Nearly everyone in the state agrees on one thing: We cannot continue on the fiscal path we have been traveling. It is, as Gov. Chris Christie told a packed crowd in Hillsborough on Wednesday, “unsustainable.” The problem is that there is no agreement on how to construct a new path. New Jerseyans pay more in taxes – all taxes – per capita than any other state and our average property tax bill is the highest in the nation as well. But we also have to admit that we get a lot for what we are paying, more than they get in most of the low-tax states. Our schools – while wildly unequal – are among …

Budget discussions in Washington could have a real impact right here in Central Jersey. The president’s proposal cuts about a billion dollars from the Housing and Urban Development budget, including $300 million from the Community Development Block Grant program, which provides cash to local governments to provide housing. Republican proposals call for more extensive cuts to the entire HUD program – including a dramatic $100 billion from fiscal year 2001 (the current budget year). The block grant cuts could mean rent hikes or service cuts at some federally funded facilities at a time when the…

Every budget has its winners and losers and the budget the governor unveiled Tuesday is no exception. According to the governor, the winners are the state’s taxpayers who finally have someone in the Statehouse willing to put the state’s fiscal house in order. The only losers, in his mind, are those who deserve to lose – the unions who represent greedy state and local workers who are making the state unaffordable. A closer look at the budget, though still cursory, reveals something else. It shows a different list of winners and losers than the one the governor has proclaimed. That’s no …

I’m having some trouble with the math. Gov. Christie is proposing to cut the state budget by 2.6 percent, but he says he’s increasing aid nominally to schools and keeping it stable for towns. He’s increasing spending on hospitals, college aid, capital projects and tax relief, and yet the over all budget is down. Someone help me with the math. The budget is smaller than last year, but only if you include the federal stimulus money the state received and that Christie has criticized repeatedly.  If you back out that funding – and the programs it paid for – then spending is up. You also have to …

Gov. Chris Christie wants to fix public education by destroying it. Since taking office in January 2010, the governor has used his vast rhetorical skills to paint the state’s teachers and its education establishment as being impediments to school improvement. And he has proposed an agenda designed to remake public schools to fit a conservative mindset that has little use for the public sector. In his first budget last year, the governor slashed school funding and then delighted in the defeat of a majority of school budgets across the state. And it is likely that he will do the same again this…

There is no doubt that the state needs to do more to educate students in poor areas, but a bill making its way through the state Legislature is not the answer. The Opportunity Scholarship Act, which has been approved by the Senate Budget and Appropriations Committee and the Assembly Commerce and Economic Development Committee and awaits further committee hearings and a vote of the full Legislature, Would grant tax credits to corporations that make contributions to designated nonprofit agencies tasked with providing scholarships to low-income students who attended “chronically failing” schools…

Fact: The state of New Jersey faces a massive shortfall in its pension accounts -- a $54 billion hole.Fact: Governors going back (at least) as far as Christie Whitman have shorted the pension fund, turning the payment into a fungible budget balancing tool that, as I wrote way back in 1995, was going to come back to bite the state on its dysfunctional tuchus.So now, with a massive debt that will have to be paid, the politicians who helped create the problem want reform. But instead of requiring the state and local governments to pay what the actuarial figures show is needed to meet its long-…

When AOL and the Huffington Post announced their deal Monday, I was as shocked as anyone. Patch, after all, is part of AOL and soon Huffington Post would be, too. According to a company press release, AOL will pay $315 million for what it dubbed “the influential and rapidly growing news, analysis, and lifestyle website.” The purchase, as the company points out, creates a “combined base of 117 million unique visitors a month in the United States and 270 million around the world” and helps AOL move closer toward creation of “a premier global, national, local, and hyper-local content group for …

The United States remains mired in an economic morass, despite the proclamations from economists who are supposed to know better. Yes, the stock market has rebounded. And yes, corporate profits are up. And yes, gross domestic product has grown. But average households have lost income over the last year, one in six Americans remain unemployed or underemployed and the jobs that are being created remain low-paid service-sector jobs. There are some interesting possibilities on the horizon—a push to create jobs in the alternative-energy sector, for instance—but these remain down the road. And now …

I filled up the gas tank on my RAV4 late last week — at a cost of $39.14, or $2.999 a gallon, which was a bargain given that the average gas price across the state has hovered at $3.039 a gallon in recent days. And that's the average. A quick review of gas prices in the region — using the AAA Daily Fuel Gauge Report — shows prices ranging from $2.959 in nearby Windsor to $3.109 in Hightstown. The area average, according to AAA, is now $3.058, up from $3.050 last week and $2.998 last month. Six months ago, gas cost an average of $2.590, a little more than it did this time last year ($2.552). …

Sen. Robert Singer wants the death penalty reinstated–not for all offenses, mind you, just for the most heinous ones. Under his proposed legislation, S2674, which is co-sponsored by 10 of his fellow Republicans, including Jennifer Beck, who represents East Windsor and Hightstown, “those who kill an on-duty police officer, murder a child or commit a terrorist attack resulting in fatalities could be put to death,” according to a press release. Singer’s bill comes just weeks after the murder of a Lakewood police officer, Christopher Matlosz, which has led to an outpouring of support for the …

A real energy bill may be stalled in Congress, but that does not mean the nation should give up on moving from fossil fuels to renewable sources to meet its energy needs. First of all, we have no choice. The Pew Center on Global Climate Change describes a warming climate that "will have real consequences for the United States and the world, for with that warming will also come additional sea-level rise that will gradually inundate coastal areas and increase beach erosion and flooding from coastal storms, changes in precipitation patterns, increased risk of droughts and floods, threats to …

Locally, the battle over illegal immigration centers on taxicabs. The Borough of Hightstown has been debating the taxi issue for what seems like an eternity, thanks in no small part to a particularly onerous set of rules that appear designed to keep Latinos from driving local cabs. I say "appear," because no one will admit to that kind of motivation. Instead, we hear arguments like the one made earlier this month to the Borough Council – that the borough's requirement that cabbies speak English was about safety because cabbies need to read road signs. "It's not an issue of picking on anyone…

Information is power. That's a cliché, I know, but clichés become clichés because they carry with them a kernel of truth. We know information is power because the people who lack access to information are easily manipulated and ultimately cede their power to those who control the information. This is true at the national level, especially when it comes to foreign policy and intelligence gathering, an area in which secrecy rules and the prerogatives of the citizen have been neutered – often with the help of compliant journalists. (That's why, despite the cries of treason by Washington …