This seems like such a simple solution: Stop your car when you see a pedestrian in a crosswalk. That the state Legislature had to require drivers to do this says a lot about how impatient and inconsiderate we are when we get behind the wheel.
Chris Christie may want us to believe that he has no animous against the state teachers union, but his actions say otherwise. The New Jersey Education Association is the governor’s favorite target, a useful totem that he can trot out when he needs to deflect blame or anger from his questionable priorities.
He has called the union an array of nasty names, with bullying rhetoric designed to foment the festering tax revolt that has helped plunge the state deep into debt. Yes, the state spends more than it should on any number of things, but a lingering anti-tax sentiment (which first showed itself during the Florio administration) has exacerbated the problem. We want the programs we want, but we want them for free — a mathematically impossible equation.
But that is a topic for another blog post. The topic at hand is Gov. Chris Christie’s fevered assault on the state’s teachers union, one that no longer is just rhetorical.
Addressing the press today in an otherwise empty science lab at Montclair High School, Christie outlined a proposal to give districts money if teachers agree to wage freezes — a move the treasury department said could return just over $27 million to schools that saw $820 million in budget cuts.
Christie, essentially, is backing up is rhetorical assault with cash — a bribe designed to divide his critics and disarm them. The idea is to put the state’s nearly 600 school boards in the position of chasing scraps — the new aid pot amounts to just 3 percent of what was taken away — to save a handful of jobs and make the teachers union look like the bad guy. Local bargaining units that don’t accept pay freezes would be costing the district more than their salaries. They would be costing districts aid, as well. The governor could then use this refusal as a stick to beat the union down/
The reality of this proposal, however, is that the money won’t go very far. Consider South Brunswick, which lost $6.3 million in aid and is considering wide-spread layoffs and charging students to participate in extra-curricular activities. The district is likely to could recoup about $200,000 under the plan (about 3 percent of the aid lost), which is equal to about a quarter of a cent on the tax rate or maybe four or five jobs.
The state is in a budget crisis. It has been spending more than it has been taking in for too long. But just slashing spending — especially spending on schools and the social safety net — is shortsighted and can only deepen the pain already felt by families during the worst national economic crisis in more than a generation.
Christie obviously doesn’t care, so it will have to be up to the state Legislature to safeguard the state’s poorest and most vulnerable, while asking those who can afford it to pay more.
There is a better blueprint out there — the Better Choices for NJ campaign has a list of revenue sources that it says will generate $1.66 billion, money that can be used to restore cuts in school aid and children’s health care, among other things. And the Legislature needs to go back over the governor’s cuts to see if they match the state’s needs and whether there are better alternatives available.
Gov. Chris Christie’s budget speech yesterday has been given high marks for toughness — even as level-headed a columnist as The Star-Ledger’s Tom Moran bought the governor’s reform rhetoric. But was this speech about reform? Was it about rebuilding the state’s fiscal ship and setting it sail once again?
Budgets, as we wrote in our editorial this week, are about policy. Money underscores the priorities. Jon Corzine, for instance, offered budgets that were essentially progressive — expanding the earned-income tax credit and children’s health care, for instance.
Chris Christie’s budget, on the other hand, is a fairly straightforward example of the Grover Norquist, anti-government approach — given a push by the state’s fiscal woes. Consider the cuts — to education, to municipal aid, to higher education, the earned-income tax credit, unemployment insurance, along with a tax cut for those making $400,000 or more.
Christie is, based on the numbers, a rather doctrinaire conservative.
Christie knew what he was doing when he crafted his speech, using a series of conservative memes that have become ingrained in our political culture to push his critics back on their heels and to prepare make it seem as though anyone who opposes his so-called reforms is part of the problem.
The defenders of the status quo have already begun to yell and scream. They will try to demonize me. They will seek to divide us rather than unite us. But even they know in their hearts, if not yet in their minds – it is time for a change.
The language is key. The governor is the one doing the demonizing, getting out in front of the train and beating his critics to the punch. It is not the governor who is yelling and screaming and dividing, but the teachers’ union, the “defenders of the status quo.”
Some are saying, by their choice of policies, that we should descend further into debt and deficit, and risk driving more people out of the state with “temporary” tax increases that always turn out to be permanent.
Some are saying — the straw man, the critic without a face, the one that cannot be defended. Who makes up this “some”?
No one is arguing for more debt and there is significant debate over the accuracy and reliability of the studies showing this massive outflux, as the governor calls it. And not all critics are defenders of the status quo.
Let’s be honest here. The state’s budget problems, as the governor acknowledges in passing, are at least 20 years in the making. They are bipartisan, created by a series of politicians unwilling to speak clearly and frankly: Since the massive overreaction that greeted Gov. Jim Florio’s tax increase in 1990, New Jersey politicians have been tax averse. At the same time, they have been unwilling to say no to anyone, offering often necessary services and putting their cost on the credit card.
If you want services, you must pay for them. That’s what our elected officials should have been saying for the last two decades. If you’re not willing to pay, be prepared to give up the services you have come to value. It is a simple equation.
So Christie is not wrong when he says the bill has come due. But his rhetoric — his claim to be the fiscal avenger — rings hollow. He appears less interested in fiscal health than in breaking the backs of the public employee unions, more concerned with shrinking not only state government, but local government and shifting much of its responsibilities to the private sector.
Christie’s tought talk masks what I see as bad faith. He is not speaking frankly, but offering the kind of false promises offered by his predecessors. I can cut government down to size without affecting services, without affecting the quality of your children’s education, the length of your commute, the freshness of your air. And if these things are affected, it is not his fault or the fault of his brave budget-cutting administration. It is the fault of the New Jersey Education Association and the other public sector unions.
Christie talks tough, but he isn’t being frank or honest. Honesty demands that he acknowledge the devastating impacts of his budget cuts, of the sacrifices he so blithely says are being spread evenly and fairly. It demands that he take responsibility for the fallout.
Gov. Chris Christie is serious about balancing the state’s budget. The only question is whether, in doing so, he removes what few reasons remain for living in New Jersey.
New Jersey is an expensive state in which to live. Taxes are relatively high, as is the cost of living.
But New Jersey has at least had some solid public services to offer — among them a top-of-the-heep educational system and one of the more expansive children’s healthcare safety nets around.
But all of that could change beginning with tomorrow’s budget address by Gov. Christie. In it, he is expected to reduce school aid by a collective $800 million, an astronomical amount that comes on the heels of last month’s cuts. The result is likely to be local layoffs, larger class sizes, delayed upgrades and repairs to older buildings, fewer afterschool opportunities, new fees and a host of other changes unlikely to be popular with parents. Add to this the anticipated municipal aid cut — about half a billion — and we are looking at $1.25 billion in lost local aid that will result in huge service cuts and potential tax increases.
The troubling thing about what we have heard so far is that the governor is prepared to balance the books on the backs of people who really can’t afford it (the unemployed also are looking at benefit cuts), while offering a tax cut to the upper end of the income strata.
From a fairness standpoint, it makes little sense. From an economic standpoint, it makes even less — at a time of high unemployment the governor is creating conditions that will add public employees to the unemployment rolls, even as he is cutting their lifelines.
This is what the state’s voters get for supporting a candidate who refused to explain how he would cure the state’s fiscal ill-health.
This suggestion may prove to be politically popular, but it privatizing state functions is as foolish an idea as Jon Corzine’s proposal to sell the N.J. Turnpike.
Let’s be clear, privatization is only the public-worker version of outsourcing, which offers some nominal upfront savings in the private sector but ultimately costs more in morale and connection to the work.
Hank Kalet 