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Over the last couple of decades, though, we have repealed Wagner’s Law — or, more to the point, only partly repealed it.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.
This week’s Dispatches, the third in my series on healthcare reform, is up a couple of days early. You can find it here.
Gov. Chris Christie is serious about balancing the state’s budget. The only question is whether, in doing so, he removes what few reasons remain for living in New Jersey.
New Jersey is an expensive state in which to live. Taxes are relatively high, as is the cost of living.
But New Jersey has at least had some solid public services to offer — among them a top-of-the-heep educational system and one of the more expansive children’s healthcare safety nets around.
But all of that could change beginning with tomorrow’s budget address by Gov. Christie. In it, he is expected to reduce school aid by a collective $800 million, an astronomical amount that comes on the heels of last month’s cuts. The result is likely to be local layoffs, larger class sizes, delayed upgrades and repairs to older buildings, fewer afterschool opportunities, new fees and a host of other changes unlikely to be popular with parents. Add to this the anticipated municipal aid cut — about half a billion — and we are looking at $1.25 billion in lost local aid that will result in huge service cuts and potential tax increases.
The troubling thing about what we have heard so far is that the governor is prepared to balance the books on the backs of people who really can’t afford it (the unemployed also are looking at benefit cuts), while offering a tax cut to the upper end of the income strata.
From a fairness standpoint, it makes little sense. From an economic standpoint, it makes even less — at a time of high unemployment the governor is creating conditions that will add public employees to the unemployment rolls, even as he is cutting their lifelines.
This is what the state’s voters get for supporting a candidate who refused to explain how he would cure the state’s fiscal ill-health.
