My Grassroots column on President Barack Obama — and my sense that he is reprising the Clinton presidency in ways we never expected — is up at The Progressive Populist.
I have my doubts about this study — not its findings or methodology, but the political bias it plays into.
Commissioned by the state Chamber of Commerce and conducted by a Boston College institute — the Center for Wealth and Philanthropy — that has endorsed a repeal of the estate tax, the study has found that rich folks are leaving the state and taking their money with them. The reason for this “exodus of wealth,” according to “local experts and economists,” was
a series of changes in the state’s tax structure — including increases in the income, sales, property and “millionaire” taxes.
“This study makes it crystal clear that New Jersey’s tax policies are resulting in a significant decline in the state’s wealth,” said Dennis Bone, chairman of the New Jersey Chamber of Commerce and president of Verizon New Jersey.
So who are these experts The Star-Ledger is quoting? Well, there is the Chamber, of course, and Jim Hughes, dean of the Edward J. Bloustein School of Planning and Public Policy at Rutgers University, and a certified public accountant that offers some anecdotal evidence. Not exactly an exhaustive attempt to get past the what of the so-called wealth transfer to the why. The Chamber, as we know, has a political agenda (profit, profit and more profit), while our accountant friend offers a nice touch but not much in the way of real empirical evidence.
As for Hughes, he is an important researcher and academic, he also has a tendency to speak in a pro-business, pro-developer language that has always left me wondering how much of his analysis is tinged with a pro-corporate bias.
So, you’ll have to excuse my skepticism when reading this report. I’m having trouble buying it.
Here is Dispatches, on Gov. Chris Christie’s promises to reform the budget and end the state’s long-standing structural deficit and how it has an all too familiar ring.
This story comes to me courtesy of our lifestyle editor, Michael Redmond:
Colorado Springs cuts into services considered basic by many
The reason I share it — and that he passed it along — is that it just may be our future, if we’re not careful. The gist is this: The antitax fervor in the Springs has left the city with a busted budget and no hopes of generating new revenue. Without revenue, there is no way to pay for services — many of which most of us take for granted.
More than a third of the streetlights in Colorado Springs will go dark Monday. The police helicopters are for sale on the Internet. The city is dumping firefighting jobs, a vice team, burglary investigators, beat cops — dozens of police and fire positions will go unfilled.
The parks department removed trash cans last week, replacing them with signs urging users to pack out their own litter.
Neighbors are encouraged to bring their own lawn mowers to local green spaces, because parks workers will mow them only once every two weeks. If that.
Water cutbacks mean most parks will be dead, brown turf by July; the flower and fertilizer budget is zero.
City recreation centers, indoor and outdoor pools, and a handful of museums will close for good March 31 unless they find private funding to stay open. Buses no longer run on evenings and weekends. The city won’t pay for any street paving, relying instead on a regional authority that can meet only about 10 percent of the need.
It is not a pretty picture and it’s one we could face if we continue to pretend that we can have top-shelf services without paying for them.
I’ve been covering state and local government in New Jersey for a long time and it is clear to me that the credit-card mentality that nearly destroyed our economy (and remains likely to) has infected every public financial and fiscal decision we make.
New Jersey is buried in debt and facing a recurring, structural budget deficit. Its pension and healthcare systems have been borrowed against, leaving far too little money available to pay off our promises to state workers. The federal government, rather than help the states, spent the Bush years cutting taxes for the rich and pretending that the impending budget crisis would never come.
And it is here and has been for quite a while. And yet, everytime we talk about making tough decisions, we flinch. We think we can balance our books by eliminating waste and corruption, as if waste and corruption make up more than just a tiny fraction of our structural deficit. We have no interest in making real sacrifices — though we are willing to have others sacrifice on our behalf (the suburbs want spending on the cities cut, for instance, while many seniors are willing to skimp on school spending and so on).
Colorado Springs may seem like a novelty story, a one-off problem. But it isn’t. It is the canary in our fiscal coal mine and we better take heed.
This headline from The Washington Post Web site pretty much tells you what you need to know about the financial industry:
AIG plans to pay about $100 million in bonuses Wednesday
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- Read poetry at The Subterranean.
- Suburban Pastoral, a chapbook by Hank Kalet, available here.
