It was a beautiful morning — and a beautiful day, really — and I took the sneakers outside and hit the pavement. Three miles in a very slow 30 minutes (ugh!), but I ran then lifted and managed four days this week. Total mileage for the week: 13.
Gov. Chris Christie’s budget speech yesterday has been given high marks for toughness — even as level-headed a columnist as The Star-Ledger’s Tom Moran bought the governor’s reform rhetoric. But was this speech about reform? Was it about rebuilding the state’s fiscal ship and setting it sail once again?
Budgets, as we wrote in our editorial this week, are about policy. Money underscores the priorities. Jon Corzine, for instance, offered budgets that were essentially progressive — expanding the earned-income tax credit and children’s health care, for instance.
Chris Christie’s budget, on the other hand, is a fairly straightforward example of the Grover Norquist, anti-government approach — given a push by the state’s fiscal woes. Consider the cuts — to education, to municipal aid, to higher education, the earned-income tax credit, unemployment insurance, along with a tax cut for those making $400,000 or more.
Christie is, based on the numbers, a rather doctrinaire conservative.
Christie knew what he was doing when he crafted his speech, using a series of conservative memes that have become ingrained in our political culture to push his critics back on their heels and to prepare make it seem as though anyone who opposes his so-called reforms is part of the problem.
The defenders of the status quo have already begun to yell and scream. They will try to demonize me. They will seek to divide us rather than unite us. But even they know in their hearts, if not yet in their minds – it is time for a change.
The language is key. The governor is the one doing the demonizing, getting out in front of the train and beating his critics to the punch. It is not the governor who is yelling and screaming and dividing, but the teachers’ union, the “defenders of the status quo.”
Some are saying, by their choice of policies, that we should descend further into debt and deficit, and risk driving more people out of the state with “temporary” tax increases that always turn out to be permanent.
Some are saying — the straw man, the critic without a face, the one that cannot be defended. Who makes up this “some”?
No one is arguing for more debt and there is significant debate over the accuracy and reliability of the studies showing this massive outflux, as the governor calls it. And not all critics are defenders of the status quo.
Let’s be honest here. The state’s budget problems, as the governor acknowledges in passing, are at least 20 years in the making. They are bipartisan, created by a series of politicians unwilling to speak clearly and frankly: Since the massive overreaction that greeted Gov. Jim Florio’s tax increase in 1990, New Jersey politicians have been tax averse. At the same time, they have been unwilling to say no to anyone, offering often necessary services and putting their cost on the credit card.
If you want services, you must pay for them. That’s what our elected officials should have been saying for the last two decades. If you’re not willing to pay, be prepared to give up the services you have come to value. It is a simple equation.
So Christie is not wrong when he says the bill has come due. But his rhetoric — his claim to be the fiscal avenger — rings hollow. He appears less interested in fiscal health than in breaking the backs of the public employee unions, more concerned with shrinking not only state government, but local government and shifting much of its responsibilities to the private sector.
Christie’s tought talk masks what I see as bad faith. He is not speaking frankly, but offering the kind of false promises offered by his predecessors. I can cut government down to size without affecting services, without affecting the quality of your children’s education, the length of your commute, the freshness of your air. And if these things are affected, it is not his fault or the fault of his brave budget-cutting administration. It is the fault of the New Jersey Education Association and the other public sector unions.
Christie talks tough, but he isn’t being frank or honest. Honesty demands that he acknowledge the devastating impacts of his budget cuts, of the sacrifices he so blithely says are being spread evenly and fairly. It demands that he take responsibility for the fallout.
Alex Chilton, leader of the influential and edgy power pop group, Big Star, and the ’60s pop-soul band The Boxtops, has died.
Chilton’s music is an underrated, but important piece of rock history, an influence on bands ranging from the Replacements to R.E.M.
While Big Star’s best years were in the past, the music will live on.
Our editorial this week is on Gov. Chris Christie’s budget address this afternoon. The budget he has prepared, as I said yesterday, is focused on deficit reduction but also on the fairly standard conservative budgetary tropes — low taxes, spending cuts, assaults on public employee unions. It is, in a word, a disaster.
David Leonhardt writes about the phenomenon that Christie and his conservative allies have fallen prey to — a growing disconnect between taxes and the services we demand. Leonhard is writing about the federal budget, which can remain in deficit. But what he says about the federal budget goes for the states — and New Jersey — as well.
As a society gets richer, its tax rates tend to rise.
This idea is known as Wagner’s Law, named for the 19th-century economist who came up with it. Citizens of richer societies generally prefer more government services, Adolf Wagner explained. With their basic needs met, they want a military to protect them, good schools for their children, comfortable retirement for the elderly, medical care even when it isn’t profitable and a strong social safety net.
Sure enough, the United States followed this path for most of the last century. In 1900, federal taxes amounted to just 2 percent of gross domestic product. By 2000, the share had risen to 21 percent.
Over the last couple of decades, though, we have repealed Wagner’s Law — or, more to the point, only partly repealed it. Taxes are no longer rising. They fell to 18 percent of G.D.P. in 2008 and, because of the recession, to a 60-year low of 15.1 percent last year.
Yet our desire for government services just keeps growing. We added a prescription drug benefit to Medicare. Farm subsidies are sacrosanct. Social Security is the third rail of politics.
This disconnect is, far and away, the main reason for our huge budget problems. Yes, the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, the recession and the stimulus have all added to the deficit. But they are minor issues in the long run. By 2020, government spending is projected to equal 26 percent (and rising) of G.D.P., mostly because of Medicare and Social Security. Taxes are on pace to equal just 19 percent.
New Jersey matches this pattern. Following Gov. Jim Florio’s attempt in 1990 to raise taxes to address what then considered a huge shortfall, the state’s politicians have been been gunshy about taxes and taxpayers have been only too happy to encourage them, while also reaping the benefits of expanding and improving services.
We are now dealing with the fallout, and it’s not going to be pretty.
Grassroots column on the so-called Coffee Party Movement is up at The Progressive Populist.
