What, you don’t like your haircut?

Budget woes elicit outcry. Tax-crunched residents bring ideas to table, read the dead-tree press headline: The Borough Council ran a forum on the 2004 municipal budget, and people showed up to complain. The salient points of the article were

• No Council member committed to specific program cuts.
  

• The “relatively low parking rates are subsidized by borough taxpayers for visitors to the downtown.
  

• Among the residents’ suggestions were that the borough may obtain more payments in lieu of taxes from the nonprofits in town, and taxing The University on its 4.5 million square feet of nontaxable space at a quarter of the municipal rate as a means to defraying infrastructure costs.
  

• A gentleman who’s paying $5,000 a month on property taxes reminded them that residents “will quite likely be voting with our feet”.
  

The first item is to be expected. Council’s on a spending binge.

The second item goes like this: taxes go up since taxpayers subsidize parking, which in turn brings in more cars, which in turn need a $14 million building, which in turn needs subsidies, and on and on.

The third item is never going to happen. Tax-exempt status of non-profits is going to remain exactly the way it is. What’s a great deal more likely to happen is the last item: people vote with their feet. A great many bastions of middle-class prosperity in New Jersey have been ruined by mismanagement. You can name a few if you’ve lived in this state for a decade or so. If you are of a certain age, you or your parents might have even voted with your feet, too.

Speaking of haircuts,

From one bad haircut to another:

Chris Muir’s Day By Day‘s cartoon yesterday, April 30, had Zed watching the TV news where they talked about Kerry flying in his hairdresser by private jet, and the last box showed Zed listening to the commentator say Senator Kerry’s CAFE legislation will require SUVs to attain 35 MPG, to which Zed thinks,

Who’s really getting a haircut here?

Thank you Chris.