HOW TO COVER 10 GOVERNORS - AND SURVIVE!
By Gordon Bishop (03/20/07)
I have covered 10 New Jersey governors during my newspaper career, beginning in 1959 as a 21 year-old reporter/columnist at the North Jersey Herald-News (1959-68) and The Star-Ledger (1969-96), New Jersey’s largest paper - and finally as a nationally syndicated columnist at this moment, writing for some 12 million readers a week... and counting. That's almost half-a-century. It feels like a lifetime.
I cast my first vote for a Senator named John F. Kennedy. I had interviewed “JFK” at the Teaneck Armory in Bergen County three days before he was elected president in 1960 by a razor-thin margin. Richard Nixon lost this hotly contested race, which some historians contend Nixon really won, but Kennedy picked up more absentee ballots in Illinois (Chicago) and Texas (Dallas and Houston) to win the White House.
During those 48 years, I also covered 10 New Jersey governors, in the order of their elections: Robert B. Meyner (D), Richard J. Hughes (D), William Cahill (R), Brendan Byrne (D), Thomas Kean, ((R), Jim Florio (D), Christine Todd Whitman (R), Jim McGreevey (D), William Codey (D) and currently, Jon Corzine (D).
Democrats dominated both the Governor’s Office and the State Legislature.
Democrats of liberal persuasion gave New Jersey their first big tax increases. Hughes hit taxpayers with the first sales tax in the mid-1960s, and Byrne whacked taxpayers with the state’s first income tax in the mid-1970s.
The Garden State has never been the same. Big Government became even Bigger Government, boosted by oppressively, burdensome consumer and income taxes.The last three governors – all Democrats—have been struggling to balance a bursting budget as more and more party loyalists fill up more and more bloated bureaucracies.
There is a cure for this taxomanic cancer: Cutting the political fat off this giant pig of a government, if you can call that “governing.”
It’s not going to happen unless there’s another Depression like the one America suffered through in the 1930s.
Predictably, every governor I covered over the past half-century has promised “not to raise taxes.”
They all did, even those whom voters assumed were “moderates” running for public office.
There are no “moderates” in New Jersey – only insufferable “tax-and-spend” politicians.
McGreevey increased taxes 18 percent in just one year of his short-lived term before resigning.
Corzine inherited a state budget of $29 billion last year. After 14 months in office, this superwealthy governor is proposing a budget of $35 billion for fiscal 2007-2008.
Whatever happened to common sense balanced budgets?
Residents and businesses are leaving New Jersey because it has the unenviable distinction of having the highest property taxes in the nation and the highest cost-of-living.
How many homeowners can afford to pay $10,000 a year or more on their modest homes? We’re not talking about estates or mansions. We’re dealing with your average ranch, colonial or split-level on a one-acre, or less, plot of land.
New Jersey has priced its housing beyond the reach of most workers. Even with a two-income family, those of my children’s generation are had-pressed to find decent, affordable housing.
All of this wasteful nonsense because our politicians don’t understand one simple word: DOWNSIZE!
The only way to balance a budget without borrowing more money to operate state government is to downsize government, just as businesses must downsize during hard times to survive.
What’s good for the private sector must be good for the public sector.
So let’s do it – and make history!
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