Author: hankkalet

I read Tom Moran’s column this morning on NJ.com with a weary sense that I’d read it all before. The argument, which was pretty much on target, was that the governor and e Democrats are doing the state a disservice by pushing a fiscally irresponsible tax cut that will make a lot of people happy heading into a state election year, but will have disastrous effects down the road,

The argument alludes to a state history in which all the players dismissed reality, crafting fiscal policies that ignored the anticipated impacts for short-term gain at the polls. This is what created the sense of deja vu I felt.

To understand where we are, we need to remember where we’ve been. In 1990, shortly after he was sworn in as governor, Jim Florio proposed what was then the largest tax hike in state history. It was designed to plug a looming deficit and address an anticipated state Supreme Court ruling that would force the governor and Legislature to equalize spending for urban school districts.

The response was a tax revolt, which ultimately led to the election of Christie Whitman and a massive income tax cut that was paid for via a revaluation of the state’s pension plans, which in turn was designed to allow the state to shrink its payment obligation.

Jim McGreevey doubled down on Whitman’s sleight-of-hand, with an assist from a Legislature willing to boost benefits without any thought being given to paying the bills.

Richard Codey and Jon Corzine both took small steps to fix the imbalance — very small steps — before Christie came in and used the imbalance as a political cudgel. He forced reforms — some of which were needed — but also made it clear he wasn’t going to keep making payments. That has resulted in a widening of the gap between obligations and funding and a fiscal disaster not too far off down the road.

The problem here — and Moran is as guilty as anyone following this — is that we have defined the pension problem as one of payouts and not one of funding. Public workers, under his paradigm, are the cause, their too-generous benefits bankrupting the state.

Had someone had the guts 17 years ago to call Whitman on her shell game — and then to hold her successors to the same standard — we might be having a very different discussion.

Instead, we have a governor who attacks public workers and wants to cut taxes for the better off in the state, a Democratic majority interested only in re-election and voters as shortsighted as the politicians about whom they endlessly complain.

The Obama administration — and a large number of politicians from both parties — have bought into the lie that nuclear power is a clean and cheap alternative to to oil and coal.

Nuke plants, they argue, generate loads of power without pumping greenhouse gases into the atmosphere — which is an accurate if very limited argument.

Nuke plants require massive government subsidies and, more importantly from an environmental standpoint, they still pollute, though not in the manner in which we’re used to discussing. The mining for uranium, which fuels the plants, is far from clean. And, as a ruling today points out, disposing of the plants’ waste remains a problem.

WASHINGTON — After a legal challenge from the Christie administration, a federal appeals court on Friday threw out a rule that allows nuclear power plants to store radioactive waste at reactor sites for up to 60 years after a plant shuts down.

In a unanimous ruling, a three-judge panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia said the Nuclear Regulatory Commission did not fully evaluate the risks associated with long-term storage of nuclear waste.

The court said on-site storage has been “optimistically labeled” as temporary, but has stretched on for decades.

Nuclear waste — spent fuel rods — are radioactive and stored in outdoor pools, which can overheat and catch fire, as they did last year in Japan. Their disposal must be factored into any discussion, which makes nuclear power far less appealing — or it should.

The reality is there is no silver bullet for our energy needs. Every source has its flaws, some greater and more dangerous or costly than others. Sacrifice will be needed, with the most logical sacrifice requiring us to cut back on our consumption.

The quote of the day today comes from Robert Scheer, who was speaking on the weekly Left, Right & Center show out of California. Scheer makes the case for ending the attacks on public workers and building up workers everywhere — a case that used to be a staple of the Democrats’ rallying cry.

I don’t like the demonization of public workers. I think that it’s just jealousy. What I think we should do is improve the condition for all workers so that the condition of public workers with their decent retirement does not seem so exceptional.

• 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.

Mitt Romney picked up on something President Barack Obama said this morning and he’s been running with it — as he should. That’s because the president’s contention that the private sector is keeping up its end of the job-creation bargain bears little resemblance to what the vast majority of Americans are feeling economically.

During a Friday morning press conference, the president tried to take last month’s awful job numbers and spin them to make them look a bit better by blaming the lack of real movement in the economy on Congressional inertia. Just 69,000 jobs were added to the American economy in May, about 82,000 in the private sector with a lost of about 13,000 in the public sector. So, yes, public sector cuts have been a huge drag on our economy.

But 82,000 jobs is not exactly the “solid pace” the president praised. Romney is right to criticize the president on this, though he is offering the wrong prescription for our ailing economy. Tax cuts and cuts in government spending are only going to drive the U.S. economy off a cliff, where it will fall into the same kind of contraction that Great Britain is currently experiencing.

What we need to see is a more robust stimulus plan — more robust than anything the president has envisioned at any point during his presidency. The fact is that many economists in early 2009 were critical of the president’s stimulus, saying it was only about half as large as it should have been and too focused on tax cuts rather than on public works projects, aid to states and municipalities and a massive expansion of the unemployment insurance program. Each of those efforts would created immediate momentum in the economy by a) putting construction workers to work building roads and affordable housing, b) keeping people in the public sector employed, and c) putting money in average people’s pockets, money they then would spend.

Instead, the president wasted the opportunity by offering up a weak plan that was made weaker by Congressional horse-trading.

• 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.

Natasha Tretheway has a sense of history. Her poetry collections explore the way language is used to explain and obscure the complicated relationship we have to the past. And, at a time when language has been so badly debased, this willingness to examine its failings is needed more than ever.

Tretheway, appointed national poet laureate yesterday, is 46 and of mixed race — a fact that is central to her writing.

In a story in The New York Times, Charles McGrath wrote that Trethewey’s “great theme is memory, and in particular the way private recollection and public history sometimes intersect but more often diverge.”

As one of her poems explains, Ms. Trethewey is the product of a union that was still a crime in Mississippi when her parents married: her mother was black and her father was white. Years later, after her mother’s death, she came across her own birth certificate and saw that the line for the race of her mother says, “colored,” the race of her father, “Canadian.”

“That’s how language works — how we change and rewrite ourselves,” she said.

I can’t think of a better definition for the poetic mission than that.

• 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.