Author: hankkalet

Today is the day. The four joint legislative panels are expected to issue their recommendations on how the state should deal with its property tax problem and budget woes.

Today’s Star-Ledger offers a bit of a preview that features an interesting array of changes, but that may ultimately lead nowhere.

I don’t mean to be pessimistic, but consider what we are talking about here — changes in state and local government that the special interests in Trenton are sure to pan, a public craving tax relief but that is unlikely to agree to many of the changes and a group of legislators that has, in the past, shown the political will of a weather-vane.

Some thoughts:

1. Consolidation legislation

Here is how the Ledger describes what is likely to be on the table:

The first recommendation from the committee that studied consolidating towns and schools and sharing services will be to set up a commission of nine members with experience in business management, government policy or academic research, according to a draft of the panel’s report.

The proposed Local Unit Reorganization and Consolidation Commission would recommend which towns should be merged. Unless lawmakers voted down the idea, mergers would be put up for a public vote in the municipalities involved, and each town would have to approve the proposed merger.

An interesting idea, but one that does not go far enough. Having talked with the folks in Jamesburg and Monroe and having covered the two Princetons, it is clear to me that most communities are going to opt not to consolidate. It doesn’t matter that Jamesburg residents would benefit through a broader tax base and more opportunities (a larger police force, a recreation department, etc.) or that the Princetons in many ways have merged much of their operations (joint planning and health boards, joint recreation department).

The elected officials and bureaucrats in the towns likely to be on the consolidation short list will fight it.

A better solution would have been the original proposal in which the state Legislature and governor would vote on a consolidation report issued by the panel, similar to the base-closing process used by Congress. Then let the towns have a veto vote with the veto only taking affect if a supermajority of each town opposes the proposed merger.

2. School aid changes and the budget vote

The school funding committee is “set to unveil more than two dozen proposals, including a plan to boost school aid by up to $1 billion a year and distribute the aid more widely,” the Ledger said, with much of the extra money expected to go to “towns with large concentrations of senior citizens.”

The new formula will estimate a community’s relative wealth — and, therefore, the level of state aid it needs — on a per-person basis rather than on a communitywide basis. The change should result in more funding for towns where seniors predominate, (said Assemblyman Herb Conaway, D-Burlington, the committee’s co-chair).

The committee also will propose a new school spending cap in which “School tax increases would be limited to the annual inflation rate, with a special adjustment to account for enrollment growth.”

Communities that stay within the limits would no longer have to put their budget up for a vote. But if a school board wanted to spend more than the caps allowed, it would have to seek voter approval in an April election with special hurdles: The vote would be valid only if 20 percent or more of the district’s registered voters participated, and the extra spending would have to be approved by 60 percent of those voting.

It is an interesting proposal, with much to recommend it, not the least of which is an end to the sham April budget vote. But the hurdles being proposed seem unnecessarily onerous — why the supermajority if there is going to be a minimum turnout requirement for districts that seek extra spending from the voters? The other option would be to abandon the minimum turnout and require a supermajority.

3. Tax rebates

Lawmakers plan to wait until tomorrow to lay out specifics of their plan to reduce property taxes for most taxpayers by up to 20 percent.

That plan would replace existing property tax rebates with a credit of up to 20 percent of property tax bills. At least half the state’s homeowners would be eligible for the full credit, but those with higher incomes would see smaller credits, and top earners would receive none.

This seems more a case of political pandering than actual reform. The rebate program has been a political pawn in New Jersey for too many years and while it does help offset high property tax payments, it doesn’t address the issue of fairness adequately and it creates a new expenditure in a state budget that has been a royal mess.

A better solution? An expanded state income tax. Here is the conclusion from a recent report from New Jersey Policy Perpsective:

Over the past 30 years, New Jersey’s income tax has earned its keep and more. It has produced billions of dollars in revenue and has made the overall state and local tax system at least somewhat less oppressive for middle- and low-income people. The fact that local property taxes continue to threaten the economic well-being of all but the wealthiest in New Jersey is less an indictment of the income tax as it is a reminder of how much worse things would have been if politically courageous lawmakers had not adopted the tax in 1976.

But that is not enough. The time has come for New Jersey to better balance its tax system by relying more on the one tax that is based on ability to pay. Progressivity is a virtue, not a vice.

Year after year, New Jersey is at or near the top of the nation in median household income, yet even as income grows more concentrated in the hands of a relative few households, the state clings to its property tax tradition. New Jersey’s tax system should reflect reality, not flout it.

South Brunswick Post, The Cranbury Press
The Blog of South Brunswick

John Nichols in The Nation explains why Russ Feingold’s decision not to seek the presidency is the best thing for progressives and the country.

South Brunswick Post, The Cranbury Press
The Blog of South Brunswick

Iraq continues its long downward spiral into chaos, deathcount rising faster than the desert mercury.

The news today — 50 hostages seized from Iraqi Higher Education Ministry by masked gunmen masquerading as Interior Ministry commandos, the Iraqi police apparently complicit — is horrific, unbelievable. Yet is seems almost familiar in its way, as if we’ve heard it before.

And we have, in so many pemutations, in beheadings and kidnappings, roadside bombings and mosque attacks.

Three and a half years now into this ugly war and Iraq is in flames and American troops, ostensibly the best in the world, are helpless to stop the madness.

For too long too many were unwilling to admit this, unwilling to admit that the decision by an American president and his administration to send troops into a country that had not attacked us, a country with little capacity to defend itself and to send those troops in on the cheap could only result in a deadly blowback that will be with us for years and years to come.

Because, make no mistake, the forces that have been unleashed in the desert, the hatreds we have sown, the enmity we have engendered, will not go a away for a long, long time.

I am no expert on this, of course, just the editor of a pair of suburban weekly newspapers who watches the news and reads the paper, the headlines daily screaming of death and kidnapping and the occasional, but all-too-infrequent moments of kindness and joy.

I write this a week after an election in which American voters spoke out about this madness, chasing a Republican majority that has walked in lock-step behind the president and his administration for three-plus years. I write this having listened to voters in the towns my papers cover, upscale voters and working stiffs, offer comments similar to those I read in the national papers.

A small sampling (from The Cranbury Press):

• “Change is the only thing we can hope for to do anything.” — Steve Quidor, Jamesburg.
• “The Iraq War is taking a terrible toll on the country and on the people that are serving there admirably. It is time for a change and staying the course with the Bush administration is absolutely foolhardy.” — Sid Hausner, Monroe.
• “I’ve got to get rid of the Republicans, mostly because of the war in Iraq. Needless, needless — poor boys who were killed and maimed for nothing, absolutely nothing.” — Charlotte Rubin, Monroe

Admittedly, these votes were cast in a blue county in a blue state, but they differ very little from the sentiments being voiced around the country, where 30 or so Republicans were chased from the House of Representatives.

The national news media is painting this as a win for conservatives — Democrats have moved to the right to win — and there is some truth to this on some issues. But the key issue was Iraq and Republican control of Congress and it is why GOP moderates were whisked away in states like Vermont and Connecticut.

And it is why we have been hearing a new tune from Bush and his neocon allies (some, like Richard Perle, jumped ship before the election). The president is now open to new ideas, but not a timetable — something needed to extricate the United States from this mess.

Admittedly, there are no good options. But leaving and allowing the United Nations and the regional powers (with a significant monetary contribution from us) to come in and clean up the mess we created is the least worst option available.

I think we will eventually get there, but first the history of the war must be recast, with many of its early supporters engaging in a dangerous shifting of blame to the Iraqis and their “old hatreds, confessional violence, ethnic bigotry and a culture of corruption” (USA Today columnist Ralph Peters, quoted by Robert Fisk) — a ritual destined only to further enflame the situation. American troops, David Brooks argued in his New York Times column, were failed both by administration blunders and “by the same old Iraqi demons: greed, blood lust and a mind-boggling unwillingness to compromise, even in the face of self-immolation.”

Casting blame in this way is a convenient tactic that allows the folks who cheerleaded this disaster into being avoid responsibility. Yes, the Iraqis bear some responsibility for what is happening over there, but so do President Bush, Vice President Dick Cheney, efense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, all their minions in the administration and Congress, and a compliant press that includes more than just the dunderheads over at Fox News.

Robert Fisk, the legendary British journalist, responded to the current round of neocon blame-the-victim handwringing, by explicitly calling it what it is, a “racist assumption that the hecatomb in Iraq is all the fault of the Iraqis, that their intrinsic backwardness, their viciousness, their failure to appreciate the fruits of our civilization make them unworthy of our further attention.”

At no point does anyone question whether the fact that the U.S. is “the greatest power on Earth” might not be part of the problem. Nor that Iraqis who endured among their worst years of dictatorship when Saddam was supported by the United States, who were sanctioned by the United Nations at a cost of a half a million children’s lives and who were then brutally invaded by our armies, might not actually be terribly keen on all the good things we wished to offer them.

Many Arabs, as I’ve written before, would like some of our democracy, but they would also like another kind of freedom — freedom from us.

In many ways, that is why all the assumptions the Bush administation and its followers made were wrong. Assuming we would be treated as liberators, that our “exceptionalism” would be seen as anything more than a new colonialism, as an arrogant attempt to control the destiny of another nation was foolish — even if we did take down one of the most thuggish dictators of recent times.

We need to admit this if we want to avoid repeating this deadly mistake in the future.

South Brunswick Post, The Cranbury Press
The Blog of South Brunswick

Gov. Jon Corzine fired a shot across the bow today, warning the Legislature that it must refrain from the kind of fiscal shenanigans that got the state into the kind of mess that forced the shutdown of state services over the summer.

Legislative leaders are talking about an average 20 percent property tax for most homeowners next year, and a new school funding formula that would provide an additional $1 billion in aid to local districts.

Speaking to reporters today, Corzine said “Those need to be financed. … I can see how that can be done. We’re working on the details of that and we will continue to. But reform and sustainability are just as important as tax relief. … Otherwise we’ll end up giving false hope to our citizens.”

That means staying away from one-shot gimmicks and finding real recurring revenue that can pay for state spending for years to come.

There remain serious questions that need to be answered about the various plans likely to be unveiled this week, but the biggest question right now appears to be whether the Legislature has the political will to do anything more than nibble around the edges.

As I’ve written often since the summer, there is a need to streamline local government, reducing the number of taxing agencies without creating new bureaucracies, and there is a need for new kinds of revenues, including a much broader use of the state’s income tax to fund education and other services.

South Brunswick Post, The Cranbury Press
The Blog of South Brunswick

Leave it to Eric Alterman to cut through all the, well, um, stuff and hero worship surrounding Sen. John McCain and his potential (sort of, maybe, but we all know he’s running) bid for hte presidency.

You see, these smart boyz are so much smarter than the rest of us, they know that whatever McCain really says, he’s on their side. It doesn’t matter that his political positions, um, suck. Rather, what matters is how cool he is around reporters.

That about covers it, really.

I am so tired of all this talk about “The Straight-Talk Express” and reporters remembering that quixotic, last-second challenge to the Bush nomination in 2000. John McCain is as conservative as they come, for the most part — anti-abortion, big pro-war guy who wants to send more troops into the quagmire of Iraq, has been kowtowing to the religious right and so on and on and on, ad nauseum.

That so many reporters and commentators, even nominally liberal ones, have fallen for his schtick just goes to show how good of a politician he really is.

South Brunswick Post, The Cranbury Press
The Blog of South Brunswick