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.

Taking to the road to help the hungry

Mobile food markets are a good idea, but flawed in the proposed form. Relying on the nonprofit sector once again to provide for the poor leaves the plan — and the poor who we are supposed to be helping — at the whim of donors. Hunger is society’s problem and efforts to address it should be paid for by the society as a whole, which means it should be a government program.

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.

Read their lips, no new taxes — on the rich; the rest of you, you’re on your own

The Republican plan for addressing the long-term deficit can be summed up this way: Leave the rich alone and pass along the costs to the rest of us.

As Ryan Grimm of the Huffington Post reports:

Rep. Paul Ryan (R-Wis.) said on Sunday that House Republicans would oppose President Barack Obama’s payroll tax cuts for both employers and employees, arguing that the policy had already failed to provide a sufficient boost to the economy. “It hasn’t worked,” Ryan said, suggesting the current temporary tax cut should be allowed to expire, which will amount to a 50 percent tax hike on workers making less than $106,000 per year.

He also said he opposes the president’s proposal to require millionaires to pay the same tax rate as the middle class, known as the Buffett plan. “Class warfare might make for good politics, but it makes for rotten economics,” Ryan said.

Again, to sum things up: Raise taxes on the middle class and oppose any hike in taxes for the rich. And gut so-called entitlement programs.

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.

With basketball season looking unlikely, I just might have to follow football

Kevin Durante said this weekend that the players are not giving in to the owners during negotiations, which means both aide have dug in and the lockout now in effect may just be a long one.

So, what’s a Knicks fan like me to when the weather turns cold? Well, the Jets, my boyhood team, won again today, and after last week’s stunning win (a blocked punt for a touchdown is one of sport’s truly great plays) I may have to start paying attention to football for the first time in 20 years.

I lost interest in football back then because I just didn’t have time to follow two sports and football was never in the same class for me as basketball and baseball.

But I do remember Namath throwing long distance to Richard Caster and, later, great receivers like Wesley Walker and Al Toon and if Mark Sanchez and company can make a run, I could be persuaded to care again.

So, with baseball ending for the season and basketball may never start this year, it’s time for the cheer: J-E-T-S, Jets. Jets, Jets!

Changing the conversation

John Nichols offers the most considered response to Barack Obama’s job speech on The Nation website, pointing out the president’s attempt to alter the terms of debate.

The rhetoric, he points out, was powerful, even if the plan was only functional in typical half-loaf Obama fashion.

The $253 billion in tax cuts he wants go mainly to working folks. The $194 billion in new spending is aimed at hiring incentives, infrastructure projects and other job-creating and retaining programs that the moment demands and that polls suggest Americans are more than willing to fund.

These might seem like rather large numbers in the current political climate, but they really aren’t. The $450 billion now on the table is only a little more than half the size of the original Obama stimulus, which was probably about half the size of what we needed. So $450 billion is a plus, but we have to face the troubling reality that it’s impact is likely to be small.

But, as Nichols points out, this speech shifts the terms of debate and puts the GOP in the position of defending a cut-our-way-out approach that most Americans understand is pure folly.