Garden State Patriot

Some in the media have been comparing Caroline Kennedy to Sarah Palin – even coining the silly phrase ‘Palin-ized.’ But Caroline Kennedy is no Sarah Palin. Sarah Palin is a self-made woman. She didn’t use a man or a last name that some bestow royalty upon to get where she is. Palin has actually run a government. She has more in common with the so-called ‘working family’ than any Kennedy ever could. Quite frankly, any comparison between the two is an insult to Palin. 
Of course, let’s just wait and see if SNL belittles Mrs. Kennedy in the same manner they did Sarah Palin considering her lack of experience, as well as her stumbling-type speech as witnessed here.

Just when you think you’ve heard it all…

In a report detailing New York Governor Paterson’s proposed ‘09 budget, the Governor is planning, among other things, to propose cuts in education and health care while imposing taxes on hospitals and insurance policies. The fact that the Governor is going to, ahem, force seniors to choose between food and medicine is bad enough but here’s the kicker…

Paterson wants to levy a tax on those dreaded menaces to society – soda drinkers! Yes, in order to help close the state’s ever-widening budget gap, what better way than to impose an ’obesity tax’ on fatties who imbibe sugary-laced carbonated beverages, eh?

But whatever you do, don’t think for a moment that this is a liberal telling us how to run our lives or unfairly treating one group of people over another. No, no, no. Only mean Republicans do that. You see, this is just the Governor looking out for us. His intentions are good so who are we to question him or this blatant misuse of the tax system?

All I can say is I hope this is one budget proposal that falls…flat.

What do you call it when a state is poised to have fewer private sector jobs than it head 10 years earlier? You guessed it – the “Lost Decade.” And that’s exactly the course New Jersey is on. Via TMCNet.com:

The state also may suffer a “lost decade,” in which the state has fewer private-sector jobs in 2010 than when the millennium began, according to the report by James Hughes, dean of Rutgers University’s Edward J. Bloustein School of Public Policy, and Joseph Seneca, an economist at the school.

The pair made their predictions in the latest edition of their monthly Sitar-Rutgers Regional Report, titled: “The lost employment decade.”

The report said that if the “lost decade” occurred it would be “the first time since the 1930s Great Depression that we have fewer private-sector jobs at the end of the decade than at the beginning.”

Additionally the article says…

New Jersey will likely continue to lose jobs until March 2010, and perhaps February 2011, if history is any guide

Certainly the recent economic turmoil is a factor in the state’s jobs prospects over the next two years, but the article makes it plain that the state’s problems have been brewing for much longer than that. New Jersey is in fiscal trouble because we are the worst state for taxes in the nation and it’s causing businesses to leave. For this we have no one else to thank but McGreevey, Corzine and our Democratically-controlled State Legislature.

So, Governor Corzine might eliminate property tax rebates for the already strapped New Jersey taxpayer in order to close the budget gap.

“We’re hopeful that we will be able to sustain it, but I can’t promise anything in this environment.”

So, let me get this straight. With property taxes in this state already through the roof, and many residents having been whacked in the past few years with re-evaluations, one of the the first things considered to go is rebates for homeowners?

On top of this, the Governor is still going full steam ahead on his social engineering scheme to build 100,000 taxpayer subsidized housing units (he calls them ‘affordable housing units,’ we don’t) all across the state, which will only hurt the value of the homes already in these communities. But here’s the kicker: The state already doesn’t have enough money for these projects a mere 4 months after the legislation passed the Legislature. The solution? What else? The Governor wants to give “the state Housing and Mortgage Finance Agency the power to borrow money to invest in affordable housing.”

More state debt. More burden on the taxpayer. No break for the homeowner, but the homeowner must pay the way for others. Welcome to the Peoples Republic of New Jersey.

I’ve never been a fan of Mayor Bloomberg. There’s just something off-putting about a guy who just won’t admit he’s another liberal do-gooder, particularly one who’s always on a quest for power. Never really a Republican, and hardly an independent, Mr. Bloomberg just can’t seem to stop scheming to stick it to taxpayers.

His latest machination is to start forcing motorists to pay tolls on the Brooklyn, Manhattan, Williamsburg and 59th Street bridges. Nor does he want to give up on his punitive congestion tax. On top of that he wants to start taxing plastic bags at grocery stores. (See here.)

One has to ask, when is enough enough?

You’d think that with all the tolls motorists already pay when they cross into NYC on a daily basis there’d be more than enough dough. Heck, it costs me about $20 in tolls just to go to a Mets game from NJ, between the GWB and the Triborough (soon to be RFK Bridge).

My reco to New Jerseyans: stay out of NYC at all costs. My reco to New Yorkers: Vote this guy out.