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.

Obama and the public-financing quandary

Barack Obama is the first presidential candidate to officially opt out of the federal public campaign-finance system — which a New York Times analysis paints as “the most critical threat to its survival.”

But is it?

The story outlines some history, but ignores the reality of the last two presidential races — campaigns in which the major-party candidates went private during the primaries, building up huge warships and spending oodles of cash before opting in after the party conventions.

And the story’s most damning quote —

“Obama’s decision may not be the death knell of public financing, but it certainly is close to it,” said Anthony J. Corrado Jr., a campaign finance expert and professor of government at Colby College. “Public financing has become a system of last resort, rather than the jewel of the campaign finance system. Rather than being a source of funds, candidates accept public money kicking and screaming.”

— is really a comment full of nuance that deserved more context. Its implication is that the system is not working, that candidates only participate because they believe they must.

In fact, the story’s most significant comment comes at the end:

“The reality is that the amount of money that comes from the government is not enough to run a modern presidential campaign,” said Larry Makinson, a consultant to the Center for Responsive Politics, a Washington group that tracks campaign donations. “The amount Obama has raised from small contributors has been unprecedented. There has never been an infusion of small dollar donors like this.

“And,” Mr. Makinson said, “he got there by snubbing the campaign finance system.”

Obama’s arguments — that his fundraising apparatus, by collecting millions of small donations, acts as a shadow public-financing system; that

the public financing apparatus was broken and that his Republican opponents were masters at “gaming” the system and would spend “millions and millions of dollars in unlimited donations” smearing him.

— is both fact-based and disingenuous. It is doubtful, after all, that he would have opted out if he did not believe he could out raise his opponent by a significant margin.

And, as the Times notes in its main bar, the GOP’s “527 advantage” may not materialize this year.

It also is doubtful that John McCain would be making such a big deal out of this if he wasn’t having such difficulty raising money himself. After all, McCain has been trying to play both sides of this issue for months, taking out a loan to keep his primary campaign going — using the promise of public funds as collateral — and then backing away when he appears to win the nomination and set his financial house in order.

The issue here has less to do with the candidates anyway than with the system itself. If we want it to work, we need to expand it dramatically and provide it with a legitimate and recurring source of funding. We need to provide free television and radio time to help reduce the costs and we need to look at 527s — independent groups that can spend whatever they want — to see if they can be policed without infringing on their First Amendment rights.

Email me at grassroots at comcast dot net.

The budget dance continues

The Assembly Budget Committee has released the newly revised state budget — a spending plan negotiated between the leadership of the two houses of the state Legislature and the governor — but the state Senate panel is not ready to move.

So the dance continues.

It remains likely that a budget will be approved before the July 1 deadline, averting a reprise of the 2006 state government shutdown, but not without some serious battles occurring.

The budget is a mixed bag. While some of the aid to New Jersey hospitals has been restored, money for Muhlenberg in Union County has not and the medical center could still close.

Tax rebates have been cut for higher-income New Jerseyans, as well, and there remains no agreement on how to finance aid for school construction.

So the dance continues.

The dance, of course, and the difficulty of crafting a spending plan that is fair to everyone in the state demonstrates how badly off the tracks the state’s fiscal reform effort has gone. After the 2006 state shutdown, the governor ordered a special joint session of the Legislature that was supposed to craft a plan to alter the way government works and rebuild state finances that were teetering on a cracked and disintegrating fiscal foundation.

Some of the early proposals were amazingly far-reaching — a base-closing-style commission that would look at municipal consolidation and shared services and recommend mergers to the Legislature and governor, who would then have final say; a state comptroller with extensive powers to investigate state and local finances; changes in school financing and administration — but in the end most were either watered down or abandoned.

Other proposals — the governor’s highly questionable plan to leverage Turnpike and Parkway tolls to pay down the state debt — also ran ashore.

So we stand in the same spot as we did two years ago, the poisonous and partisan culture in Trenton making it impossible for the vast majority of the 120 members of the state Legislature to see beyond their own narrow constituencies and the status quo and make the kind of changes that truly could be called reform.

We remain wedded to the outmoded property tax system, convinced that rebates are the only way to lighten the tax burden on homeowners. We refuse to consider an expansion of the state income and corporate taxes or significant revenue sharing as a way to reduce the burden on property taxpayers (raise more from income taxes to pay for education, a state responsibility under the state constitution).

We remain stuck with 566 municipalities in a state of 8 million people, stuck with 611 school districts and another 200 or so taxing districts (county governments, fire districts, etc.) that do little more than create administrative redundancies while doing everything they can to protect their own little fiefdoms.

I’m not arguing that bigger is better — just look at the mess that the cities of Trenton and Newark have become over the years — and it can be legitimately argued that some small towns have the resources and land mass to manage on their own (Cranbury comes to mind).

But towns like Jamesburg, Helmetta and Spotswood, many in Bergen County and along the Jersey Shore, and dozens of others (the two Princetons, the Hopewells and Pennington come to mind) should be looked at seriously to see if merging them either with each other or with another neighbor (Jamesburg into Monroe, for instance, or Hightstown into East Windsor) might result in tax savings, better or expanded services or both. There are 70 municipal governments in Bergen County — an absurd number given the physical size of the county and its population.

We continue to allow legislators to skirt constitutional rules designed to limit their ability to borrow money, which were designed to ensure that borrowing was used only for legitimate longterm expenses (infrastructure improvements, for instance) and not to balance the books.

And we continue to put off our pension and health care obligations waiting for that time bomb to explode.

By we I mean not just the state Legislature and governor but municipal and county officials, school administrators, taxpayers, voters — everyone seeking to protect their own small piece of turf at the expense of the larger public good.

I could continue, but why bother. No one seems to be listening anyway.

Email me at grassroots at comcast dot net.

Battlefield may clinch MOM battle

The state Department of Environmental Protection’s Division of Parks and Forestry has apparently given ” thumbs down to the Monmouth Junction route’s proposed crossing” of the Monmouth Battleground State Park, according to the Asbury Park Press.

A May letter from the division, the paper says,

cites adverse effects from commuter trains on the park — which is crossed by rails where a freight train runs — and from more drivers using Route 522 to reach a proposed station in Manalapan near the park.

The effort to upgrade the Monmouth Junction line across the preserved battlefield could be prevented by federal officials, now that the DEP has rendered an opinion about the effects, a prominent historian said.

“They can’t proceed without the permission of the New Jersey Historic Sites Council, and if they approve, the National Parks Service would not approve,” said Garry Wheeler Stone, Monmouth Battlefield State Park historian.

The Post and Press will have more on this story as it develops.

Email me at grassroots at comcast dot net.

An oily maneuver

Ah, that John McCain. He’s such an environmentalist. I mean, only someone committed to protecting the environment, to safeguarding our oceans and beaches, would support an end to a federal ban on oil drilling off the coast, right?

In fact, a straight-talking, maverick Republican would be willing to buck his party, even the president, to take such a stand, right?

It couldn’t be that McCain has engaged

in an obvious attempt to pander to voters’ disgust with high gas prices as well as to grease his way with the more conservative Republican base that believes any oil well is a good oil well

as The Star-Ledger points out.

McCain and Bush tout drilling as a cure for high gas prices and dependence on foreign oil. And if it actually were, perhaps even ocean-loving Jerseyans could be seduced into allowing oil rigs offshore. But drilling offers neither short-term nor long-term relief.

But then, this is not about oil prices or the environment. As with his dopey gas-tax holiday idea, this is about votes. The straight-talking McCain and his campaign apparently believe that voters will ignore these facts, as outlined by the Ledger.

End the drilling ban today and it would take at least 10 years for oil to begin flowing. There would be zero effect on gasoline pump prices today and for years in the future.

Moreover, when the oil did begin flowing, there would not be enough of it to meet America’s needs. Federal estimates are that off-coast oil deposits total about 16 billion barrels — an amount equal to only about two years’ worth of estimated national consumption in 2018.

Of course, voters saw through his gas-tax holiday and are likely to see this policy announcement for the empty the pandering it is.

(Check out Jimmy Marulies’ editorial cartoon in The Record today.)

Email me at grassroots at comcast dot net.