"Now I am starting to care about California"

Bill Dupray sums up how I feel about California and, unfortunately, how many people should feel about New Jersey:

Now I am starting to care about California. But it is not because I am feeling altruistic, it is because their previously self-contained disaster has now spilled out into requests for bailout money from me. If I am going to be asked to bail out California, I want a right to go in and cut their spending, cut their taxes, and cut their regulations.

Damned right. If California is going to look to "the Federal government" (which is really just the rest of the states) for bailout money so they can keep spending, shouldn't "the Federal government" -- we -- tell them what they can do? Isn't that the same argument that the Feds used when they wanted a "pay czar"? When they wanted to determine what kinds of cars GM should build?

It seems to me that the Federal government told AIG what their executives could earn, and people like Andrew Cuomo threatened to make a lot of AIG names public if they kept their bonuses. Let's do the same to California: Yes, you can take our money, but to do it you'll have to take severe pay cuts and reduce services across the board. Get back in line with fiscal responsibility and we just might let you take control again -- once you've paid us back.

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Misguided Spending

An article from the Chronicle of Higher Education laments a rule that "lacks teeth":

Under the rule, states must spend at least the same amount of money for colleges each year as they spent on average in each of the previous five years.

Forget whether or not it lacks teeth. (The issue there is that the feds haven't established a federal monitoring process. Not my point.) Look at why they created the mandate:

Advocates of the spending mandate, enacted in part to encourage states to provide consistent levels of aid to colleges to help them rein in costs, worry...

So if I am to understand this correctly, forcing the states to pump more money into education is supposed to decrease costs. Which is funny, because on my planet, people cut costs when there's less money to spend.

Maybe the mandate's advocates should retake Econ 101.

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Corzine Sued - Is the state operating illegally?

It has been clear for some time that New Jersey has been spending way beyond its means. And the Governor ("I didn't take this job to be Scrooge') continues to ignore the fiscal calamity facing the state. But with all of his fiscal scams, I thought he was intelligent enough to either change the rules or come up with a technicality around New Jersey's leaky laws regarding public funding and spending.
Apparently not.

Governor Corzine has failed to respond to an open records act request from Senate Republicans regarding the states budget. From Politicker:

The complaint notes that there is a constitutional requirement that the expenditures of the State not exceed its revenues and that Governor Corzine has acknowledged drops in revenue that meet or exceed the planned surplus for the current fiscal year. At the same time, the Governor has continued to sign new appropriations into law, without indicating how those appropriations will be funded.

Could it be that our Governor knows that the state is spending far outside the revenue it is taking in right now? I would bet on it. Otherwise, why would the governor refuse the request which would put him squarely in violation of the state constitution.

See the complaint here.

Read the Politicker article here.

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Q: What's the worst way to start a crash diet?

A: Run out of food.

At his end-of-the-year press conference today, Governor Corzine gave a pessimistic view of the next year in New Jersey and committed to cutting spending. This is gonna hurt. We've been gluttons for too long, and as we tighten our belts we will be in more pain because of it.

(Fortunately, for most of us, this is just a metaphor; that said, please remember the "We Can't Let This Bank Fail" food drive.)

It's a shame that it will hurt this much. Some of this was avoidable, even with the financial sector's plummeting fortunes.

Think about one aspect of the pain: cutting the government's budget will mean lost public-sector jobs. Transitioning from a government job to a private-sector job is hard -- and it's made even harder when private-sector unemployment is high. People with "safe" government jobs will feel more pain than if we had reduced our budget earlier, increased private employment in the state, and thereby encouraged them to get private-sector jobs.

Don't get me wrong: a bad economy always hurts. But this one will hurt more because of our dependence on the Nanny State.

And we will only be making this particular dependency (government jobs) worse if we pretend that feeding the government is an economic stimulus. Go to war with Connecticut? Maybe that would stimulate the economy. Pour more money into government contracts for road building? Not so much.

I don't only blame Governor Corzine. As WBGO reports, "His most recent plan to delay pension payments floundered in the Senate." But I do worry about him; he needs to follow through on this promise:

Let’s actually get in front of the curve as opposed to staying with it and waiting for some other shoe to fall, to drop, to get to a conclusion. I feel very strongly about that. It’s not exactly a love fest with regard to those issues.

We should have done that already. We shouldn't have a 33-plus-billion-dollar budget. Yes, we should have encouraged municipalities to merge or share services -- something I heard Corzine claim on WBGO this morning, but that isn't included in their write-up -- but we also should have made them less dependent on the state in the first place.

Governor Corzine, State Assemblymen, State Senators, now is the time. Yes, this is going to hurt, but the time will not come again in which people are this willing to regain control on spending. Tightening the belt will hurt, yes, but you have to do that anyway. Ratchet it tighter than you feel comfortable with, because normally the ratchet works only one way, and you can't tighten it at all. Get ahead of the curve.

Don't play games: don't claim that you've made deep cuts when you're only going back to 2006 funding levels, don't claim that you're only borrowing for "required expenditures" when every penny borrowed or spent represents a choice to go further into debt, don't posture as a deficit hawk while promising bailouts and stimulus packages for big government projects.

Do your job: get the state's finances in order.

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State Government Vehicles Gone Wild! Report Offenders Here!

I have blogged in the past about the habit of this state to distribute vehicles to state workers like candy at Halloween. Except, at least I get to decide whether or not I want to pay for and distribute the candy myself. In this case, the state takes money from us and gives out autos for no apparent reason to people in roles that clearly do not require them.

For the record, if you work in a public safety role and are on call 24 hours a day, you deserve and should have a state vehicle. If you are driving to work to say, the state NJDEP, you shouldn't have a state paid for vehicle.

Tonight, on the way home I was passed by a state vehicle on route 206 at at least 70 miles per hour. The vehicle was weaving in and out of traffic and clearly had no state purpose. That vehicle's license plate number was SG28164. Watch out for this person.

Have you seen a state vehicle that you question why the driver is even provided this perk? Send in the license plate and we will make it public. We are paying for it so why not advertise it.

Wonder if a car is a state or state paid for vehicle? Follow this link to get beyond the "SG" obvious offender.

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