Wage hike reveals policy failures

Connecticut’s raising the minimum wage in stages from $10.10 to $15 per hour by June 2023 is, Governor Lamont said the other day, “the best thing we’ve done in a long time.” While there is an argument for tying the minimum wage to an inflation index, as the state will do in 2024, the argument for raising it in Connecticut was weak this year as the state’s economy continued to decline because of high costs.

Helping the working poor was the rationale given for raising the minimum wage but it had more to do with camouflaging the longstanding and lethal failure of critical government policies. That is:

1) Connecticut socially promotes its elementary and high school students. There are no learning requirements for advancing from grade to grade. Only maintaining student selfesteem is mandatory in school. This policy now is standard throughout the country.

2) As also is standard throughout the country, half of Connecticut’s students graduate high school without mastering math and English.

3) Enabled by government welfare subsidies, many young women, especially those who have grown up without a father, have children outside marriage before their mid20s though they lack the job skills necessary to support themselves, much less their kids. Liberated by those welfare subsidies, their boyfriends don’t support their children.

4) So the unmarried young women with children qualify only for lowpaying menial work and become dependent on welfare for life.

5) Rather than address social promotion and welfare’s facilitating childbearing outside marriage, state government raises the minimum wage, even though most minimumwage jobs are held not by adults supporting families but by teenagers living at home and working only parttime in entrylevel positions.

Raising the minimum wage helps elected officials feel better about themselves even as these failed policies worsen Connecticut’s demographics, with about 40 percent of the state’s children living without a father in their home, as many as 90 percent of kids in the cities, and even as fatherlessness correlates heavily with educational failure, criminality, physical and mental illness, and unhappiness in life.

These policies are the suicide of society. But will any elected officials and candidates dare to tell their constituents that they and their children must take education far more seriously and that childbearing outside marriage is more destructive than the political panic of the moment, vaping?

Connecticut’s politicians can’t even stand up to another welfare constituency, the momandpop liquor stores.

Chris Powell is a columnist for the Journal Inquirer in Manchester, Connecticut.