While state government is running a growing deficit, a big tax increase seems likely, and social disintegration is increasing, the General Assembly is considering legislation to forbid the import and sale of rhinoceros horns.

It's not as if anything Connecticut does will help the rhinos avoid extinction. It's more that if legislators don't busy themselves with trivialities, they might face serious issues, like whether taxpayers may become extinct.

To get serious, legislators would not have to offer solutions. They would need only to ask serious questions.

Why is poverty worsening in Connecticut, not only in cities but in the suburbs as well, despite decades of state and federal government programs to alleviate it?

Social-service agencies and school systems note a vast increase in disturbed children. Where are they all coming from?

Speaking about the recent rioting in Baltimore, President Obama blamed, in part, fatherlessness and the decline of the family. Observers in Connecticut quickly noted that conditions in cities here are similar to those in Baltimore. So what has has caused fatherlessness and the decline of the family?

School enrollment in Connecticut is falling as steadily as school spending is rising. Indeed, state law actually makes it illegal to reduce school spending no matter how much enrollment declines. What is this about? Whom does it benefit?

While the governor boasts that high school graduation rates are rising, two-thirds of Connecticut's high school seniors and state university system freshmen have failed to master high school English or math or both. Much of public higher education here is now admittedly remedial. Is social promotion now the comprehensive practice in education here? If so, why and what are its costs?

Connecticut's public works departments figured out long ago that when a water main breaks, flooding streets and buildings, the broken main must be repaired. But such insight is not applied to social policy here.

No, when social policy in Connecticut fails, the failure is overlooked and mere remediation of the problem is pursued. It is as if, instead of repairing the broken water main, the public works department only distributed buckets for continuous bailing. Thus Connecticut is being flooded with messed-up children.

With social policy today, state government mainly arranges remediation of problems of its own creation. The premises of failed policies are simply accepted. And since there is so much money to be made from failed policy -- so many people to be hired and contracts to be awarded, money made from both creating and remediating the problems -- no one in authority has incentive to question. Questions are too threatening to too many people on the payroll. 

Meanwhile, Gov. Dannel P. Malloy is making much of his initiative for a "Second-Chance Society," and properly so. Most prisoners will be released eventually, but there's no point in releasing them if, stigmatized and without job skills, they only return to crime, as most do. They have to be guaranteed job opportunities and basic housing.

The problem is, as former state Victim Advocate Michelle Cruz notes, that while Connecticut may not yet be a second-chance society, its criminal-justice system long has been full of second chances, almost to infinity. Connecticut's criminal laws and courts are forgiving to a fault. Criminals here really have to work their way into prison, their many lesser offenses resulting in mere probations until they maim or kill someone. Then it's as if no one saw it coming.

The governor boasts that crime is down. But this may be only because the prison population he is trying to reduce went up.

In any case the governor's objectives are sound. Drug criminalization doesn't work, and if prisoners can't find jobs and housing upon their release, it would be better to keep them locked up for life.