church/state – Hank Kalet

Christie budget math does not add up

Gov. Chris Christie rode into office promising to put the state’s fiscal house in order. According to him, it’s mission accomplished.

According to everyone else — including one of the nation’s most influential bond rating agencies — the state fiscal house remains a mess.

S&P, the first major credit-rating agency to analyze Christie’s proposal, found little to praise: The budget relies on more one-shot revenue sources than last year; the $300 million surplus is too small; the hole in the pension fund is still too big; tax cuts are expected to drain $530 million, and revenue-growth estimates of more than 7 percent defy the conventional wisdom among economic analysts, especially since the state is under target for the first half of the current fiscal year.

“We believe revenues could rebound significantly in a strong economy,” an S&P analyst, John Sugden-Castillo, said. “(But) some of these revenue assumptions have been optimistic given the current growth the state has been experiencing. That could put pressure on the budget.”

Christie, portrayed by most as a straight-talking, no-nonsense leader, is really no different than the governors who have preceded him in office. While he slashed the budget, he also has relied on a tried and trued New Jersey budget-balancing trick: one-shot revenue/spending cut.

Remember, the governor has withheld paying money into the state’s pension funds (a short-term saving that will bite us on the ass down the road), used money set aside for climate change efforts to balance his budget and raided urban enterprise money.

This year’s sleight-of-hand involves a shockingly positive revenue outlook, based on the notion that the state is out of the woods even as it deals with a 9 percent unemployment rate and towns continue to lose tax ratables.

But they are necessary to his larger political and policy agendas — the proposed income tax cut (which will primarily benefit the rich) and a generally positive message designed to buttress his re-election campaign next year.

The state needs tax reform, but the income tax is not the problem, or not in the way Christie paints it. What we need is property tax reform that shifts away from property and sales taxes to income taxes along with an aggressive reorganization of local and county government to reduce the number of taxing entities in New Jersey.

Putting that on the table would take real courage. Promising a tax cut and pretending the recession is over for budgetary purposes does not.

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Certainties and Uncertainties a chapbook by Hank Kalet, will be published in November by Finishing Line Press. It can be ordered here.
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On religious chauvinism

Joe Conason offers a succinct and on-target take on the dust-up over Mitt Romney’s Mormonism and the GOP evangelical base’s antipathy toward him.

The issue is not whether a Mormon should be elected or could be elected, but why we should allow those who wish to impose their sense of faith on the American public. Romney, after all, offered this comment as part of his speech:

“Freedom requires religion just as religion requires freedom … Freedom and religion endure together, or perish alone.”

As Conason writes, however,

This statement is so patently false that it scarcely deserves refutation. If Romney has studied the bloody history of his own church, then he knows that the religious fervor of its adversaries drove them to deprive the Mormons not only of their freedom but their lives, and that the Mormons reacted in kind. If he has studied the bloody history of the world’s older religions, then he knows that the most devout Christians of all sects have not hesitated to suppress, torture and murder “heretics” throughout history. Only the strictest separation of church and state has permitted the establishment of societies where freedom of conscience prevails — and those freedoms are firmly rooted in societies where organized religion has long been in decline.

That’s what makes the discussion about Romney important; it’s not the electoral math, but the constitutional implications of connecting religion and government.

And it is the implied religious chauvinism of Romney and former Arkansas Go. Mike Huckabee that should worry us all.

Phonies like Huckabee and Romney complain constantly about the supposed religious intolerance of secular liberals. But the truth is that liberals — including agnostics and atheists — have long been far more tolerant of religious believers in office than the other way around. They helped elect a Southern Baptist named Jimmy Carter to the presidency in 1976, and today they support a Mormon named Harry Reid who is the Senate majority leader — which makes him the highest-ranking Mormon officeholder in American history. Nobody in the Democratic Party has displayed the slightest prejudice about Reid’s religion.

Liberals and progressives have no apologies to make, or at least no more than libertarians and conservatives do. Cherishing the freedoms protected by a secular society need not imply any disrespect for religion. But when candidates like Romney and Huckabee press the boundaries of the Constitution to promote themselves as candidates of faith, it is time to push back.

I couldn’t agree more.

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State-sanctioned prayer?

Steven Hart offers just the right touch of sarcasm to commemorate yesterday’s state-sanctioned Day of Prayer. I’m surprised that more people aren’t bothered by this constitutionally dubious faux event.

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

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