In today’s Hartford Courant, there are a couple stories (at least a couple) that fly in the face of all reason, and should prompt most of us to say, Are You Serious?
According to the Courant, over the next 13 years, the cities especially Hartford and Bridgeport are going to experience a boom while the smaller municipalities, especially the wealthier ones, like Greenwich and Wilton, are going to see their populations diminish.
The Courant reported that, “Patrick Flaherty, an economist at the state Department of Labor, analyzed the data from the Connecticut State Data Center and found numbers that surprised him.”
Most of the data and projections come from state sources, which are remarkable unreliable, biased, and politically motivated. In this case, both the data and the analysis is derived from state data. They can’t even figure out the size of the deficit which is based on current data let alone perform complex, multivariate, economic projections.
The article assigns the anticipated success of our large cities to our Governor, who, in the eyes of this publication is a combination of Mother Theresa, for his enlightened selflessness and Pope Francis, for his infallibility, because of his tireless, attack on the “ joblessness, blight and crime”, that plague those cities, as well as, “looking for ways to improve cities”, and “spending money to clean up unused and dilapidated industrial sites to promote business growth, funding so-called innovation places to create urban districts promoting high-tech business and upgrading inter-city transportation that attracts downtown retail and residential development around rail and bus stations”.
However, before we start appealing to Rome for Dannel’s immediate canonization, it is necessary to think about this for a moment.
All of the projections fly in the face of common sense, which not only confuses the situation but also lends further doubt as to the credibility of the data, the analytics, or both.
To predict the unlikely rise of Hartford and Bridgeport and the demise of the ‘burbs, especially in lower Fairfield County, where I live reminds me of the old Groucho Marx saying, – “Who are you going to believe, me? or your own eyes?”
We need to enlist outside sources to not only provide the projections but to aggregate and maintain the data. This will lessen our dependence on the ever-growing bureaucracy, and reduce costs dramatically, as well as, provide greater assurance that the data is not tainted with political bias.
Connecticut’s constitution calls for the establishment of 6 offices, like the Office of the Governor, Office of the Secretary of State etc. However, we currently have over 106 offices, departments, agencies, boards, councils, and commissions. This does not include the quasi-public agencies like the Capital Region Development Authority or the Connecticut Airport Authority, nor does it include the 20+ agencies overseeing the state-provided higher education system.
I have argued that the private sector can perform nearly all government services with greater competence and efficiency than the public sector. There are numerous examples that demonstrate this over the last 240 year history of our country, as well as the basic laws of economics.
I have a saying that, “nothing is permanent, except a temporary government program”.
I am a conservative and the prime directive of the Conservative Party is to limit the interference of the federal government, and to scale back the involvement of the federal government to those powers enumerated in the Constitution, which are very few. However, even those who believe otherwise, those who believe that the government should be involved in governing the Internet and our healthcare, it doesn’t mean that they government must manage these systems.
If you believe that the feds should tell us, how fast our Internet should be, or what medical insurance we must buy, or what treatments and procedures, each of us should be entitled to it doesn’t mean that the government necessarily has to provide those services.