Author: hankkalet

Two days and counting. With the state Legislature and governor still at an impasse on tax cuts, the state budget remains in limbo and New Jersey residents are left to wonder what will happen on Monday.

In 2006, a similar impasse resulted in a week-long shutdown of state government that resulted in a flawed compromise and three years of incremental changes that resulted in something short of reform — and the election of Chris Christie as governor.

Now, two-and-a-half years into the Christie administration, we are facing the same potential impasse — and a different set of flawed reforms.

The state pension plan remains a mess, with the governor refusing to make the kind of payments necessary to make it whole and instead blaming state and local workers — you know, police officers firefighters, teachers, social workers, road crews, prison guards, etc.

Property tax growth has slowed, but our tax bills remain the among the highest in the nation, driven in part by our foolish unwillingness to move education funding from the property tax to the income tax or to drastically cut the number of government entities in the state.

More than 1,400 taxing agencies is way too many. Fire districts, garbage districts, etc., only create mini-fiefdoms and generate momentum for spending. Decisions on fire services should be in the hands of municipal or county governments and not in the hands of fire commissioners who sometimes win their positions in elections in which turnout sometimes fails to exceed a couple of percentage points.

On top of this, we have 566 (soon to be 565) municipal governments, nearly 600 school districts and 21 county governments — a number that should be slashed by about a third. There are 70 municipalities in Bergen County, most of which are relatively small both in terms of geography and population. In Middlesex, there are 25 towns, 20 percent of which either have populations of less than 10,000 or are smaller than 2 square miles.

State residents have long viewed this as a problem, though most voters have viewed the need for municipal and school district consolidation as someone else’s problem.

Complicating things is the longstanding antitax mood in the state. For too long, we have want our services in New Jersey, but we do not want to pay for them.

Instead of these issues being the primary focus of our budget debate, Christie and Democratic legislative leaders are arguing over a tax cut that cannot be sustained unless the state meets unrealistic growth projections or brutally slashes spending.

Come Monday, state government may or may not be open for business. But it is guaranteed that business as usual in New Jersey will continue unabated.

• Send me an e-mail.
• Read poetry at The Subterranean.
• Certainties and Uncertainties a chapbook by Hank Kalet, will be published in November by Finishing Line Press. It can be ordered here.
• Suburban Pastoral, a chapbook by Hank Kalet, available here.

Consider today’s ruling by the U.S. Supreme Court to be a half-full glass. In upholding President Barack Obama’s signature legislative success, the Affordable Care Act, it allowed the expansion of health coverage to about 15 million more Americans than had been covered in the past.

But in doing so, it allowed to stand a flawed reform that will expand the power of the health insurance companies, does little to address costs or improve health outcomes and still leaves an estimated 20 million uncovered.

The rationale behind so-called Obamacare is relatively simple, as described by Robert Scheer in Truthdig (in a column critical of the contortions being performed by Republican presidential hopeful Mitt Romney):

The issue faced by the court was the same on the federal level as it was on the state level; if the public, through its government, must ultimately bear the cost of caring for the uninsured—as would be so in any society possessed of even a modicum of shared social responsibility—then it can vote to levy taxes to finance that effort.

In accepting this argument, the court majority — which included conservative Chief Justice John Roberts — added balance to a badly imbalanced equation. The mandate expands the insurance pool, and shifts the cost of coverage to health-care users, rather than having the larger taxpaying public pick up the cost. Scheer, to be clear, has been critical of the Obama healthcare plan. Obama, he wrote last week,

limited his ambition to what Big Pharma and the insurance giants would accept as “reform” in a system that they had so successfully exploited. Obamacare is a faux reform born of opportunism, as was Romney’s original version: Play ball with those who have profited most from the run-up of medical costs and expect them to make it more affordable.

Two dynamics doomed the experiment. First, the new Democratic president wanted to launch a bold progressive program, but rather than channel the spirit of Franklin Delano Roosevelt to address the economic crisis that he inherited, he continued the bailouts begun under George W. Bush and fixed on health care reform instead of the financial pain being suffered by average Americans.

The second dynamic that undercut the health care bill was an overeagerness on the part of the new White House operatives to collaborate with the profiteers in the very industry targeted by reform.

Real reform, Scheer points out, would build upon Medicare, which has been remarkably successful even given the built-in cost issues it faces because its insurance pool is limited to older Americans, who require a greater amount of care.

Let me humbly suggest that as an alternative to a mandatory system rejected by the majority, we return to the idea of covering most people by attracting them to quality public and private programs through consumer choice, and that one of those choices be a version of the public option we now offer seniors. It’s called Medicare and it works splendidly.

U.S. Sen. Bernie Sanders agrees, praising today’s decision but making it clear that it should be viewed only as a first small step toward real change, as he told John Nichols in The Nation.

“In my view, while the Affordable Care Act is an important step in the right direction and I am glad that the Supreme Court upheld it, we ultimately need to do better,” the independent senator says. “If we are serious about providing high-quality, affordable healthcare as a right, not a privilege, the real solution to America’s health care crisis is a Medicare-for-all, single-payer system. Until then, we will remain the only major nation that does not provide health care for every man, woman and child as a right of citizenship.”

Obamacare is not going to get us there, but Medicare-for-All will. Progressives should take a day or two to rejoice over today’s ruling, but then get back to work fixing our broken health-system.

• Send me an e-mail.
• Read poetry at The Subterranean.
• Certainties and Uncertainties a chapbook by Hank Kalet, will be published in November by Finishing Line Press. It can be ordered here.
• Suburban Pastoral, a chapbook by Hank Kalet, available here.

The “Fast and Furious” debacle should have been nothing more than a footnote in the annals of the Justice Department.

It was a dubious policy that was badly executed and led to the firing of some low-level employees. Congress is right to investigate, though the full-on assault that this has turned into, fueling wall-to-wall Fox News coverage, offers a glimpse into the depredations of our political culture. The GOP wants to damage the president. Attorney General Eric Holder obliges by being less than forthcoming. The Republicans pounce and Contempt of Congress charges follow. The president reacts with a flimsy declaration of executive privilege, turning a minor blip into a full-bore constitutional battle.

Let me be clear: The GOP is overplaying this failure into a scandal, though they are right to investigate how the whole thing went down. Holder should cooperate, but the GOP needs to be respectful of him and his office, something the party has seemed unwilling to be. And, finally, the president should stay out of it. There is no privilege here and Congress has an investigative responsibility under the constitution. As Jennifer Rubin, who writes the Post’s Right Turn blog, points out,

The defense of Obama’s flimsy executive privilege claim is bad politics and bad law (unlike Obama’s immigration edict, which is good politics and bad law). The impulse in politics is to circle the wagons whenever “your side” is attacked. Hence the left-wing blogosphere and congressional Democrats, who regard Republican executive imperialism as akin to an anti-democratic coup, find nothing wrong with the administration’s stonewalling. This is the triumph of political partisanship over principle. Liberals certainly don’t believe in the flimsy use of executive privilege, except, of course, if Obama is wielding the privilege and there’s an election coming up.

I’m not at all impressed with the argument that Obama is entitled to stiff Congress because House Republicans are playing politics. That sure wasn’t the Watergate or Iran-Contra or Valerie Plame standard. Democrats wanted to get Nixon, Reagan and Bush in those instances, but that partisan motive wasn’t germane, was it?

This hyper-partisanship, which has infected both parties (though the GOP’s partisan fever runs much hotter), is like sugar in the gas tank of American democracy. Along with the obscene amount of money and lack of accountability for donors, government has ground to a halt at the hands of politicians more concerned about their party brand than making things better for Americans.

• Send me an e-mail.
• Read poetry at The Subterranean.
• Certainties and Uncertainties a chapbook by Hank Kalet, will be published in November by Finishing Line Press. It can be ordered here.
• Suburban Pastoral, a chapbook by Hank Kalet, available here.

The latest from The Tent City Project blog: “Ledger editorial gets it right on housing.”

We now officially have two budget plans on the table in New Jersey. Unfortunately, neither plan accepts the state’s fiscal and economic realities.

On the one side, we have the budget proposed by the governor, which continues with his goal of making life easier for those with money. The centerpiece of his plan is a 10 percent income tax cut that would help most those with the most.

On the other side, we have a nominally better Democratic plan that adds a small amount to programs for those in need and includes its own tax cut — a property tax credit that is likely to help those in the middle.

On both sides, however, we have a willful refusal to abide by the basics of smart budgeting.

Despite their wariness over Christie’s revenue figures, the Democrats’ budget would spend nearly all of the money the governor expects to come in, and they are relying on those estimates rather than cutting spending based on the less optimistic OLS forecast.

“It’s hypocritical,” state Sen. Kevin O’Toole (R-Essex) said. “They criticize the revenue estimates, then use them to build a budget.”

Senate Democrats also said they could produce $140 million in new savings, but restless Republicans questioned Sarlo when he said the money would come from more aggressive debt collections at the state Treasury and adjustments to several accounts that never spend their allotted money.

What do I mean by smart budgeting? As anyone who has dealt with their own budgets knows, you never use the most optimistic revenue forecasts. You always assume the worst. If revenue then comes in at the higher level, you have a surplus. If you shoot high and the numbers come in low, you have a shortfall and have to scramble — which is what we’ve been doing the last couple of years.

New Jersey residents deserve a more honest approach to the budget — and not the false bravado and pseudo-straighttalk we get from Christie or the Democrats.