The Star-Ledger reports today that health care premiums in New Jersey are growing faster than wages. I doubt anyone is surprised.
What is surprising, however, is that no one quoted in the story mentions real health care reform, instead focusing on reigning in costs as if doing so in a vacuum will have any real impact.
I did three miles with a cold and a bad calf wishing I was at home sleeping.
iPod: The Hold Steady, Stay Positive
I thought that Alan Greenspan was infallible. Wasn’t that the conventional wisdom all these years? For most of the political and journalistic power elite, this is the equivalent of finding out there is no Santa Claus.
on Thursday, almost three years after stepping down as chairman of the Federal Reserve, a humbled Mr. Greenspan admitted that he had put too much faith in the self-correcting power of free markets and had failed to anticipate the self-destructive power of wanton mortgage lending.
“Those of us who have looked to the self-interest of lending institutions to protect shareholders’ equity, myself included, are in a state of shocked disbelief,” he told the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform.
Shocked like Capt. Renault, perhaps? I mean, shouldn’t someone with Greenspan’s credentials have known better than to trust the pyramid scheme that the finance industry created.
At least he is now agreeing that “the multitrillion-dollar market for credit default swaps, instruments originally created to insure bond investors against the risk of default, needed to be restrained.”
“This modern risk-management paradigm held sway for decades,” he said. “The
whole intellectual edifice, however, collapsed in the summer of last year.”
I’m not sure how I feel about this decision, which nullified a state plan to required the 89 rural communities without police departments to pay the state for State Police coverage.
The plan, which would have cost the towns $12.6 million (a sliver of the $87 million the state says it costs to police those towns), was part of a larger effort by the state to make smaller communities understand the actual costs of continuing to function as independent municipalities. The state’s argument has been that state law enforcement has allowed these towns to receive police protection without having to pay for it — unlike towns with their own forces or those that may have contracts with neighboring communities.
The cost to the state is relatively minor, but the new cost in small towns would have meant higher property tax bills.
The problem, as I see it, is not the governor’s plan — which seems fair when you consider that residents of Rocky Hill, for instance, pay for State Police services out of their state income tax, the same as I do, but they get to use state cops as their primary law enforcement option. I have to pay additional money for local police.
At the same time, we all rely on the State Police for a lot of things, and these small towns have been operating in this way for years and years — so this is not the easiest of issues to resolve.
The issue raises some basic questions about the vast number of towns in this state and whether we should be pushing them or forcing them to band together as larger communities so that services can be provided and provided using an economy of scale.
The questions of police protection, of library spending (i.e., Jamesburg), recreation programs, school funding, etc., have to be addressed within a broader context. We can’t keep dealing with each of them in a vacuum.
My eulogy for Honey is this week’s Dispatches. My sister said it made her cry.
