Rush Holt says nothing

I mentioned last week that I’d pass along U.S. Rep. Rush Holt’s response to the $1 million in federal cash for a new — and unnecessary — MOM study. Here’s what he said (via an e-mail from his press officer, Matthew Dennis):

“Rail service can play a valuable role in making commutes more convenient, decreasing congestion, and protecting the environment. But we must choose rail lines that make sense from the perspective of economics, rider convenience, and environmental impact.”

Honestly, I expected a little more from a Congressman who has taken some tough stands and who may have an eye on Frank Lautenberg’s U.S. Senate seat.

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The Blog of South Brunswick

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The false promise of experience

I’ve been waiting for someone to make this argument as effectively as Ari Berman does here:

I’d like to suggest that “experience” — a buzzword every election cycle — is also overrated.

At every turn Hillary Clinton invokes her years as First Lady and New York Senator as a not-so-subtle contrast to Barack Obama’s supposed inexperience. In his piece criticizing Obama this morning, my colleague David Corn writes that Clinton and John Edwards are “steeped in the nuances, language, and minefields of foreign policy.”

That tenure prompted both Clinton and Edwards to support the war in Iraq, along with virtually the entire Democratic foreign policy elite. They had years of PhDs, postings abroad and negotiations with dictators (the kind bemoaned by Clinton and embraced by Obama in last night’s YouTube debate) under their belt. And they came down on the wrong side of the biggest foreign policy question of their generation.

So it’s a little disturbing to see Clinton surrogates like former Secretary of State Madeleine Albright giving reporters a tutorial today on how to negotiate with hostile regimes. In a follow-up interview with a newspaper in Iowa, Hillary piled on by calling Obama’s comments “irresponsible and frankly naive.”

Let’s step back a second. The Obama camp could argue that it was “irresponsible and frankly naive” for Senator Clinton to hand President Bush a blank-check to go to war and then claim that she was only giving the Administration the authorization to win over the United Nations and keep weapons inspectors in Iraq until they finished the job. It was painfully obvious, except maybe to Senators and their advisors in Washington, that Bush would use Congressional approval as a mandate to invade.

Those senators he’s talking about were the ones with experience.

I have not signed on to any bandwagon and I remain in flux about who I’d like in the White House when the disastrous Bush years finally come to a close.

But having spent the last 17 years talking with politicians and candidates at the local and state level, I know that experience is really only a small part of the equation.

First, experience tends to favor incumbents. Incumbents, by virtue of being in office, are more experienced.

In the case of the current crop of Democrats, for instance, experience should favor Joe Biden and Bill Richardson (maybe Chris Dodd). Anyone ready to get behind their gray eminences?

Second, experience is meaningless if there is no vision. Successful candidates — and presidents, etc. — have vision. Ronald Reagan had vision (I disagreed with it, but he had it) and John Kennedy had vision. Neither had the kind of experience one might think is required to sit in teh White House.

Jimmy Carter also lacked experience. But that’s not what I think killed his presidency. It was his lack of any real sense of where the country had to go, a lack of focus that could organize his policies and capture the imagination of the country.

Having someone with experience might be nice, but it’s not necessarily the best option.

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

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Runner’s diary, Wednesday

Five miles in just under 50 minutes — a tough, slower-than-preferred run, but a productive one in that I stretched the length out on the road, rather than the treadmill.

Today on the iPod: a mix featuring Bob Dylan, The Clash, Dwight Yoakam, Tom Jones, the Kooks, the Beachboys, etc.

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

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Expediency’s downward spiral

Perhaps things are darker than we realized here in the great state of New Jersey. I mean, thanks to a decision by then-Gov. Christie Whitman, the state is about $58 billion short in its fund to provide health care to retired workers.

In 1994, New Jersey decided to stop setting aside money in a fund to pay for health care for its retired public workers. The savings paved the way for a big tax cut.

Meanwhile, hundreds of thousands of public workers were being told that as long as they worked 25 years, the system would provide virtually free health care for them when they retired, often when they were as young as 55.

No one added up the cost — until now.

It turns out that New Jersey will need about $58 billion, in today’s dollars, to provide all the care it has promised its current and future retirees. That’s nearly twice the state budget and nearly twice the amount of its outstanding debt. And because of the step it took in 1994, the state has virtually no money in reserve to cover those costs.

And….

The portion of the $58 billion that they need to come up with each year will rise sharply because of soaring health costs and a burgeoning population of retirees, according to the New Jersey Treasury. The state will spend about $1.1 billion on this year’s care, and the figure is expected to double in five years.

Meanwhile, the state’s revenues are largely static. That means that unless something changes, New Jersey will have less money each year to pay for vital services like colleges, hospitals and mass transit. Its popular program to preserve green space just fell victim to the need to devote huge amounts to the retirement plans and debt servicing.

You remember 1994, right? The first year of the Whitman administration.

So what happens now?

To create a retiree health fund from scratch, Mr. Goldman estimated, New Jersey would need to start by setting aside $6 billion a year to make up for all the years of no contributions.

That is on top of the pension fund’s pressing needs for new contributions.

Which means….

making more retirees pay for part of their health premiums and by switching retirees into a network of doctors at negotiated fees. Currently, most state retirees can see any doctor. As of 2003, fewer than half the states allowed retirees to do so.

Not exactly the direction health care reform is supposed to take. But then,

the plan to make more state retirees pay part of their premiums had a setback in June. The government agreed to drop it for retirees who signed up for wellness programs, which are supposed to save money by reducing the incidence of preventable diseases.

Meanwhile, retired teachers have dodged the bullet entirely. Their union, the New Jersey Education Association, negotiates contracts with school districts and not with the state, and the state has not asked them to chip in for their premiums.

But have no fear. There is another plan on the table — asset monetization (otherwise known as the sale or lease of the N.J. Turnpike) — though its exact shape and the timetable on which it will be unveiled has yet to be, well, unveiled:

The governor’s advisers had hoped to use the turnpike proceeds to pay down debt or fund the state’s retirement plans. But in June, Mr. Corzine acknowledged that the effort had become a political lightning rod, with his opponents whipping up fear around predictions that that the turnpike would fall into foreign hands.

He said foreign ownership was not in the cards, nor is a sale to a profit-making company. For now, he says he wants more planning and public debate, putting off any way to use the turnpike as a financial resource until after the state legislative elections in November.

“I’m going to fight for it,” the governor said. “The status quo is unacceptable.”

I’m pretty certain that monetization will be unacceptable, as well, leaving us back at square one and the likelihood that major budget cuts and tax hikes are in the offing.

Welcome to New Jersey, the state where political expediency has made a royal mess of things.

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

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