NJ Voices

You've got opinions, New Jersey

The next budget -- the one that begins July 1, 2009 -- is shaping up to be a big challenge for New Jersey, with significant budget reductions, underfunded and decreasing pension assets, cities looking for more state help, courts ordering more school aid, additional hospital closings, hundreds of community agencies facing service delivery cutbacks, transportation funding approaching stagnation and more.

As announced by the Corzine administration, the state will be facing a shortfall of more than $4 billion. I think it could be much worse. Furthermore, the state budget is under stress in the current fiscal year, which ends June 30, 2009. Even with very careful budgeting by the governor, including significant program reductions, spending below the previous year's level and exceptionally conservative revenue estimates, the state is looking at a shortfall of up to $1.5 billion.

The push to use EZ Pass on the New Jersey toll roads was suppose to be a cost savings measure - as it turned out - at $2.2 million a mile, it's not. However this new system of collecting taxes had a very comforting side effect for our "spending leaders" under the golden dome.

Complacency!

Zooming through the toll roads most of us aren't even aware of the tax we are paying that is being quietly collected through an electronic device stuck on our windshield, nor are we even aware that the tax went up.

Now that the Supreme Court has confirmed that the Second Amendment protects the individual citizen's right to own handguns, it's time for public officials to start prescribing a new antidote for gun crime: target violent criminals who actually misuse handguns, instead of passing scattershot laws with toxic side-effects like disarming victims, bullying honest gun owners, and demonizing firearms themselves.

Unfortunately, a bill pending in the State Senate and up for committee vote 12/8 (S1774) is a bad dose of old medicine. It's a proposal to ration the Constitutional right of law-abiding citizens to own handguns beyond the existing regulatory thicket, which already slows exercise of those rights to a trickle. It ignores violent behavior and known sources of illegal trafficking, instead restricting only persons investigated and pre-certified as acceptable to own firearms. Even mainstream media recognize the ineffectiveness of this approach.

It has taken a few days to realize what has been nagging at me about Plaxico Burress' tragic situation. Some memory from my distant past, from high school...and nothing to do with sports...Forget about football...I was a skinny cross-country runner.

Finally, it dawned on me this morning when I read that Plaxico joined the Giants as a "free agent...and [was] occasionally an enigma, even to his teammates."

That was it! High school ninth grade English class, when we spent a couple of months knitting our brows being forced to read the sparse, depressing tomes of Albert Camus and Jean-Paul Sartre -- in translation, of course. (You can imagine how long ago I went to high school.)

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362,00 grand will buy a whole lot of eggnog.

Last month, some 4,600 families of disabled adults awaiting residential placement were notified by the state where their adults now stand on the list.

Yes, I'm talking about the infamous "waiting list" for placement into group homes or community facilities - and those 4,600 are merely the "priority" clients - people whose care providers are becoming elderly and infirm or who have only one living elderly parent.

Here's a succinct message for those whining about the toll increases on the Turnpike and the Parkway: Get over it.

Granted nobody likes paying more to drive those roads, but requiring Parkway and Turnpike users to shoulder the costs for repairs and expansion of the highways is probably the fairest, most reasonable means of raising revenue that government has. Even those doing the loudest grousing about the higher tolls have to admit that.