Waiting for Christie to be specific on his budget is like waiting for Godot

I have a question for Republican candidate Chris Christie: When do you plan to explain how you can cut taxes, increase property tax rebates and balance a budget that already is expected to be $8 billion in the red next year? Because his public comments — mostly criticism of his opponents tax policies — leave me wondering whether he understands how budgets work.

Consider: If you cut taxes, you’re cutting revenue. That means the state has less money coming in, unless you can find a new source of cash to replace it. If you can’t — or won’t — you will need to make budget cuts to offset the lost revenue.

That’s how a family budget works. Think about a two-income family. If one person is laid off or quits his or her job, then that family has to account for the lost money, either by bringing in new money or reducing the amount going out. That person can find a job or a couple of part-time jobs. The remaining breadwinner can get a second job or someone else in the family can go to work. The alternative is making cuts in what each member spends — driving less, going out to eat less frequently, stretching food or other supplies for longer periods and so on. But the family cannot continue to spend at the same level when less money is coming in.

It works the same way with a state budget.

Christie has been talking about his plan — a vague promise to cut waste and end corruption. OK. If he wins, I hope he’s successful at doing that. The reality is, however, that the waste and fraud he’s talking about will not result in enough savings to cover his own promises, let alone the anticipated deficit.

Unless, of course, he has a different definition of what wasteful spending might be (cutting programs with which he disagrees, for instance) or plans to borrow to plug the gap. If those are possibilities, he needs to say so. New Jersey voters need to know what programs might be on the chopping block under a Christie administration.

If he’s not thought that out, he needs to explain that, as well, so that voters know he is making bogus promises.

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Nobel offers sur-Prizes: What were they thinking?

The folks at the Nobel Prize committee really outdid themselves this year. Not only did they award a literature prize to what appears to be a minor Eastern European writer, they’ve given the Peace prize to President Barack Obama on the grounds that he has remade the international community.

President Obama was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize on Friday for his “extraordinary efforts to strengthen international diplomacy and cooperation between peoples,” a stunning honor that came less than nine months after he made United States history by becoming the country’s first African-American president.

The award, announced in Oslo by the Nobel Committee while much of official
Washington — including the president — was still asleep, cited in particular the
president’s efforts to rid the world of nuclear weapons.

“He has created a new international climate,” the committee said.

He has? Look, I think he is a drastic improvement over the arrogant fool who sat in the Oval Office for the last eight years, but I can’t help but wonder whether the Nobel committee has allowed the previous administration’s failures to distort its view of the current president.

The fact remains that he has been office a little less than nine months and has accomplished little on the world stage. He may be committed to nuclear abolition, but so far all we have to show for that is some harsh words for Iran, some general goals and some talking.

On a separate but related point, I find it difficult to accept the awarding of a peace prize to a president who is still considering a troop buildup in Afghanistan.

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Olbermann takes on healthcare, sort of

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Keith Olbermann’s “Special Comments,” his occasional editorial comment, are often pointed and say things that need to be said.

Some on the other hand, miss the mark completely.

Last night’s, as Mike Madden writes on Salon.com, just fell flat. It was overly long and offered little to the people who watch his show, the vast majority who support reform. It was a good, old-fashioned venting, one he may have needed to perform, but one that we did not need to hear and that did not move the debate forward. Olbermann, as Madden says, “mostly ignored what’s actually happening, in favor of preaching to the choir, rather than explaining the situation.”

The entire hour was dedicated to a “Special Comment” — Olbermann-ese for an editorial — about healthcare reform. But the point didn’t seem to be to pass reform legislation; the point appeared to be to chastise everyone involved in it, on either side, and to declaim about the nature of the system. Where Olbermann could have explained what the legislation would do — and taken on the myths against it — instead he spent his time making solemn pronouncements.

The questions he raised and did not raise, the myths he magnified and dismantled, did not get at the basics of an argument that has gone horribly off track (my Progressive Populist column, which will be published later this month, focuses on this) — the need to expand care to the uninsured and to make sure the insured actually get the coverage they pay for, the need to change how we pay doctors and the need to uncouple health coverage form employment.

Spending an hour spitting venom on a dysfunctional system should have functioned as a call to arms for single-payer, but instead he offered nothing more than an angry salvo in a healthcare battle the contours of which have been decided by politicians without imagination or guts or both.

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Wrong approach on health care

I know this is supposed to be good news, and I guess it is. But the reality is that the deficit is a red herring in the healthcare debate. It’s not about the deficit, but about the way we spend our healthcare dollars.

We spend one out of every six dollars in our economy on health care — an astronomical number that is almost 50 percent higher than the average industrialized nation. And yet we have nearly 50 million uninsured and we rank on the lower end of the health scales.

We spend plenty. The questions are who gets the money and what we spend it on. Right now, the bulk of the cash flows through the insurance companies, who skim big money from the top before passing it along to Big Pharma and doctors who push unnecessary drugs, tests and treatments.

The Baucus bill leaves this dynamic place.

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