economy – Page 14 – Hank Kalet

Green incentives

We are in a down economy, especially on the real estate end, and there is vacant warehouse space available in the region. What to do?

The Middlesex County freeholders have a pretty decent idea: Seek out firms in the environmental field.

A new county committee has been formed to match manufacturers of energy-efficient and sustainable products with vacant warehouses, which could bring business into South Brunswick.

”Our goal is to actively pursue as many economic opportunities as we can by creating green jobs and boosting the economy,” said Freeholder H. James Polos. “Middlesex County is in position right now to take the lead and help our communities attract new business opportunities.”

The Middlesex County Green Economic Development Zone Committee was established to study the economic value in creating “green” zones, with hopes of bringing burgeoning green technology companies into the county, according to Mr. Polos.

A team of local, county and state officials and representatives from the corporate and academic sectors met in late May to lay the groundwork for attracting these companies to the area in order to boost economic growth and create jobs.

This makes sense on a number of levels. First, we need to generate jobs and green jobs are likely to have more staying power than the service-sector stuff we’ve focused on in the United States for the last couple of decades.

Second, we need property tax revenue. The state is unlikely — regardless of who wins the Statehouse in November — to make the kind of drastic changes in the tax system needed in New Jersey. So, we need businesses to occupy empty buildings and there is some demand out there for light-assembly work (solar panels) and distribution of eco-products.

Third, creation of a green zone in Middlesex County could trigger other green zones — creating the incentives necessary to move away from our carbon-based lifestyle. The more cheaply we can produce environmentally friendly products, the cheaper they will be for consumers. And if we can lower the cost on the consumer end, we are more likely to see consumers make green choices. The Middlesex County green zone could, under this reasoning, serve as a model for other counties in the state and other regions in the country.

As the president’s Economic Recovery Advisory Board wrote in a draft report (quoted from Thomas Friedman’s column in Sunday’s Times:

“Sustainable technologies in solar, wind, electric vehicles, nuclear and other innovations will drive the future global economy. We can either invest in policies to build U.S. leadership in these new industries and jobs today, or we can continue with business as usual and buy windmills from Europe, batteries from Japan and solar panels from Asia.”

Using local food to help locals in need

This is such an obvious idea, you have to wonder why it took the state so long to do it:

Low-income families looking to eat healthier may now use their food stamp cards at more than 80 farmers’ markets around the state, according to a joint announcement today from Human Services Commissioner Jennifer Velez and Agriculture Secretary Douglas Fisher.

The new program provided the farmers’ market operators to the scanning equipment so people on food stamps, now known as the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, may use their Electronic Benefits Transfer cards to buy fresh produce, officials said.

The benefits of the program are myriad, including:

Access to better quality fresh fruit and vegetables for food-stamp recipients, helping them stay healthier.
Tax revenue generated by the farmers’ added income.
Continued farming, which keeps development at bay.

Seven Central Jersey farms are participating:

Asprocolas Acres in Millstone.
Farmer Al’s in Monroe.
K&S Farms in Cream Ridge.
Naturally Grown Gardens in Hopewell.
R&K Farm in Monroe.
Stillwell Farms in Robbinsville.
Von Thun’s Country Farm Market in South Brunswick

Dispatches: The economy and the shredded social safety net

Dispatches, on the shredded social safety net and the exponential growth in need in this recession, is on our site.

Care for some tea?

I think Mark Di Ionno is overplaying the meaning of the tea-party movement — saying the seeds of a new American revolution can be found in it — but I do think these little protests present a challenge to government.

As with the Goldwater campaign of the early 1960s, which essentially was a fringe movement of libertarian conservatives that took over the Republican Party, the tea-partiers appear at first blush to be curiosities. Their calls to arms are taxes, government spending and a visceral dislike of socialism and their early protests have featured some rhetoric that came as close as you can get to crossing the line into xenophobia and racism.

But they are plugging into something bubbling up from the depths of the American psyche, the discontent that has been festering since the economic crash and that has not been adequately addressed by the federal government. (State governments are not equipped, because of their balanced-budget requirements, to deal with much of this mess.)

As much as we on the left like to make fun of the so-called tea-baggers, we have to acknowledge their potential power. Consider the Goldwater campaign. Barry Goldwater lost his presidential race in 1964 to Lyndon Johnson in one of the biggest landslides in American history. Within two years, Ronald Reagan would rise from the ash heaps of the Goldwater movement, using much of his rhetoric to charge into the California state house; Richard Nixon would build his 1968 presidential campaign on the same lingering resentments and the conservative movement would make steady inroads into government, eventually taking it over.

There was a political tone-deafness among liberals at the time, due in part to LBJ’s success. LBJ, however, knew that the liberal moment was passing — he famously predicted the Republican takeover of the South after he signed the Civil Rights Act.

Fast forward to today and we have to ask whether liberals already have grown comfortable with their newfound power, whether they are misreading the election of Barack Obama as something more than a complete disenchantment with the last eight years. Obama made his campaign about change, but what we’ve been witnessing during his first six months in office has been a timid incrementalism, one that has left much of the bankrupt power structure in place.

This is not the kind of change that was envisioned.

There always will be a fringe element on the right, a Goldwater/Reagan faction that views any government action as anti-American. Its power will wax and wane.

If liberals do not act more aggressively, if they cannot explain their approach clearly and transparently, if they do not demonstrate to the disenchanted and discontented middle that they are moving the country in the right direction, then this supposed liberal moment will be a short one and the Goldwater/Reagan trajectory of the second half of the 1960s could play out once more.

Whatever happened to John Maynard Keynes

Somewhere along the line, the Obama administration lost control of the economic debate, allowing deficit hawks to step in and steer the ship at a time when we need some serious Keynesian action.

Here is what Paul Krugman had to say today:

We have the Obama stimulus plan, which aims to create 3 ½ million jobs by late next year. That’s much better than nothing, but it’s not remotely enough. And there doesn’t seem to be much else going on. Do you remember the administration’s plan to sharply reduce the rate of foreclosures, or its plan to get the banks lending again by taking toxic assets off their balance sheets? Neither do I.

All of this is depressingly familiar to anyone who has studied economic policy in the 1930s. Once again a Democratic president has pushed through job-creation policies that will mitigate the slump but aren’t aggressive enough to produce a full recovery. Once again much of the stimulus at the federal level is being undone by budget retrenchment at the state and local level.

Krugman calls for the Obama team “to ramp up their efforts, starting with a plan to make the stimulus bigger.”

He acknowledges the difficulties, which include recalcitrant Republicans and misguided centrists “who partially eviscerated the original stimulus plan by demanding cuts in aid to state and local governments — aid that, as we’re now seeing, was desperately needed.” And he blames his own colleagues for

recycling old fallacies — like the claim that any rise in government spending automatically displaces an equal amount of private spending, even when there is mass unemployment — and lending their names to grossly exaggerated claims about the evils of short-run budget deficits. (Right now the risks associated with additional debt are much less than the risks associated with failing to give the economy adequate support.)

Rather than worry about the deficit at a time when we are facing the serious likelihood of deflation, Krugman said, we need more stimulus. The first plan was not nearly enough and the healthcare plans being discussed, which suffer far too much from an attempt to make the budget neutral, do not go far enough.

And all of this retrenchment is happening at the same time that our elected officials essentially ignore the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. They talk about them, but have stopped talking about anything resembling a real withdrawal, which would do a lot more to tame the deficit than anything else in the government’s tool box.

I was out to dinner with my family tonight. Our waiter, Bru, was a bit of a comic. Part of his schtick was a presidential platform that included some interesting services for the poor — yearlong job training and other services for the homeless, for instance. (He also said that all the corporate folks involved in cratering the economy should be prosecuted and that Bernie Madoff shouldn’t be sent to jail, but instead should be made to pay off his debt by performing low-wage work, like landscaping.)

Where would he get the money for his ideas? By ending the war. As he said to us, the job is not nearly as difficult as the politicians make it.