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Even before the credit card bills for Christmas 2007
arrived in the mail box, I wasn’t feeling very merry
this year. And please accept my apologies in advance
for starting the New Year in a sour mood. It’s just
that a bunch of seemingly innocuous and unrelated
things that happened last year finally reached
critical mass in my mind – and taken collectively –
have seriously rained on what should have been (and
always has been) noteworthy celebrations of Christmas
and New Year’s Eve.
I’m a bit of a history buff, and have always been very
proud of the important role New Jersey played in the
Revolutionary War. The Garden State proudly and
correctly boasts that it is the Crossroads of the
American Revolution.
Some of you may not know why we have a road just north
of Trenton named: “Federal City Road.” It is so-named
because Trenton was very briefly the seat of the
Federal Government during the debate on where the
Capitol should ultimately be located. At the time the
two sites being debated were
New York City
and Philadelphia.
Trenton,
therefore, seemed like a workable compromise. And now
you know why we still have a “Federal
City Road” in Mercer County.
So why the sour mood, you ask? For openers, the State
couldn’t come up with even $200 thousand dollars to
properly spruce up and maintain the grave sites of the
five Patriots who signed the Declaration of
Independence and who are buried in New Jersey. Let’s
put this in perspective for a minute. The current
State Budget is $33.3 Billion Dollars!
Out of that outrageous sum of money the Legislature
and Governor couldn’t find $200 thousand to preserve
and maintain five graves?
They did manage, however, to come up with $800
thousand dollars to pay Steer, Davies, and Gleave,
Ltd., a London-based consulting firm, to come up with
a report extolling the virtues of “monetizing”
the New Jersey Turnpike and Garden State Parkway. Not
surprisingly, the consultant’s report indicates that
doing so is a good idea, or that’s what we’re being
told it says because thus far this almost million
dollar term paper has been kept under lock and key.
Spending taxpayer dollars, it seems, does not
automatically guarantee that the public ever gets to
see how its money has been spent. I’m having some
difficulty swallowing “trust us” on this one. So
let’s summarize where we are so far: “0” dollars for
Patriots but $800 thousand dollars for London-based
consultants. (Isn’t it a bit strange that there are
no consultants in New Jersey qualified to study
“monetization?”)
And what was
New Jersey’s
most-pressing public policy issue, one that simply had
to be taken up on a priority basis before the end of
2007: it wasn’t preserving the graves of Patriots, and
it wasn’t “monetization,” no, it was protecting
the lives of 8 of the most despicable criminals ever
to be housed in
New Jersey’s
correctional facilities. They were all on death row,
having been found guilty of heinous crimes by juries
of their peers, and, regrettably, none was in any
danger of being executed for years to come because of
our sorry excuse for a State Supreme Court. The
foregoing notwithstanding, according to the powers
that be in Trenton, ending the death penalty in New
Jersey was the critically important issue that had to
be taken up on an expedited basis before the end of
the year. I can’t imagine how our State leaders can
sleep at night knowing that by their actions they have
saved the lives of “the worst of the worst,” including
several that raped and murdered 6 and 7 year old
little girls.
You know what I think? Repealing of the death penalty
was a “smoke screen” designed to draw attention away
from what’s really happening to
New Jersey.
The State is in “free fall,” careening rudderless in
the darkness to a destination as yet unknown.
If further proof is needed, one has to look no further
than a recent report by Rutger’s economists Joe Seneca
and Jim Hughes that ominously points out New Jersey
residents are fleeing the State in droves. So
many more people are leaving the State than are moving
here that New Jersey is on the verge of seeing its
population actually decrease.
Unfortunately, I have no magic pill to recommend to
fix things, so you’ll just have to accept my gloomy
“bah humbug” greetings as we begin 2008. I’m also not
going to challenge “worse” by foolishly stating,
“thing’s couldn’t possibly get worse.” There is
little doubt…they will! |
