Sunday, November 30, 2008
The grasshoppers never learn.
When times are good, that's when you have to sock away provisions for the lean times that will surely come.
But the short-term thinkers who make up our governments -- federal, state and local -- never prepare for economic hard times.
When the economy is booming, they discover they can cut taxes and still have enough coming in to increase spending. If they overdo it -- and they always do -- they borrow against future revenues, which of course will always grow and grow.
Until they don't.
Then when economic growth slows -- or grinds to a halt, as it now threatens to do -- they find themselves with no good op tions.
Raise taxes when taxpayers are hurting more than ever?
Cut spending when the demand for services is bigger than ever?
Borrow more when there's no money to pay the old debts?
In Aesop's fable (as opposed to the Disney version), the grasshopper who ignored the ant's advice to put away grain for the winter realized its error as it lay starving in the snow.
But in our capitals, it seems no one ever learns. Politicians keep making the same mistake, economic cycle after economic cycle.
And who can blame them? If the public sees coin piling up in government coffers, it doesn't cry out, "Retire the debt! Maintain the infrastructure! Build the surplus!" The cry of the taxpayer is more likely to be "Gimme back my money!"
Then when times are bad and the public expects government to help, government looks in its vaults and finds nothing but IOUs.
Somewhere, an ant is shaking its head.
Sunday, November 23, 2008
John Farmer, longtime national political reporter and columnist for The Star-Ledger, will become editor of the paper's opinion pages, Editor Jim Willse announced.
Farmer will oversee The Star-Ledger's editorial board, as well as its op-ed pages and NJVoices.com, the paper's online opinion forum. He succeeds Fran Dauth, who is among those leaving the paper in its financial restructuring.
Joining Farmer as Deputy Editorial Page Editor is Dan Murphy, an experienced editor who supervised the paper's recent coverage of the presidential election.
Farmer began his career at the Jersey Journal in Jersey City, his hometown. He was Trenton bureau chief and Washington correspondent for the late Newark News, then moved to the Philadelphia Bulletin as its Washington correspondent and later national editor. He joined The Star-Ledger in 1982.
Among the many major stories Farmer has covered were the civil rights movement of the 1960s, the 1968 assassination of Robert F. Kennedy, and the British elections in 1979 that brought Margaret Thatcher to power. He has covered every national election and political convention since 1960.
Murphy joined The Star-Ledger in 1998 after more than 20 years as a writer and editor with the Associated Press in New York, Washington and New Jersey. He was deputy bureau chief in Trenton and bureau chief in Union County before coming to the Newark office as an editor specializing in political and government news.
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