Hank Kalet

It’s not enough that our elected officials currently work under a system in which their votes appear tied to the money they raise from contributors.

Or that many of the poeple who end up working for local, county and state agencies are the same people who fund our campaigns.

Assemblyman Patrick Diegnan wants to extend this system of legalized bribery to voters.

The New York Times described the legislation this way:

Under a bill introduced this week by two Democratic legislators, everyone who votes in New Jersey would be eligible to win more than $1 million in a lottery drawing after an election.

There could be other rewards as well, like even more money or something else valuable.

To make voting even more alluring, anyone who votes in both a primary and the general election would have two chances of winning. Voters could conceivably get even more than two shots a year, depending on whether school board, municipal and fire district elections, which are often held on separate dates,
would also count.

There is no doubt that turnout could be better. As the Times points out:

Turnout has been steadily declining in the state, as it has elsewhere, with a record-low 48.5 percent of registered voters actually voting in the 2005 race for governor between Jon S. Corzine and Douglas R. Forrester.

But turning the polls into a massive lottery game? Is this what we’ve come to, a need to bribe the state’s residents to turn out at the polls? And is the best way to get an apathetic — some might say disaffected — electorate to reinsert themselves in the democratic process to turn it into a new Power Ball game?

“People say, ‘Oh gee, it’s trivializing the voting,’ ” Mr. Diegnan said. “I say just the opposite. Anything we can do to call attention and get people to vote, we should consider it. My purpose is really to bring some excitement to it.”

Excitement? Sometimes I wonder if politicians actually listen to themselves speak.

It’s not that the proposal trivializes voting — it does — but that it also trivializes the notion of civic participation and democracy itself. Democracy isn’t supposed to be about the big cash payoff (corporate donors excepted). The payoff is supposed to be an efficiently functioning government that has the people’s interest at heart. If residents of the state are not concerned enough about the people who sit on school boards, municipal governing bodies or county freeholder boards, who serve in the Legislature or as governor, then that is their prerogative.

If Mr. Diegnan were truly interested in boosting voter turnout, he’d recommend an array of other reforms, including holding elections on multiple days, moving Election Day to the weekend, allowing secure e-voting, etc.

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

Gov. Jon Corzine plans to do something to help thousands of the state’s poorest taxpayers — that is, if the state’s budget can handle it.

According to an Associated Press report in The Star-Ledger,

New Jersey Gov. Jon S. Corzine may seek to cut income taxes this year for thousands of the state’s poorest families, according to the state treasurer.

Treasurer Bradley Abelow told The Associated Press the Corzine administration will like to revive plans first proposed last year to cut taxes for 614,000 families.

“We were interested and remain interested in doing something to reduce the income tax burden on our very lowest income paying folks,” Abelow said last week.

Last year, the governor wanted to increase by $5,000 the threshold at which families start paying income taxes. Boosting the level from $20,000 to $25,000 would have affected about 414,000 families. He also wanted to cut income tax rates for an additional 200,000 families whose incomes range from $25,000 to $30,000.

But the plans were axed as Corzine grappled with a $4.5 billion projected budget deficit.

Abelow said the plans, estimated to cost $105 million last year, were being considered again. They would help New Jersey avoid taxing families that fall below the poverty line.

The state’s $20,000 level has been unchanged since 1999 when it was $7,500, and is poised to fall below the poverty line for a two-parent family of four this year, according to New Jersey Policy Perspective, a liberal think tank. The group recently noted the federal poverty line for a family of five is $23,400, meaning such families in New Jersey have already paid income tax on their earninut it seems a rather gs.

Of the 42 states with income taxes, 22 have higher thresholds for income taxes than New Jersey, according to the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities. New York’s threshold for a family of four is $28,200; Pennsylvania’s is $32,000.

But there could be complications given that Corzine and Abelow are projecting a gap of about $1.5 billion to $2 billion in the $30 billion budget expected to be unveiled Feb. 27.

While it would be better to include this as part of a larger tax reform package, I’m hopeful Corzine can pull this off. New Jersey’s working poor can use the help.

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

The best way to commemorate the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. is to listen to his words. I’ve linked to a portion of his “I have a dream” speech (from YouTube).

Some other thoughts follow:

Sean Gonsalves, a columnist and reporter for the Cape Cod Times, offers some thoughts on King in a dispatch on Alternet.org that not only acknowledges the flaws in King’s character but explains that they make King human — and available, meaning that his legacy is our legacy.

While haters point to these things as proof that King is unworthy of adulation, it had the opposite effect on me, similar to my reaction when I discovered Thomas Jefferson owned and fathered slaves. I was inspired because King (and Jefferson) were no longer mythical gods but flawed human beings who achieved greatness. That means ordinary people like me could do extraordinary things, despite fundamental flaws.

The idea, Gonsalves says, is to stop worshipping the myth and remember the man, and emulate the effort and sacrifices he made fighting to make the world a better place.

Another powerful column comes to us from James Carroll in The Boston Globe, who makes the point that King’s commitment to nonviolence was part of a larger vision of a better world.

He says that

racial injustice and poverty are inextricably linked to violence. That is why non violence formed the evolving center of King’s vision. It was no mere tactic with him, a way of coping with racist sheriffs who had guns. Non violence was a defining affirmation of the value of life, and it was the practical engine of a powerful political movement.

King’s was one of the main voices to which Johnson was responding when he sought to lead the nation out of war. 1968 is recalled as a year of hated turmoil, but first it was a year of rare illumination: Racial justice and economic justice depended on peace. King was the first American to speak that triple truth to power, and for a moment, power seemed to hear.

Today, the war in Iraq is both a symptom and a cause of the chronic disease of US violence. Bush feeds the virus, and it infects every organ of the body politic. King would be appalled at the way guns now shape the hopelessness of young black men. But King would name the link between gun supply in American cities and the flood of weapons pouring from a global arms industry across the most impoverished regions of the world. Indeed, poverty has become the ground of global violence, and terrorism is its poison flower. What King and Johnson knew as the war on poverty has become an all-but-declared war on the poor. Washington is its headquarters.

Martin Luther King Jr. is held in precious memory because he made an alternative world seem possible. He spoke of a dream, but he mobilized a pragmatic program for change. Idealism, in his terms, was the height of realism. Thus, healing between races, the lifting up of the socially downtrodden, and the amelioration of all that made for violence were not three items on King’s agenda, but one human project.

We honor King today not as a way of recalling the past, but as a way of resuming his campaign in the present. A dream, yes. But equally a three-sided political movement. No racial justice without economic justice! No justice, period, without peace!

I’d like to believe that we understand this legacy, but I think that Gonsalves is right, that we have allowed King to become a myth on the order of the Greek gods, someone from another time. And we have simplified his message, turning King into a touchy-feely profit of racial harmony when what King was calling for was peace and justice. We need to remember that not only today but every single day.

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

Just a quotation from Fran Wood’s Star-Ledger column offering a brief glimpse into the failure that is New Jersey politics, a bruising partisanship that puts political labels above potential solutions. The state’s politiicans are not the only one infected by this disease –the first strain of it comes from Washington and it has worked its way down to towns like South Brunswick and Monroe — but at the state level it is helping to ensure that property tax reform is a non-starter.

Democrats control a majority, but too many are too concerned about too many constituencies — teachers and unions and municipal officials and so on and so on. This is where bipartisan discussion and compromise is needed to break the gridlock and make things happen. But as Ms. Wood points out, the behavior this week — with legislators walking out on the State of the State and sending self-serving e-mails and press releases — indicates that they are more interested in making political points than making change.

The problem with New Jersey’s finances — specifically our property tax problem — is that we want more things than we want to pay for. That’s hard to resolve by itself, but it becomes nearly impossible when we all want different things. Young folks with families want more spending on education. Seniors want more spending on prescription drugs. Suburbanites want dead deer picked up. Urbanites want rat control and lead paint testing. And so it goes.

Unable to please everyone, too many legislators try to blame the resulting gridlock on the other side. Victory isn’t solving the problem, it’s making the other party responsible. That’s what those walkouts and press releases were about.

So the problem will continue to fester and New Jersey voters will continue to Tbrood, eventually voting out those they deem responsible, starting the cycle over and giving a new set of partisans a chance to play political games.

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

Not sure if anyone has noticed, but the president has managed a rhetorical sleight-of-hand with his new excalation proposal. Forget for a minute that surge is about as accurate a description of the president’s plan as the president’s declaration before the war that Saddam had WMDs. The issue here is that the Democrats are fighting the plan on the wrong front, focusing on the Iraqi government and not on the question of whether we are acting as an igniter in the region.

This has become a debate over whether the Iraqis want Democracy and the consequences of America not winning this war and not about whether our military presence in Iraq is inflaming a civil war and becoming a cause-celebre in the Arab world, creating new terrorists and further fraying already frayed international relationships.

The reality is that we have no idea what will happen if we leave, but the predictions of calamity being pushed by the president and hawks like John McCain are already happening and will continue to happen and worsen whether we are there or not. This war was lost a long time ago — probably around the time that it became clear that our stated reasons for invading were fabrications.

Our only recourse is to bring in an international coalition to help sort out the mess that the country has become.

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