Yesterday, Governor Corzine announced that New Jersey has a budget deficit. It's the third largest behind NY and CA. We are in hock up to $3 Billion. And, to be honest, I'm just scratching my head, trying to wrap my brain around how this could possibly be.
NJ is a wealthy state. We make some of the highest salaries in the country. But we also have a very high cost of living. And most non-NJ Kossacks would have coronaries at the sight of our property tax bills.
In spite of all of that, the state is pretty well run. Budgets are super tight but we're managing. The roads are in decent shape, bridges get built, the schools in the suburbs have very good teachers and curriculum (except for the gifted kids, but don't get me started).
But if you are the child of a recently laid off engineer with a hefty mortgage payment and you need treatment for some chronic health problem, well, you're SOL.
It's a crazy, topsy-turvy world we're living in. Every year, NJ sends billions of tax dollars to the Feds and it gets distributed to places like Wyoming and Mississippi and Iraq. We pay more into the system than we can ever expect to get back. Our schools don't get built, teacher's pensions get dumped onto seniors on fixed incomes who can least afford to pay them and until a couple of weeks ago, thousands more NJ taxpayers were going to get stuck with a tax increase if the AMT had not been fixed.
And now our three most prosperous states, all blue, are running massive deficits.
This was no accident. It was engineered.
The Republicans set out to drain blue states and saddle them with the tax burden that their disastrous policies have generated. We aren't eligible for most of the programs that the working class is entitled to in other states. That tends to breed resentment. Our wealthier districts are represented by Republicans in whose interests it is to never move away from a burdensome property tax system that funds our state.
And yet, our tax money is held hostage to an endless war. We derive no benefit from it and our cultural landmarks and industries are at risk from attacks by inflamed extremists.
This is what George Bush did to my state and my country. He trashed it. His merry band of cavalier and careless cohorts saw wealth sitting around and decided they should have it. The money that could have been used to build infrastructure and fund research and improve education and healthcare was simply siphoned away. In it's wake, we have underfunded and antiquated federal regulatory systems, an interior that is auctioned off the highest bidder and ruined cities. Our civil liberties are in name only, our privacy violated, our security compromised. And my state is $3 billion in debt. Without the additional funding from the SCHIP expansion, a lot of NJ children and their family's finances are at risk. We can't afford to fund our own.
We will not know the extent of the damage until January 2009. And all of the hard work that went into the creation of a prosperous middle class from the 1930's to the 1990's, all the work of FDR and Truman and Eisenhower, Kennedy, Johnson and Clinton, all that has been reduced to the barest minimum as Wall Street investors, including you and me, demand higher profits from the corporations we work for and love to trash.
I don't think I have to tell you how serious this situation is but some of you need to think about what it's going to take to put it right. Because once the Bushies are gone, the $$%^'s going to hit the fan. The money from China will last only so long, the mortgaging of our economy has undermined our viability and the oil crisis is going to accelerate our downward slide.
The tendency of the universe is towards disorder and energy is needed to keep it in check. To reverse it, we need to make bonds and introduce order.
Disorder and chaos prevent progress and can't be wished away. And order can't be beaten into our friends and enemies until morale improves. To suggest that good government is an inevitable result of hope or flagellation ignores nature. The only way to restore order and put things on the proper footing for going forward is to work very hard and create coalitions.
There never was an inevitable nominee. You have always had a choice.
Choose wisely.