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.

Delaying tactic:Budget puts off necessary reforms

I am trapped in the office, so I didn’t hear the governor’s address. But I have read it and have some thoughts — some of which should be familiar to those who have read my columns over the past year.

The proposed budget offers some good — $300 million to cover an expansion of the state’s earned income tax credit, a nominal increase in aid to schools and towns, money for stem cell and autism research, a reduction in the state workforce through attrition and his call to end “Christmas tree items,” or those spending items tacked on to a finished product without discussion. The rest of the budget address, however, glosses over a single fact: that the governor and state Legislature failed horribly in their attempts to reform state government.

The governor speaks of “$9 million for the new comptroller’s office to root out waste, prevent fraud and reduce spending.” But the comptroller will have few real powers.

He speaks of the new property tax credits — which will offers savings this year, but are unsustainable beyond this year as they are currently constituted.

He speaks of a new $20 million consolidation fund “to provide meaningful incentives for schools and local governments to share services and reduce costs,” but doesn’t acknowledge that the consolidation panel is just advisory and unlikely to result in much real streamlining.

The biggest question mark, however, remains his commitment to “asset monetarization,” essentially using state assets to generate short-term cash. He makes an interesting case, arguing that it represents the only way the state can raise the kind of revenue necessary to provide the programs desired while also offering property tax relief.

The one option that is new and that we are now studying is asset monetization. It’s something that has been implemented in other states and, I can assure you, successfully around the globe. I think it’s fair to say that most governmental entities across the country, led by Democrats and Republicans, are examining its feasibility and appropriateness.

The economic potential from restructuring the state’s interest in our asset portfoliois too significant to ignore, whether that asset is the Turnpike, the lottery, naming rights, air rights, or whatever.

Potentially, asset monetization could reset the state’s finances by dramatically reducing our debt burden, and consequently reducing debt service.

Monetization could free up as much as a billion dollars or more in every year’s budget — long into the future.

Sounds good on the surface, but the potential pitfalls — loss of control over the “asset” (toll hikes and maintenance on the Turnpike and Parkway, for instance) — are hard to quantify. The issue remains how we account for the hidden costs and the nonmonetary costs. The governor address this issue this way:

Make no mistake – with any proposal, we would insist on protective conditions.

If we can’t ensure that the high standards of operations and maintenance will continue, we won’t proceed.

If we can’t ensure public safety will be maintained, we won’t proceed.

If we can’t ensure the state will maintain oversight in the governance of the asset, we won’t proceed.

If we can’t ensure that price increases will be predictable and reasonable, we won’t proceed.

I’m not feeling any more confident about the proposal, nor am I convinced that the choices the governor is taking off the table — income tax increases and streamlining of government — are as unpalatable as he thinks.

A broader-based progressive income tax coupled with a significant reduction in property taxes, forced municipal mergers and regionalization, elimination of county government taken together could go a long way toward fixing our problems.

In the end, “asset monetarization” may still need to be considered — I hope not — but at least we will have forced a reconsideration of New Jersey government before being forced down that path. To sell the Turnpike first will only put off the necessary reforms.

South Brunswick Post, The Cranbury Press
The Blog of South Brunswick
The Cranbury Press Blog

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No duh

Why was the little dust up between the Clinton and Obama camps the other day such a big story? Isn’t this the kind of thing that usually happens during a presidential campaign? Did we really think that everyone was going to make nice when the stakes were so high?

South Brunswick Post, The Cranbury Press
The Blog of South Brunswick
The Cranbury Press Blog

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The ever-changing blogosphere, II

Katha Pollitt, writing on TPM Cafe, adds to something I wrote last week about blogs, political campaigns and the world of journalism in the wake of the Edwards/blogger fiasco.

As I said then, the blogosphere is a schizophrenic place, with many bloggers trying to function as political and partisan activists, political journalists and media critics all at once. The problem, however, is that the journalist and critic must remain independent, while the partisan activist is by nature and definition partisan.

These worlds collided in the Edwards campaign when the candidate hired the authors behind two lefty/feminist blogs — Pandagon and Shakespeare’s Sister — that use some salty and extreme language to make their points about the Christian right. The blogs are often sarcastic and bombastic, but funny and provide the kind of hard-headed lefty analysis missing from too many op-ed pages and cable new programs.

The controversy, it would seem, was inevitable from the moment they were brought on board. Edwards, after all, “is running for president, not king of the blogosphere.”

He wants — he needs — the votes of people who have never looked at a blog in their lives, who are deeply religious, culturally staid, and easily offended in about a thousand ways. Would those unemployed mill workers Edwards likes to talk about see Amanda’s “vulgarity” as populist and fun? or as smartypants elitism? How many Catholic undecideds think that joke about the Virgin Mary was funny and/or a sly critique of sexism in the church versus how many see it as rude and insulting, or would think so, after they’d heard it a thousand times thanks to William Donohue? It’s all very well to dismiss as outmoded people who respond poorly to obscenities and dirty jokes about religion. Fact is, there are a lot of them. A candidate would be out of his mind to alienate them over a staffing matter.

That said, the ultimate importance of the controversy was not whether Edwards was strong enough to stand up to the right or whether the campaign dissed the blogs. It is that it highlighted the problems that are likely to crop up more and more as the blogosphere grows and matures, creating more and more tension between its journalist/critic side and its partisan/activist side.

The blogosphere resembles, in many ways, the early days of the newspaper, when they were all partisan and biased and scandalous and read by the kind of people with which the elite wanted nothing to do.

For now, however, I’ll end this with a comment from Pollitt’s TPM post, a bit of advice to bloggers who value their independence:

To me, being a writer and being a political operative are very different things, and ought to remain so. A writer should be free to say what she believes, and the reader should know that the writer has that freedom. That is where the honor of a writer lies.The converse is, you can’t expect a politician, or the voters, to disregard your paper (or electronic) trail. They don’t care about your honor, they just want to get elected.

South Brunswick Post, The Cranbury Press
The Blog of South Brunswick
The Cranbury Press Blog

E-mail me by clicking here.

In the red

If an actuarial report issued today is accurate, the state is in far worse financial shape than anyone appears willing to acknowledge.

The annual actuarial report on the Public Employees Retirement System, the state’s second largest retirement program, shows the total amount of pension benefits for which no money has been salted away soared from $4.5 billion to $7.2 billion as of last June 30.

Filling the gap will cost taxpayers dearly.

According to the report, the state’s contribution in the budget Gov. Jon Corzine is scheduled to unveil tomorrow should be $459 million, compared with the $192 million the current state budget included for the fund.

Local governments, who are paying a total of $218 million into the fund this year, should pay $491 million in their upcoming budgets, the report shows.

The dire news should lend momentum and a sense of moral urgency to the tax reform debate, but is more likely to enflame the current anger directed at public employees over what is seen as extravagant benefits.

There is no doubt that state employees receive top-notch health and retirement plans, along with very generous vacation policies. In the current climate and given the current fiscal mess, it only seems right that employees contribute to the solution with changes in future benefits.

The pension obligation that has been racked up int eh past, however, should not be part of the discussion. It is part of a promise made to state and local employees in past contracts, a moral obligation if you will, and it is incumbent upon every elected official in the state to find a way to ensure that these payments are made.

That’s why tax reform is so crucial. We need to restructure both state and local government to reduce costs and find a better, fairer way to pay for it and one that will be recurring and protected from the kind of politically expedient decisions made by the Whitman and McGreevey administrations to balance their budgets without raising taxes.

South Brunswick Post, The Cranbury Press
The Blog of South Brunswick
The Cranbury Press Blog

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Conspiracy theories

Sometimes the shortest analyses are the best. Bob Rixon deconstructs, in a few words, Sen. Hillary Clinton’s offhanded smear of an unnamed Democratic opponent:

“To underscore a point, some people may be running who tell you we don’t face a real threat from terrorism,” she said. “I’m not one of them. We have serious enemies who want to do us serious harm.”

Rixon’s critique:

That’s a Cheneyism, the vague, off-handed smearish comment that holds up a frame with no photo in it. Hmm, who could she mean? Who’s the mystery idiot?

Clinton, of course, has been a round a while and knows how to play this skunky game — her “vast right-wing conspiracy” comment during her husband’s presidency may have been based in a level of truth, but was a vast overstatement designed to undercut criticism.

South Brunswick Post, The Cranbury Press
The Blog of South Brunswick
The Cranbury Press Blog

E-mail me by clicking here.