As Connecticut sinks, gov't band plays on

If Connecticut’s state legislators had been on the Titanic after the ship struck the iceberg, they wouldn’t have just rearranged the deck chairs. As the ship sank they’d have held a grand costume ball as well.

State government’s bankruptcy and the collapse of Connecticut’s economy notwithstanding, the General Assembly’s Labor and Public Employees Committee has just approved a bill to require businesses to provide paid sick days to employees.

Of course, most businesses already do; some small businesses don’t. While small business is the engine of economic growth and might be encouraged, Connecticut does things differently, economic growth being an impediment on the road to a people’s republic.

The bill would require businesses with 50 or more employees to provide an hour of paid sick leave for every 40 hours worked. For businesses that aren’t already providing paid sick time, that would be the equivalent of a 2.5-percent payroll tax increase. Of course employees should have paid sick time, but prosperity is the time for adding such taxes, not near-depression. And of course the bill doesn’t propose reducing other business taxes to offset the extra cost.

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Meanwhile, the Energy and Technology Committee is considering legislation to prohibit utility shutoffs to households with children 2 years old or younger. Far be it for the government to suggest that people consider more carefully what used to be the financial obligations of having children.

United Illuminating Co., which serves a small area centered on the welfare hubs of New Haven and Bridgeport, told the committee that 80,000 of its 325,000 customers — a quarter of them — already don’t pay their bills. Connecticut Light & Power, which serves most of the rest of the state, won’t specify its delinquency rate but says it’s also in double digits.

Of course somebody is paying those delinquent utility bills. They are collected through higher assessments against customers who have lived a little more responsibly and who pay more in taxes than they consume in public services — the saps.

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In December the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics reported that state and municipal government employees throughout the country are compensated, on average, 45 percent more than private-sector employees. The bureau didn’t report a figure for federal government employees, but the other day USA Today conducted its own analysis of BLS data to compare compensation in 10 occupations common to the federal government and private industry. The conclusion was similar. Federal government workers earned 55 percent more than private-sector workers, most of the disparity due to a 400-percent advantage in medical insurance, pension and other benefits.

Thus there is plenty of room for reducing the compensation of government employees. But in Connecticut this can barely be talked about. Among its several actual prohibitions on getting value for taxpayers, Connecticut law forbids school boards from spending less than in the previous year. The pretense is to protect students. But the only protection is for school employees, whose compensation keeps rising even as school services are reduced. In Connecticut education isn’t sacrosanct; only the compensation of educators is.

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With the University of Connecticut having just raised tuition by 5.7 percent, the co-chairwomen of the General Assembly’s Education Committee — Sen. Mary Ann Handley, D-Manchester, and Rep. Roberta B. Willis, D-Salisbury — pretend to be indignant. They say they learned about the tuition increase from their constituents, not the university, and so have proposed a bill requiring public colleges to give the Legislature direct notice of tuition increases.

The legislators are just trying to evade responsibility. They could have learned about the tuition increase in advance from the newspapers. But no matter, for the legislators would not have done anything about it anyway and are not doing anything about it now.

For the alternatives are only to increase appropriations for UConn or to enact cuts in its spending. Tuition increases long have been the Legislature’s unspoken policy toward UConn, the Legislature’s main objective being, as usual, only to preserve the disparity between government and private-sector compensation.

Chris Powell is managing editor of the Journal Inquirer in Manchester.