Hank Kalet

The key, ultimately, is getting five a game from the starters and taking advantage of Cardinal mistakes. Mistakes, though, are likely to be few — LaRussa’s teams always play the right way.

I like the Mets’ balance and I have to wonder about the Cards’ bullpen, which did very well against the Padres. But the Padres were the weakest offensive team in the playoffs. The Mets were the best in the NL.

I’m confident, but I am a Mets fan. So, I’m always on edge.

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

A strike out of Albert Pujols? Good start.

othing from the Mets in teh first, but then Tommy gets another three — six up, six down.

Now the four, five, six guys.

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

Jim Testa of Jersey Beat offers a pretty good summary of the failings of the Menendez campaign this year — in a senate race that he should have been winning (in the polls, anyway) by 10 points. I mean this is a so-called blue state, right? And there is a concensus that George Bush is doing a bad job and that his war is a debacle and Tom Kean still supports it — and yet Sen. Menendez has been unable to take advantage.

There always were some questions about Menendez — about his name recognition, about his connections to Hudson County (a canard that shouldn’t have been an issue), about the bodies he’s left strewn across the political landscape (they play rough in his neck of the woods). I had been hoping for someone like state Sen. Nia Gill, a politician who is willing to battle the entrenched elite, or U.S. Rep. Rush Holt, a rather solid progressive. Menendez is reliably liberal — aside from his stance on Cuba and some security issues — but there were always those nagging doubts.

I just hope this is not something that Gov. Jon Corzine — who picked him to fill out the unexpired seat partly because he thought he was the man most likely to retain the seat against a well-financed opponent — will live to regret.

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

So the South Brunswick Democrats are not returning or donating the campaign money they’ve received from John Lynch’s PAC. I guess that’s the organization’s prerogative, though I think it’s a bad move.

Here’s my Dispatches on the issue.

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

If the state wants to find new revenues, here is a pretty easy place to find them: the state’s Business Employment Incentive Program.

According to New Jersey Policy Perspective,

BEIP provides to businesses cash grants worth up to 80 percent of the amount that a company withholds from its employees for their New Jersey Gross Income Tax payments. The size of the payments depends on how many people a company brings to New Jersey, and how much it pays them.

The program sounds good on paper, but as the story of Altana Pharma in Florham Park shows, it is really nothing more than corporate welfare.

At a ribbon-cutting in 2002 for its new US headquarters in Florham Park, Altana Pharma made the prediction that by 2007 the international pharmaceutical firm would employ 1,000 people at the site.

Things didn’t work out as the company hoped. On October 3, Altana announced plans to lay off 350 workers. That was bad news for the employees-and it also was bad news for the taxpayers of New Jersey, who to date have handed out $488,553 in subsidies to Altana. The money was part of the deal the state made with the firm when it decided to put its headquarters in New Jersey.

Altana, according to NJPP, “attributed to delays by the federal Food and Drug Administration in approving pharmaceutical products,” which meant a loss of revenue. The layoffs meant that Altana ended up receiving less from the state, but it still received money even though it failed to follow through on its promises.

NJPP thinks this Altana should give the money back now and not wait the two years that generally pass in these circumstances.

(F)airness to New Jersey’s taxpayers should also dictate that the company give back the nearly $500,000 it has received so far. New Jersey has gotten a poor return on its investment. Altana, meanwhile, had net income of $507 million in 2005 from its operations in 30 countries.

“New Jersey taxpayers shouldn’t have to support payoffs for layoffs,” said NJPP President Jon Shure. “This is one more example of how subsidies are bad business for the state.”

Which is why the state should kill the subsidy program and end the farce of having taxpayers subsidize businesses that do not need the money.

The Altana case is one more piece of evidence that state subsidies to businesses are the wrong way to build an economy. Companies have gotten very good at playing states off against each other. Businesses end up getting paid by taxpayers to do what they might well have done anyway. And when promises aren’t kept, the state loses. If the money going to Altana and other companies were used instead to build an economy the old-fashioned way-investing in transportation infrastructure, schools, training, etc-the results would last a lot longer.

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