Don’t bring us your tired, your hungry, your poor, yearning to be free.
Especially, the “poor.”
Connecticut doesn’t want them anymore. We don’t do well with poor people. We’re very good with rich people. Rich people prosper in Connecticut. Bring us more of them.
We don’t mind if the rich people are hungry. In fact, we want them to be hungry. We’ve got a make-believe downtown Hartford just begging for some rich, hungry people — or at least people who can pretend that they are rich when they’re on some expense-account convention trip.
We want people so rich and so comfortable that they won’t even notice that they aren’t free — nor yearning to be free. We want residents with so much wine in the cellar that they won’t even notice that you can’t buy a bottle in a Connecticut grocery store.
Poor people with ambition should live in a state with low taxes and robust growth and a rock-bottom minimum wage that doesn’t retard hiring at the low end of the pecking order. Connecticut? No.
Our worst nightmare is that you ambitious poor people will scrape together enough dough to buy a little three-bedroom ranch house in the country, spoiling the views of the rich people. Gov. M. Jodi Rell leads us in our morning prayer, “Buy more open space,” which takes money away from normal people to gobble up available land, so you poor people won’t get any funny ideas about residential real estate.
We have carefully crafted an economy here in Connecticut that stifles employment growth (up 0.4 percent in the 1990s; down 1.0 percent from 2000 to 2003) to maintain our status-quo stupor, because we aren’t interested in creating “opportunities” for you poor people. We already have jobs.
The latest A. G. Edwards ‘Nest Egg Index,” evaluating how ready we all are for retirement, put Connecticut number-one in the nation. Of course we are.
We are full of rich people. We may or may not be best in the country in tending to our poor. We don’t care. You can’t be number one at everything.
A Marketing Nightmare
We have to be careful. It’s not like we can actually put up signs at the New York and Massachusetts borders, offering exceptional watering and feeding of rich people. You have to pretend that everyone is welcome and how much we appreciate diversity and blah, blah, blah. Between 2000 and 2006, the population in Fairfield County only grew by 2 percent — in part, because we weren’t aggressive enough in putting out the welcome mat for rich guys.
When the Bureau of Labor Statistics this summer computed the average weekly salary in the investment banking industry, by county, which county do you think finished first? Of course, Fairfield County. In Connecticut. Where rich people thrive.
We’re not subtle about our preferences. If you aren’t rich, don’t come here. The National Center of Public Policy and Education’s recent report card on “affordable” higher education gave Connecticut an “F” – and we’re proud of it. If you can’t afford to pay your tuition, move somewhere else.
Connecticut has made progress in ridding itself of unnecessary poor people. Our poverty rare was only 8.3 percent last year, well below the national average (13.3 percent) — a clue that Connecticut’s poor people are getting the hint and moving somewhere else. But we can’t let up.
The poverty-levelfamilies don’t begin to represent the total problem Connecticut faces when it comes to welcoming “poor” people. The top five percent of earners in Fairfield County last year averaged $746,000. We need to rid ourselves not only of the real, real poor people, but the sort-of-poor, as well.
We’re almost where we want to be, at least in terms of mindset.
Connecticut grows rich people the way Iowa grows corn. We know that. The only thing holding us back from an aggressive marketing plan for the rich, and a relocation plan for the poor, is that “guilt” thing.
As novelist Daniel Akst wrote in the journal Wilson Quarterly a few years ago: “There are two things at which Americans have always excelled: One is generating almost unimaginable wealth, and the other is feeling bad about it.”
Well, stop it, stop it, stop it, Connecticut. Don’t feel bad. Revel in your rich people.
Laurence D. Cohen is a freelance writer.
