March 24, 2010 THE VILLADOM TIMES II • Page 23 is not what’s playing any more. The people who moved to upscale towns so their kids would not get mugged for lunch money are not able to support those fantasies of public prep schools. Similarly – brutal as it may sound – people who somehow expect that special education programs are somehow going to turn their kids into four-year college material also need to take a look at reality. These are good, lovable kids, but no taxpayer program on earth is going to turn them into competitors for the Ivy League or even for Rutgers or Montclair. Parents need to lose this fantasy instead of foisting it off on society. The tax burden on people who are earning too much money for the entitlement program and too little for tax shelters is backbreaking as it stands, and trying to make these people pay for programs that do not work because they just cannot work is cruel and unusual punishment. We need to look into ways to save money in every way we can. The police officers came through for everybody in this latest catastrophe, and we need to remember that. The fact that police officers need and deserve state-of-the-art medical and dental programs and a valid living wage is a no-brainer. They earn it. We need to take care of the people who talk care of us when things aren’t working out. We also need to make sure there are enough police officers for a full shift, day and night. On the other hand, I think we could save a fortune on buying police officers state-of-the-art guns. The last police officer I knew who had shot and killed somebody in the line of duty retired 20 years ago. We used to compare notes because he had also shot and killed people when he was in the service. I have probably slain as many evildoers as the entire police establishment of Northwest Bergen Count at this point – which is to say, none. I have done so without a taxpayer subsidy, except when I was in the dirty old Army, not an option for most officers today. Let’s make sure the brave men and women on our police forces don’t have to resort to part-time jobs to pay for their medical insurance, but if they want to upgrade their firepower, let them pay for it out of pocket. I don’t support arbitrary gun control. Neither do I support arbitrary gun proliferation. When I was a soldier many years ago, I was taught that it was better to make a garrote and strangle people anyway. You can’t make this stuff up; that is what they told us. Skip all these Glocks and use a .38 or a .45 like Wild Bill Hickok or Wyatt Earp. That’s the American way. Two groups that do not require guns to be heroic are the volunteer fire departments, backed by the ambulance corps volunteers. Some of these people did without sleep for 48 hours or more during the power failures, the basement flooding, and the fallen trees. If ever the taxpayers got a bargain, it was when the members of these groups stood up for the towns they live in. They put their lives on the line along with the hundreds of hours they spend in training and on duty, and their contributions are the best-kept secret in Northwest Bergen as far as the taxpayers are concerned. If we had to pay people to perform these duties, everybody’s tax bill would jump up in a way that made people scream. They are the ultimate class act, and whatever we can do for them or their families is well worth doing. It is an ill wind that blows no good – and the wind that shut off our power for one, two, or three days was a very ill wind. But what it may have showed us was that we are tougher than we thought we were. We learned that we could cope without telephones or electricity for a couple of days with a little imagination. In just such a way, we can learn to cope with the new state budget that cuts back on state employees who can never be bothered to pick up their telephones anyway, cuts back on the number of people who don’t do their jobs anyway and – dare we hope – allows people who enjoy putting money into the bank to save for their own retirements instead of taking “escape” vacations to tropical places where people hate Americans and leave it to Uncle Sam to plan their eventual retirements. Read my lips: Uncle Sam doesn’t exist. He is a figment of somebody’s imagination. The average American is very much on his own as far as long-term economics. Not Bush, nor Obama, nor Uncle Sam cares what happens to you. Help the very poor as your conscience tells you to, and put the rest of it in the bank, under the mattress, or in the most conservative possible investments. We just saw what happens when the infrastructure breaks down for a couple of days. It wasn’t pretty. If it happens on a long-term, basis, you’re on your own. My wife and I grew up playing cowboys and Indians with real Indians. The real Indians depend on the federal government for everything. They sometimes live the way Northwest Bergen just did for a couple of days for months or years at a time. Extreme cold out West is known among whites as a Three Dog Night – whence the name of the rock group. If you don’t want to depend on canine insulation, squawk like a banshee at every tax bite and put that cash in the bank. The rest of it doesn’t work. The good news after the recent storm is that most of us once again have electrical power and telephone service again. (Mine still doesn’t work, but the phone company still hates me because I denounced them to the Board of Public Utilities and the Justice Department on a “slamming” charge.) The bad news is that we had better not depend on New Jersey, the United States, or anybody else as part of the entitlement program that comes with being born here, serving in the armed forces, and paying our taxes for umpteen years. The fantasy that Big Papa or Big Mama could protect us all from the real world collapsed over the weekend of March 13-12 and some of the top addresses in Northwest Bergen County were left without electrical power for multiple days. Life is hard, and a big income, present or previous, does not leave any of us bulletproof. My wife and I were watching PBS play the songs of our adolescence in a bid to raise money when the TV coverage tanked. We shrugged it off with a decision to hit the sack early that night. When you have lived with the people who were here first, as we both have, a power failure is no big deal. The people whose lives vectored around the computer may have decided the end of the world had arrived, but they have since been extricated from doom – at least temporarily. No sooner had most of Northwest Bergen gotten its electrical power back than we got the news from the governor: New Jersey’s budget had finally dropped back from the Twilight Zone and was finally back into the real world. I am going to miss those rebates, but I was at least convinced that the governor was trying to be an honest man. New Jersey has always been a sort of grisly farce where fiscal integrity is concerned, but one can at least hope that things get better. The new administration at least has a handle on what is happening in New Jersey. Too many people are working for the state at serious salaries, but really are not doing much of anything. Howls of outrage may erupt as state-level jobs are cut, but the reality is that government has been turned into an entitlement program so people who “know somebody” will never have to enter the awful reality of the private sector, where wages for productive labor are absurdly low. Money is funny stuff. The money some people used to make with a sudden hop on the stock market could be spent painlessly because it was made painlessly. The money earned through useful labor, or produced by a two percent interest rate, is a little different. Some of the people who saw the Ivy League as part of an entitlement program that came with their property taxes are now hard pressed to pay their property taxes. Some of the people who saw their property taxes as a reach for Rutgers and are satisfied with a couple of years of Spanish and math are still paying their bills. Both groups need to be considered, but the people who once saw the public schools as a discount alternative to Choate or Lawrenceville need to realize that this Ill wind in Northwest Bergen: A Harbinger or a fair warning Letters to the Editor Dear Editor: Mr. Koster’s column is almost always my favorite part of the paper. I consider myself to be both a bit of a history buff as well as someone who is reasonably up to date on local affairs. So you can see why his columns get my attention. However, his recent missive, “A Tough Decision,” was really disjointed. First he gave us the history lesson about mistreatment of Native Americans, without any mention that in recent decades their problems may have more too due with personal responsibility than the issues their ancestors suffered. He then wandered into the Ridgewood Village Council mess about COAH housing and a group home in particular. Noting that the neighborhood group that opposed it was evenly divided (racially) left me wondering what his point was. Did he consider suggesting that since multiple mandate housing projects already reside there it would be better if other neighborhoods accepted some of these burdens? Since he didn’t head down that road, was he considering attacking COAH and making it clear that mandated housing projects were bad for all neighborhoods everywhere? His last few sentences seemed to be heading in the direction that COAH’s choice of that area was because of its historical racial makeup and its lack of economic clout. He failed to make that clear. The whole Hitler/COAH comparison was way out of place. Maybe something about eminent domain would have been more balanced. In any event, if he dislikes COAH and similar programs, why not mention that these problems come mostly from New Jersey Supreme Court rulings and, in a few cases, from progressive politicians? Why not mention some of the politicians who voted for this legislation and which party supports these programs? Lastly, he knows what the minimum wage is and how irrelevant it is to life in Northwest Bergen County. If we Reader left wondering doubled that wage tomorrow, it would not make any more homes affordable in this area for those who work for that amount. Would a handful of small apartment dwellers have more income in this area? Maybe, but most economists and small business owners will tell you that raising that wage often causes more unemployment and job losses to those same people. Whole sections of libraries are devoted to books about Hitler, Native Americans, government programs, minimum wage debates, and the racial makeup of neighborhoods. Trying to tie them altogether in a limited space was misguided. It could only leave readers wondering. Jack Carroll Ridgewood