April 30, 2026
Lakeville Journal
Apr 29, 2026
Response to ‘Confronting evil’
Gentlemen: Your letter lays out the historical facts clearly and accurately. There is no way to excuse or condone the behavior you chronicle. I agree with your opening paragraph but am troubled by the implication that this war could not be avoided.
Perhaps more diplomacy would have been the equivalent of appeasement but I am uncertain.
Operation Midnight Hammer on June 22, 2025 failed to solve the problem. The question raised then and again now is the gray area regarding presidential authority to engage in war without congressional approval. History illustrates the uncertain outcomes of similar conflicts. It is too early to judge the wisdom of the choices made by our current administration. I shared your letter with Perplexity, an AI provider.
Perplexity says: “The letter presents the war as the unavoidable price of finally confronting a malevolent regime, which is a coherent argument — but it omits the role that specific policy choices (particularly the 2018 JCPOA withdrawal) played in accelerating the nuclear crisis it describes. Whether war was truly unavoidable, or whether different diplomacy could have prevented it, depends heavily on assumptions about Iranian intentions that remain genuinely debated among serious foreign policy thinkers.
The letter is an opinion piece by concerned citizens, not a policy analysis — so it argues a point of view rather than weighing all the evidence. That is entirely legitimate, but a reader should be aware they are getting one side of a complex argument.”
“The Case That War Was Unavoidable”
Perplexity
• Iran repeatedly rebuffed diplomatic overtures across multiple administrations — Carter, Reagan, Clinton, Obama, Trump — suggesting no negotiated solution was achievable
• Iran continued enriching uranium even during the JCPOA period, and after the U.S. withdrew in 2018, accelerated its program to the point of being weeks away from weapons-grade material
• The letter’s implicit argument is that each concession or delay only bought Iran more time to build missiles, fund proxies, and approach nuclear capability — making eventual confrontation more dangerous, not less
• Some serious analysts argue that a nuclear-armed Iran would have been permanently destabilizing, making a conventional war now preferable to nuclear deterrence under a hostile theocracy”
“The Case That War Could Have Been Avoided”
Perplexity
• The JCPOA (2015 nuclear deal) was working — IAEA inspectors confirmed Iran was in compliance when the U.S. unilaterally withdrew in 2018. Many foreign policy experts argue that staying in the deal, or negotiating a stronger one, offered a credible non-military path
• The Trump administration’s withdrawal from the JCPOA directly triggered Iran’s uranium acceleration — the crisis the letter describes was in part a consequence of that decision, not an inevitability
• Coercive diplomacy backed by sanctions had demonstrably constrained Iranian behavior at various points; critics argue it was never given sufficient time or consistency
• Several of Iran’s most aggressive proxy actions (the October 7 attack, Hezbollah’s rocket campaign) were responses to specific events — they were not simply predetermined
• Historical precedent: the U.S. reached arms agreements with the Soviet Union despite profound ideological hostility, suggesting negotiated coexistence with adversarial regimes is possible”
Philip V. Oppenheimer
Lakeville
Omissions in ‘surging gas prices’ article
Last week’s front-page article, “Surging gas prices stretch local budgets,” was timely and certainly of interest to everyone. However, I noted two obvious omissions. One, there was no mention of local governments adjusting their budgets by reducing spending as most families must do when confronted by rising prices in the face of fixed incomes. When costs rise for essential commodities such as gasoline, the logical response is to temporarily cut back on spending for non-essential things like entertainment and eating out, or postponing major purchases. The economy is cyclical and the cost of gasoline fluctuates. It will not remain high forever. Budgets can always be readjusted when things return to what passes for normal – for families and local governments, alike.
Speaking of which, the present cost of gasoline has risen from approximately $3.00 a gallon a year ago to about $4.00 presently. This is due to our current conflict with Iran, something which began 47 years ago. The Iranian mullahs declared war on us but we never responded. Every president just kicked the can down the road, expecting a successor to deal with it. “It,” of course, was the threat of a nuclear attack as soon as they completed a weapon to use. They got closer and closer until President Trump moved preemptively to eliminate the threat. Geopolitics are complicated and things do not get resolved overnight. The rest of us need to practice patience.
I noted one more thing in the article. While the cost of a gallon of gasoline rose from $3.00 to its current $4.00 in the past year, nowhere in was it mentioned that the average weekly retail gasoline price hit an all-time high of $5.07 a gallon in 2022 when Joseph Biden was President. Most people seem to have selective amnesia.
Richard Kopec
Sharon
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Turning Back the Pages - April 30, 2026
Norma Bosworth
Apr 29, 2026
125 years ago —
April 1901
The Canaan creamery has been incorporated with a capitalization of $50,000 and is doing an extensive business. They have recently added the manufacture of fancy cheese for which they have large advance orders.
It is said that a steam road will be built from Canaan to Clayton by the Consolidated. It is said that a large brick making plant will be erected at Clayton on the lands of the White Brick and Cotta Co.
The bill incorporating the Falls Village Light and Water Co. was passed in the Senate April 24th. The legislature also passed a bill making poultry stealing punishable by a fine of not more than $10, or imprisonment for not more than two years, or both.
100 years ago —
April 1926
Maple Tree Inn, the former Shannon Sanitarium at Falls Village, now owned by Samuel Weiner, was completely destroyed by fire early this morning. When the fire was first discovered it was apparent that the building was past saving and no outside help was called, the Falls Village fire company handling the affair alone.
Some of the women claim that it is almost impossible to buy a new spring hat unless they bob their hair, as everything in the millinery is designed for bobbed hair. There are still a few ladies who continue to retain “woman’s crowning glory” but they appear to be in the minority. One of them remarks that the present style of dress reminds one of an aviator or a deep sea diver.
50 years ago —
April 1976
There’s fresh evidence this week that neighborliness is alive and well in Salisbury. A local farmer with a bad back has his fields all plowed and harrowed, thanks to a chance remark dropped at a dinner meeting. Willard Myers, who operates a rented farm on Weatogue Road, is the afflicted farmer, and his benefactors were students from the vocational agriculture program at the Housatonic Valley Regional High School. Two vo-ag teachers at the HVRHS heard Myers mention his back problems at a Young Farmer organization dinner last Thursday night. From Friday morning through Sunday, not in the least discouraged by the foul weather, shifts of vo-ag students worked to prepare Myers’ fields for planting. In all, nine young men and women labored under the direction of teachers Walter Burcroff and George Wheeler, who took turns supervising during their time off from official duties, and student teacher Becky Brickell of Goshen. Mrs. Myers said Monday they accomplished in three days what would normally have taken her husband three weeks.
Residents of Lakeville will have to rely for a while on their stomachs and their watches to tell them when to eat lunch. The noon whistle will not be heard for an indefinite length of time, Fire Chief Peter Brazzale said Monday night. A part in the clock mechanism needs to be replaced and the 12 o’clock signal will be out of commission until the new piece arrives. A similar situation existed for several weeks two years ago. The same part of the timing device had to be replaced then too. Brazzale said the fire siren will continue to work as usual. Only the noon blast will be affected.
CANAAN — The dramatic end of an 1873 attempt to cross the Atlantic Ocean by air was described last Wednesday to the members of the Falls Village- Canaan Historical Society. Society president Oliver Eldridge told of the end of the flight of the Graphic balloon on Oct. 6, 1873 after a stormy passage over Canaan Mountain. The balloon was forced down on Lower Road in East Canaan after a flight from New York City. The adventure had been sponsored by the New York Daily Graphic newspaper. A crew of three, Washington H. Donaldson, Alfred Ford and George A. Lunt, set out from Nostrand Avenue, Brooklyn, at 6 a.m. in a brave attempt to reach Europe by air. They were traveling in a lifeboat suspended beneath a balloon 160 feet high, 110 feet in diameter and with a lifting capacity of 600,000 cubic feet of gas. The balloon crossed Long Island Sound, flew over Westchester County and up over Bethel, Conn. The winds abruptly changed and the craft drifted over Bridgeport, New Haven and Waterbury before traveling northwest to the Canaan vicinity. It passed so close to the earth in Goshen that the crew was able to converse with those on the ground. They declined invitations to stop for a drink of cider but left a card certifying that the balloon had been in the region.
25 years ago —
April 2001
SALISBURY — Kathleen Lauretano testified before state legislators last week and told them abuses she has seen by Connecticut State Police in recent years “have radically altered my faith in my own profession and confirmed me in the belief that no police department should be allowed to police itself.” Although she has been a state trooper since 1982, Mrs. Lauretano told members of the judiciary committee of the State House of Representatives and Senate at an April 16 hearing in Hartford, “I do not ... represent the state police today.” A civilian oversight committee is needed to police the police, she told legislators, who are considering a bill that would require such supervision for municipal police forces. “I am here to advocate that it be amended to include the state police,” she said.
CORNWALL — If any residents are thinking about donating any money to the town, a new proposed endowment fund could make it easier to contribute and also make the gift go farther. First Selectman Gordon Ridgway presented a legal prospectus to the Board of Finance at its meeting Thursday night, outlining the possible endowment. “It would allow the town, when we receive gifts, to invest them in different ways than we can right now,” Mr. Ridgway said. A recent $50,000 donation by Mary Schiefflin’s estate, designated for recreation purposes, will be used to start the fund.
These items were taken from The Lakeville Journal archives at Salisbury’s Scoville Memorial Library, keeping the original wording intact as possible.
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Bears return to Salisbury
Lakeville Journal
Apr 29, 2026
Provided
Salisbury resident Tim Moyer captured recent black bear activity near his property, noting it was his first sighting of the season.
A second bear appeared briefly, he said, but “didn't stay around for too long.”
The sighting occurred on Prospect Mountain Road, near the Salisbury Garden and Landscaping Center, and reflects a broader uptick in black bear sightings across the Northwest Corner this spring.
Provided
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AI tax targets the wrong signal
Revana Sharfuddin
Apr 29, 2026
As Connecticut lawmakers debate Senate Bill 515, they are asking a question more states will soon face: As artificial intelligence changes work, what happens to workers whose jobs change or disappear?
The bill would create a “workforce and productivity gap” surcharge. If a company’s payroll falls while each remaining worker appears to produce more, the state could impose a new tax. Companies that keep staffing steady and use “collaborative technology” meant to help workers rather than replace them would be exempt.
That sounds like a way to protect workers. But it would likely do more harm than good for Connecticut workers over time. The bill directs the state to design a surcharge around a “productivity gap,” meaning firms could be taxed if they appear more productive while employing fewer workers.
The bill does not specify how this would be measured, but in practice such approaches rely on some version of falling payroll alongside steady or rising revenue. Those figures move for many reasons other than technology replacing workers, including reorganization, shifts in product mix, or higher prices. The result is a policy that risks taxing adjustment rather than harm, discouraging investment and slowing the wage growth that usually comes with a more productive economy.
A drop in payroll does not have one meaning. It can reflect weaker demand for a company’s product, a shift toward different lines of business, work moving to contractors or other locations, or better internal organization. In all of those cases, measured output per worker can rise. The bill treats those very different situations as if they were the same.
Technology usually reshapes tasks before it eliminates entire jobs. Despite common claims, firms do not typically replace an occupation all at once. They change pieces of work. Some tasks disappear, some become more valuable, and new ones emerge. The real question is not whether a firm has fewer workers than it did three years ago. It is whether workers are moving into more valuable roles as the work itself changes.
The bill tries to account for that by rewarding “collaborative technology,” meaning technology that helps workers do their jobs instead of simply replacing them. The instinct is sound. The trouble is that the line is hard to observe from the outside. The same software can reduce the need for some roles while raising the value of others. A payroll statistic cannot tell you which is happening.
What the policy can do is change behavior. If firms need to stay close to an old staffing baseline to avoid a surcharge, many will manage to that line. They may delay layoffs, change hiring plans, or move work outside payroll. That may make the numbers look better without leaving workers better off.
There is a second problem, and it goes straight to workers’ pocketbooks. When firms face unclear rules around new technology, they hold back on investment. That means less experimentation, slower adoption, and weaker productivity growth. Over time, weaker productivity growth usually means weaker wage growth.
There is also a broader economic point. When technology makes a service cheaper, people often use more of it. Economists call this Jevons paradox. Lower-cost AI legal research, for example, can reduce the time spent on each task while expanding demand for legal services overall. A tax built around preserving current payroll pushes in the opposite direction. It nudges firms to hold onto existing roles instead of helping workers move into higher-value work, often in different roles, firms, or sectors.
A functioning labor market depends on exactly this kind of movement. Workers change jobs. Firms expand and contract. New tasks show up in places the old jobs did not. A policy that tries to hold the labor market still ends up reducing opportunity.
None of this diminishes the concern that motivates the proposal. If the goal is to support workers through these changes, the most direct tools remain the most reliable. Strengthening training and career mobility does more than penalizing firms based on imperfect signals. It helps workers move into the new roles that technology creates. Policy can also do more to align incentives. Today, it is often easier to expense investment in machines than investment in people. Allowing immediate expensing of employer-provided training would put worker skill development on similar footing. Connecticut largely follows federal rules here, so progress would require action at both levels.
Connecticut’s proposal recognizes a real challenge. But treating lower payroll as clear evidence of harmful displacement is too blunt for a dynamic economy. The goal should not be to freeze today’s jobs in place. It should be to help workers move into better ones over time.
Revana Sharfuddin is a research fellow at the Mercatus Center’s Labor Policy Project at George Mason University.
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America’s wartime economy
Bill Schmick
Apr 29, 2026
In April, the White House asked Congress for $1.5 trillion more in defense spending for 2027. This is a 40% increase over the Pentagon’s spending in fiscal year 2026. Half the funding will come from cuts to education, housing, and health programs. Welcome to the war economy.
While the stock market celebrates another two-week extension of a cease-fire between the U.S. and Iran, the wars are not over. There will be more, in my opinion, and preparing for them will cost money. The Pentagon needs $4.5 billion to replenish its Tomahawk cruise missile stockpile. The Navy wants more boats, and the $250 million in planes and helicopters we lost rescuing two downed flyers need to be replaced.
As more military resources disappear, the need to replace them grows. That never-ending story fuels a wartime economy. The money earmarked for defense may not be enough. At a private lunch last week, according to the New York Times, the president said we need to prioritize military protection. Otherwise, he said in a since-deleted video, the country could not continue to shoulder the financial burden of services including day care, Medicare, and Medicaid.
For those, like my daughter, who vaguely remember the term “wartime economy” from their history books, let me start with a definition. A wartime economy is an economic system that is reorganized by a nation to prioritize military production and resource allocation during periods of armed conflict.
What that means is that all the resources, including production, distribution, and financial systems, are adjusted to support military efforts while maintaining overall economic stability. If you are old enough to remember, it can and did mean rationing, price controls, centralized planning, inflation, and deficit spending here in the U.S.
For Americans, World War II is usually the go-to example of a wartime economy. Defense spending surged from 1.6% of Gross Domestic Product (GDP) in 1940 to over 40% four years later. By the end of the war, that number climbed to 119% of GDP. Non-military auto production was halted. Seel, rubber, and aluminum were rationed. Price controls artificially suppressed inflation, and black markets in everything from food to fuel proliferated.
Historians say this wartime economy pulled the U.S. out of the Great Depression. It sped up GDP growth and built the military-industrial complex. The war and draft created a job boom. By 1944, unemployment fell below 1%, the lowest ever. Women joined the workforce in large numbers. War also sparked major advances: radar, jet engines, computers, medicine, and the nuclear bomb.
All this is true; however, that is not the whole story. Under the hood, both private consumption and investment lagged badly. Civilian living standards were lower during the war than in 1940. That was before rationing and quality deterioration.
Much of wartime economic growth came at the private sector’s expense. Tanks, ammunition, ships, and planes—many lost in combat—could have built schools, hospitals, housing, or consumer goods. Instead, Americans waited in line for basics like gasoline, meat, and shoes. The national debt more than doubled as a share of GDP during the war.
Could we see the same results 80 years later? It seems doubtful. War may not deliver the benefits people expect. War spending gives an output boost, and we may fight for a “good cause,” whatever that means now. Yet do not expect the same job gains as before.
Next week, I will address the inflationary fallout from wartime economies and how countries worldwide are being forced to alter their own economies due to shifting post-war strategic alliances and geopolitics.
Bill Schmick is a founding partner of Onota Partners, Inc., in the Berkshires. Bill’s forecasts and opinions are purely his own and do not necessarily represent the views of Onota Partners, Inc. (OPI). None of his commentary is or should be considered investment advice.
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