Hats off to New Jersey

Watching Governor John Corzine of New Jersey attempting to modernize his state’s highways and bridges should tell us a good deal about the future of the United States. It’s altogether possible to miss this story in the flux of substandard reporting about the presidential campaigns. But this story "is" the story of our nation’s fast approaching decades.

Governor Corzine’s problem exemplifies the dilemmas of leadership in post-Reagan America when the idea of taxation is triangulated in the public imagination with waste and inefficiency. The Reagan shtick was always built on the idea that the government was big and wasteful and if you just kept starving the government the wondrous world of the private sector would step in and take over and everything would be more efficient and cost-effective.

I’m all for the private sector. I love my kitchen appliances. Who would want a government built toaster?

(The government built toaster is powered by a recumbent bicycle which is also hooked mysteriously to your neighbor’s electric garage door opener.)

Governor Corzine’s problem is that the Reagan revolution produced unimaginable consequences. The Federal government that was built by FDR and was perfected by Eisenhower, the government that John F. Kennedy inherited—a government that could imagine sending people to the moon within a decade has been largely destroyed. The federal government can’t rebuild New Orleans or even build a fence along the Mexican border without Haliburton and a thousand lobbyists and hangers on who work for the lobbyists and who used to be known as "loan sharks" but nowadays are called "public policy advisors".

The Reagan legacy is both a tale of privatization and deregulation of commerce and the successful misrepresentation of government as a problem.

God help the politician who would step to the microphone and tell the people that schools and roads and bridges and water treatment and meat inspection and the center for disease control cost money. These things don’t run on private donations.

Both FDR and Eisenhower understood that these things must necessarily be paid for by taxing the wealthy more than the middle class. And the wealthy disliked these men. Reagan was the political son of Senator Barry Goldwater who was the GOP’s reactionary answer to Eisenhower.

Say what you will but President Eisenhower understood how FDR had saved America from foes both foreign and domestic. God how the right wing wealthy hated the old general.

How will our nation build new bridges or clean our water supply?

Will we hold a bake sale?

Will we have special TV telethons depicting collapsed bridges and calling on the good hearted public to phone in a generous donation?

Governor Corzine has proposed a comprehensive plan to save New Jersey’s transportation infrastructure because everyone knows that we’re in a crisis.

The plan calls for some substantial tax increases. All of these are staggered over time and they are carefully indexed to cost-effective public management of capital resources.

(People forget that FDR’s "New Deal" was not wasteful. An efficient government working on behalf of the public can account for every dime. We forget this at our peril.)

While the respective presidential candidates talk about change in vaporous terms and when the Bush administration is calling for more tax cuts to stimulate an imperiled national economy, only Governor Corzine has had the courage to step forward with a proposal that reminds us of FDR and the old general.

Will we pay taxes in order to remain a first world nation?

I for one am praying that the people of New Jersey will show the courage to do what’s right. The people of the garden state must return our faith to accountable and democratic government.

The private sector ain’t gonna fix the roads. They can’t even run an airline.

S.K.