NJ Taxes and You: Perfect Together

I could have skipped the Somerset County Business Partnership forum at Raritan Valley Community College Friday morning, because I was under the weather and felt more like remaining snuggly covered under the blankets.

But the topic was “Making New Jersey More Affordable for Businesses and Residents: a Public Policy Forum,” and I was determined to get a first hand impression of what the panelists and gubernatorial candidates had to say. Gubernatorial challengers Daggett and Christie were present and offered their views on NJ’s tax mess.

Incumbent Governor John Corzine decided to take a pass and to ignore the people of northern Somerset County.

Well, it was enough to make me even sicker, because it confirmed what I already knew, but about which I obtained a lot more detailed confirmation. Forum speakers and audience questioners emphasized the fact that the negative impact of New Jersey’s tax structure at all levels of government is totally unsustainable:

The crushing debt burden from ill-advised government borrowing; increased deficit spending; and unfunded liabilities for public sector pensions and benefits (said to be from $100 billion to $130 billion) has resulted in a stifling level of taxation, especially for property taxes.

I could go down a list of all the winners and losers in this NJ public spending drama, but it would be wasting your reading time. You know most of them but, if you are serious about learning even more, check out the home page at http://www.mycentraljersey.com/, and click on the “Tax Series Tab” in the carousel. You’ll be amazed at the first-rate job that Courier News journalists did in covering Friday morning’s forum.

First Signs of Christmas Shopping

Well before Thanksgiving, the holiday spending season begins to gear up – much too early for my taste.

However, this year a good argument can be made that if consumers do a good job of it nationwide, it will help to pull our economy out of its doldrums. And who can be against that?

One of the best ways to tell just when the fever takes hold is to keep your eyes open for merchants who set up their store fronts or kiosks to do business only seasonally. By that measure, the Christmas shopping season may have already started at the Bridgewater Commons Mall, because one such merchant is already setting up to offer his wares.

On the first level, at the Macy’s entrance, in front of the escalators being refurbished for the expected holiday crowds, the Day-by-Day Calendar Company installed its racks this week. The shelves were empty when the photo was taken, but you can expect them to be filled with a variety of wide-ranging subject matter calendars very soon.

If you keep your eyes open, you’ll also notice what could be a similar Christmas marketing strategy with Toys-R-Us & Learning Express, firms that weren’t at the mall during the summer months and which may be gone after December.

Go ahead and shop your heart out, but remember to set aside some serious thinking for the real meaning behind the season.

Photo by Dick Bergeron, 6-25-09

The Little Borough that Could – and Did

In a Courier News poll not long ago, a majority of respondents said that the relatives and friends of the victims of the Trade Towers attack should “move on” with their lives. I interpreted that to mean that it’s time to forget – 9/11 is over.

I’m glad that the residents of Raritan Borough didn’t take that advice about WWII and their native son and hero, John Basilone. Each year commemorative events in his honor only seem to grow. That’s as it should be, because to forget the cost of what others did to secure our freedom as Americans is a passive act of ignorance.

There is hardly a week that goes by where I don’t have a recollection for the sacrifices that my three brothers endured when they served this nation in the same war in which John Basilone fought and died.

Pride in the American military’s accomplishments is a cheap commodity these days, especially within Washington’s beltway, where politicians inside the Capitol Building and the White House treat our servicemen and servicewomen like pawns in their game of chess which they play in comfortable rooms, thousands of miles removed from the dirty battlefields of Iraq, Afghanistan and the surrounding areas of the beleaguered state of Israel.

I’m not a war hawk, and I wish to see peace reign on this planet, but I do not minimize the nature of the threats posed by dangerous men like the leaders of Iran, Syria, North Korea, and Venezuela, the last of which has entered into military provisioning agreements with Russia.

Friday, Saturday and Sunday, in this little corner of the world, Raritan Borough will pause to memorialize once again the example of a man who did what he felt he had to do for his nation.

Construction Continues on Chase Branch in Pluckemin

As the photo shows, construction is moving ahead in Pluckemin on a new branch bank for the investment and banking firm of JPMorgan Chase. I never thought that I’d find myself in the position of favoring one giant financial institution over another, but this is an exception: Just a few hundred feet away from where Chase is erecting its ill-advised building sits a Bank of America branch on Burnt Mills Road.

The BofA branch is sufficiently removed from the intersection in Pluckemin where U.S. Route 202-206 joins with Washington Valley Road and Burnt Mills Road. The BofA location does not disturb the traffic pattern at the intersection.

This cannot be said for the new Chase building which sits on a corner within spitting distance from the sidewalk where it will hamper traffic flows at that busy commuting intersection.

The reason that Chase is setting up on that spot is obvious: That’s where the money is – in them thar’ hills. There is nothing wrong with chasing after the wealth to be mined in the Somerset Hills, but the site chosen for the battle between BofA and Chase (the Peapack-Gladstone Bank is in the Hills Shopping Center just a block away) is incompatible with the personality of the village of Pluckemin.

It’s another bad decision by Bedminster officials who once acquiesced to having a major interchange which would have unloaded traffic from Interstate 78 onto Rt. 202-206. That interchange would have been right on Bridgewater’s border, next to the Bridgewater Manor and would have ruined the character of the village of Pluckemin, not to mention its negative impact on the northern section of Bridgewater.

The citizen pushback on that scheme was overwhelming; State of New Jersey officials and Bedminster had to back off. Too bad that there isn’t a similar rethinking of this unnecessary addition to the Bridgewater-Pluckemin landscape.

High-Priced New Jersey

On Friday, October 2, the Raritan Valley Community College will host a 5-hour program entitled Making New Jersey More Affordable. It is being sponsored by the Somerset County Business Partnership, the Courier News and its web site, together with Allstate and the Affinity Credit Union.

I strongly support this gathering of powerful and influential people who will lend their voices to the debate. All gubernatorial candidates have been invited. I hope all are present and give specifics as to how they propose to pull New Jersey out of its downward financial vortex.

Although I can be highly skeptical at times, I generally have a cautiously optimistic outlook for the future. But for the love of me, I cannot figure out how this state will pull itself out of its financial morass unless it addresses the structural weaknesses which are strangling it.

Public service unionized salaries and benefits are out of control, with not a soul willing to give up a millimeter of ground. Year-after-year negotiated union salaries and benefits continue to rise at a rate above inflation during a time of deflation and national economic distress.

Dishonesty, fraud and corruption in government are rampant, and only the surface seems to have been scratched.

Remember the hollow promise of 1976 when the income tax was passed? It was intended to provide real estate tax relief for all homeowners, but decades of those revenues – billions – have been doled out with no conditions attached, or they have been spent for the preferential treatment of the few. The state never sets aside revenue collected for a specific purpose; instead, the money effectively goes into the general fund and you can kiss it goodbye.

Heck, we don’t even measure up to a state like New Hampshire which has no income tax and no sales tax, yet whose students produced an average 2009 SAT score of 1556, compared to New Jersey’s 1505 – lower New Jersey results for a lot more money, lower, even, than the national average of 1509.

The challenges facing New Jersey’s economic future are enormous, and they won’t be met simply by taxing the super-rich and cutting back on income tax rebates.