A sea of teachers clad in red T-shirts rumbled across Chicago, protesting the audacity of officials who want to consider student outcomes in evaluating teachers and offering ‘only’ a 16 percent raise across four years.
Meanwhile, in California and Wisconsin, black-robed judges are picking through the fine print in various voter approved efforts to roll back public employee wages and benefits that are clearly unsustainable.
Yes, the hunt for answers has now moved to all the wrong places. The bargaining phase is done; the appeal to voters is over; it’s on to the streets and the courts, all in historically progressive bastions. It’s always interesting when labor-backed officials have to handle a labor crisis. And, after awhile, it all becomes as mesmerizing as watching a slow-speed train wreck.
The Chicago crisis has subsided. The trial court rulings will vary wildly, giving each side a chance to cheer and jeer. And all verdicts will be appealed fully until what emerges is a judicially certified blueprint for other jurisdictions to follow.
Here in Connecticut, we can sit by smugly and say it can’t happen here. But it can. And it will. We are typically three to five years behind California in seeing these chickens come home to roost. But all the fundamentals seem in place:
• We’re among the worst in the nation in unfunded public employee retirement benefits.
• We’ve already played the concession card with the state unions.
• We’ve already imposed the largest tax hike in history.
• The legislature has tried to insulate municipalities from the harshest realities, but the towns and school districts are already bleeding.
• And we haven’t made a dent in the problem. Ahead lies a two-year state budget that begins life with a deficit.
The political wind has shifted. Who would have thought the nation’s political pundits would mark Connecticut down from deep blue to likely blue to a mere ‘leans blue’ in the presidential election. And the race for the U.S. Senate seat so important to the Democrats’ national strategy is now too close to call.
It seems about time to hoist the storm-warning pennant here in Connecticut. Our interesting times are about to get even more interesting.
‘Dr. Doom’ redux
If Steven Lanza keeps it up, he may inherit the title of ‘Dr. Doom.’
The UConn economist and editor of the quarterly Connecticut Economy magazine looked at the 4,000 jobs the state lost in the second quarter of this year and came to the conclusion that the economy is bleaker than it had appeared.
“At the current rate it will take nearly six more years to recover all the jobs lost in the last recession. And we may not be even that lucky,” he writes. He notes neither consumers nor business has much appetite for spending and blames the federal government for not doing more to bolster the economy.
He further points out that while the national housing data points to a recovery, in Connecticut the slide in housing prices is continuing, down 4.7 percent in the second quarter. That’s the worst performance in the nation.
In an economic sense, the ‘Dr. Doom’ moniker most recently has been applied to NYU’s Nouriel Roubini who predicted the Great Recession as early as 2006. Unlike Roubini, Lanza is not out on the limb alone. His warning reinforces the findings of the Connecticut Center for Economic Analysis, which said in August that Connecticut may not yet be out of its recession phase. The center noted business productivity not yet returned to pre-recession levels. As Lanza notes, employment is worse, a fact confirmed by last week’s jump in unemployment.
In any case, if Lanza’s predictions prove as accurate as Roubini’s, he can set up shop as Connecticut’s own ‘Dr. Doom.’
It seems only right that in Connecticut that title should be held by a tenured state employee.
