Today's bill of the day (a new tradition) is S267. If this bill were to pass it would reduce the sales and use tax from 7% to 6%. It was introduced back in January by Senator Joseph M. Kyrillos, Jr. and is still waiting to be reviewed by the Senate Budget and Appropriations Committee. This is a bill I can wholeheartedly get behind.
The use tax is a ludicrous concept in which the state believes that it deserves a piece of anything you buy anywhere. The state of NJ wants to have its hand in your pocket no matter where you are in the world. If I go buy something in another country and paid no taxes on it and bring it back to NJ I am required to pay a 7% use tax. Its a sales tax that follows you wherever you go.
Friday, April 11, 2008
Another School Budget Fiasco...
An audit of the Union City School District showed that they paid $345 per month for each of 39 cell phones and paid bus drivers six hours of overtime a month to charge them. Five drivers were paid overtime ranging from $39,000 to $73,000 per year. This is another example of the extreme inefficiencies of government bureaucracies.
Now that Gov. Jon Corzine is cutting the municipal aid that the state hands out each year everyone is taking a careful look at their own budgets and they are finding leaks. Leaks like this one exist all over the place and are quite common. This is a symptom of having bureaucrats manage our tax money with absolutely no accountability for what happens. Is someone going to get into trouble for the obvious mistake of paying overtime for charging a cell phone? No.
And it's not 100% the fault of the bureaucrats, it's also the state government. This is how their budget works. They give a municipality some aid money. If the municipality doesn't use it all up then the state figures they don't need as much funds and the next year they give them less money. But if the municipality is able to spend all the money and show a need for more then the state will consider increasing its aid. And the more money the municipality is able to bring in from the state the better the elected counsel and mayor will look, even though this money is coming from taxes levied on the residents of this same town.
It's a vicious cycle and the only way to end it is to severely decrease the amount of money that the government both collects and expends. The less money they have the much more efficient they will have to be.
Click here for the news article.
Now that Gov. Jon Corzine is cutting the municipal aid that the state hands out each year everyone is taking a careful look at their own budgets and they are finding leaks. Leaks like this one exist all over the place and are quite common. This is a symptom of having bureaucrats manage our tax money with absolutely no accountability for what happens. Is someone going to get into trouble for the obvious mistake of paying overtime for charging a cell phone? No.
And it's not 100% the fault of the bureaucrats, it's also the state government. This is how their budget works. They give a municipality some aid money. If the municipality doesn't use it all up then the state figures they don't need as much funds and the next year they give them less money. But if the municipality is able to spend all the money and show a need for more then the state will consider increasing its aid. And the more money the municipality is able to bring in from the state the better the elected counsel and mayor will look, even though this money is coming from taxes levied on the residents of this same town.
It's a vicious cycle and the only way to end it is to severely decrease the amount of money that the government both collects and expends. The less money they have the much more efficient they will have to be.
Click here for the news article.
Who Visits This Blog?
I have used Google Analytics to find out who visits this blog and here is a list of some veerrryyy interesting readers who have visited in the last 30 days:
- lockheed martin corporation
- new jersey department of transportation
- state of new jersey
- state of new jersey department of treasury
- new york city police department
- army & air force exchange service
- bernards township
- city of newark
- east brunswick board of education
- equal rights advocates
- fairfield police department
- federal aviation administration
- mcguire air force base
- star-ledger
- state of delaware
I am glad that these institutions are aware of this blog and were interested enough to at least take a peak. I wonder if any of them got anything out of reading an article, I hope that we got them to at least question some of our state government policies.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
