Williams, More Jobs Please

President Pro Tem of Connecticut’s senate Don Williams was invited by the Chamber of Commerce of Eastern Connecticut to give a talk, presumably on the state’s faltering economy, a delicious irony, rather as if the moneyed classes of pre-revolutionary France were to invite Jean-Paul Marat to a salon to give a chat on the future of the monarchy.

Williams who, along with his comrade in arms in the House, Speaker Chris Donovan, is principally responsible for having produced a budget now nearly half a million in arrears, told the group that the state has to “ratchet it up,” shove a little more money in the direction of education and improve Connecticut’s rail lines. Improved schooling, Williams said according to an account in the Norwich Bulletin, “wouldn’t require much extra spending and could be accomplished chiefly through policy changes. Connecting Hartford, New London, and Springfield, Mass., through rail would better move people and goods around.”

The completion of that line will better enable unemployed people to move from Hartford to Springfield. It has no other use. And just now, according to a story in the Hartford Courant, students are hunkering down in 4-year and 2-year community colleges until the epoch of unemployment passes by. Our leaders, strangely indifferent to plight of the people they rule and ruin, cannot read the papers – and they most certainly cannot read the times.

The question the Democratic dominated legislature should be considering is this: What will it take, short of a revolution, to persuade these so called leaders to become serious about cutting spending?