Author: hankkalet

Hank Kalet is a poet and freelance journalist. He is the economic needs reporter for NJ Spotlight, teaches journalism at Rutgers University and writing at Middlesex County College and Brookdale Community College. He writes a semi-monthly column for the Progressive Populist. He is a lifelong fan of the New York Mets and New York Knicks, drinks too much coffee and attends as many Bruce Springsteen concerts as his meager finances will allow. He lives in South Brunswick with his wife Annie.

Christie budget math does not add up

Gov. Chris Christie rode into office promising to put the state’s fiscal house in order. According to him, it’s mission accomplished.

According to everyone else — including one of the nation’s most influential bond rating agencies — the state fiscal house remains a mess.

S&P, the first major credit-rating agency to analyze Christie’s proposal, found little to praise: The budget relies on more one-shot revenue sources than last year; the $300 million surplus is too small; the hole in the pension fund is still too big; tax cuts are expected to drain $530 million, and revenue-growth estimates of more than 7 percent defy the conventional wisdom among economic analysts, especially since the state is under target for the first half of the current fiscal year.

“We believe revenues could rebound significantly in a strong economy,” an S&P analyst, John Sugden-Castillo, said. “(But) some of these revenue assumptions have been optimistic given the current growth the state has been experiencing. That could put pressure on the budget.”

Christie, portrayed by most as a straight-talking, no-nonsense leader, is really no different than the governors who have preceded him in office. While he slashed the budget, he also has relied on a tried and trued New Jersey budget-balancing trick: one-shot revenue/spending cut.

Remember, the governor has withheld paying money into the state’s pension funds (a short-term saving that will bite us on the ass down the road), used money set aside for climate change efforts to balance his budget and raided urban enterprise money.

This year’s sleight-of-hand involves a shockingly positive revenue outlook, based on the notion that the state is out of the woods even as it deals with a 9 percent unemployment rate and towns continue to lose tax ratables.

But they are necessary to his larger political and policy agendas — the proposed income tax cut (which will primarily benefit the rich) and a generally positive message designed to buttress his re-election campaign next year.

The state needs tax reform, but the income tax is not the problem, or not in the way Christie paints it. What we need is property tax reform that shifts away from property and sales taxes to income taxes along with an aggressive reorganization of local and county government to reduce the number of taxing entities in New Jersey.

Putting that on the table would take real courage. Promising a tax cut and pretending the recession is over for budgetary purposes does not.

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.

Jeremy Lin and the great demographic shift

There are a host of ways to view the sudden stardom of New York Knicks point guard Jeremy Lin:

As a great underdog tale;
As a triumph of talent over stereotype;
As a cultural shockwave that’s got many sportswriters tongue tied.

But the one storyline not being discussed is Lin as point man for a larger demographic shift that already is making its presence felt in youth leagues across the country.

Lin is a phenomenon precisely because of a lack of American-born Asian players, which makes his sudden arrival on the scene such a story. Plenty of players have come out of nowhere in the past — John Starks comes to mind — but Lin is the only Asian-American in the league at a point in American history when Asian-Americans are making up a greater and greater portion of the population.

And his athletic prowess comes as we are seeing a cultural shift in the way Asian-Americans are portrayed in the media. It wasn’t that long ago when Asians — whether Chinese, Korean or Indian — were portrayed solely as shopkeepers or academic nerds. (These stereotypes still exist, but they have grown more nuanced — Raj on The Big Bang Theory is both a projection of the stereotype and a critic of it.)

Today, we get the geek and shopkeeper, but also American spies, cops, mobsters, political operatives and other staples is American TV and film.

Lin breaks through another wall, however, and is likely part of a shift that will make his ethnic background a nonissue in the not-too-distant future.

I say this because I am sitting at youth league basketball game on a Saturday morning, watching to teams of third- and fourth-graders run up and down the court. The teams are about 40 percent Asian (South Brunswick, where I live, is about 20 percent Asian), with the best players on both teams — the most skilled at dribbling and passing, with the best court sense and athletic grace — being Asian Indians.

This is an obviously positive development, and one that should surprise no one. Talent has nothing to do with race or ethnicity, despite what sportswriters too often think. The kids who grow up on the court and work the hardest are the ones most likely to excel

Jeremy Lin, Chinese-American, Harvard graduate, undrafted journeyman, is proof of this. His novelty is both important and temporary in the best of ways.

The return of preemptive war

Iran today drew its own line in the sand, promising to “take pre-emptive action against perceived foes if it felt its national interests were threatened,” according to a report in The New York Times.

The Iranian stance, referred to in the story as bellicose (without attribution, as though that was an objective fact, is both a troubling indication of the escalation of tensions between the Persian nation and the West and the obvious fallout of American actions and war theory dating back to the Bush presidency.

Don’t get me wrong. The Iranian regime poses a dangerous threat to the stability of the region and to the world economy. But the war drums have been beating far more loudly here in the United States than in Iran.

What is striking about this, however, is not just the rising tensions, which were expected. It is the rhetoric offered by Mohammed Hejazi, deputy head of the Iranian armed forces:

Our strategy now is that if we feel our enemies want to endanger Iran’s national interests, and want to decide to do that, we will act without waiting for their actions.

The language easily could have come from the mouth of American officials circa 2002, as we prepared to invade Iraq. During a 2002 commencement speech at West Point, Bush outlined what we now call the Bush Doctrine — a defense of pre-emptive war:

Our security will require all Americans to be forward-looking and resolute, to be ready for preemptive action when necessary to defend our liberty and to defend our lives.

The similarities should not be underplayed. Critics of the Bush doctrine — myself included — have said since its unveiling that it would give license to other nations acting in the same way. And now, we have the threat of Iran — which is, in many ways, just reacting to the international community’s threats of sanctions and possible military action — using the Bush doctrine to attack Israel.

This only will lead to a further escalation of rhetoric, with Israel thumping its chest and the U.S. and Britain chiming in. How this can be viewed as good for anyone is beyond me, but this is what we have wrought.

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.

Abortion: TV’s dirtiest word

Abortion is the eighth dirty word.

Remember the George Carlin skit, “The Seven Dirty Words You Can’t Say on Television”? The words — shit, piss, fuck, cunt, cocksucker, motherfucker and tits — were considered so profane that the Supreme Court ruled in 1978 that the FCC had the right to ban them from broadcast television and radio.

The skit makes its first appearance on Carlin’s 1972 album Class Clown at a time when public mores are in flux and a massive political backlash is brewing.

It also is the year in which Maude Findlay has an abortion.

That two-part episode, broadcast before Roe v. Wade, stands as a rare moment on commercial TV — a thoughtful exploration of the impacts of unwanted pregnancy, the options available and a decision to abort. occasionally, TV has gone to this well, telling the story of the unwanted pregnancy, but in nearly every case abortion was removed from the discussion.

There is an interesting contrast playing out now on television, with two shows introducing unwanted pregnancies into their narratives in very different ways. On Grey’s Anatomy, Christina Yang has an abortion and sticks to her guns despite what it does to her marriage — a gutsy move, especially when you contrast it with Desperate Housewives.

On that show, Julie Mayer, daughter of Terry Hatcher’s Susan character, shows up from grad school six months pregnant, which precludes any discussion of abortion and allows the show to avoid wading into the controversy.

This is a cop-out from both a storytelling standpoint, and from a political one and just underscores how politically challenging Maude was and how timid TV remains.

Some of Carlin’s dirty words have made it onto broadcast TV, but the abortion issue remains too hot for most TV shows to touch.

An interesting proposal on marriage equality

A column in today’s NY Times business section offers what I’ll call a libertarian approach to the same-sex marriage debate — remove marriage from the law completely and call all unions “domestic partnerships” or “civil unions.” Leave the word marriage out of law, with individuals able to call their unions what they believe best describes them.

It is not a perfect compromise — marriage carries a cultural weight that is difficult to ignore– but it gets to the crux of what is, in reality, a religious argument, which means this is a First Amendment debate.

Religious liberty, which is the new call to arms on the right, demands that religions be left free to function without religious interference. It also, to be clear, demands that religion keep out of the affairs of government. The state cannot tell the Catholic Church whom to marry; the church, by the same logic, cannot tell the state what unions to sanction or what to call them.

The various marriage-equality bills out there recognize this. Religious conservatives, however, refuse to. My message to them: Back off and shut up.