Page 16 THE VILLADOM TIMES IV • August 11, 2010 up for it. Some people have told me that the property taxes they are paying today on houses with no mortgages are now higher than the mortgage and taxes they were paying before they paid off the mortgage. Like a lot of people, my latest tax bill was not a pretty sight. The bad news is that “for sale” signs popped up like mushrooms after the bills went out. What’s worse is that almost nobody seems to be buying real estate right now. The revised figures were set off with a disclaimer that the bulk of local taxes were for the schools, and the municipal government is not responsible for the schools. Who is responsible for the high cost of education? The people who collect the paychecks know where the buck stops, and they won’t quit collecting the pay because the rest of us aren’t happy about the prospect of losing the house so an older teacher or almost any administrator can make as much money as a young doctor or a less-than-notorious lawyer. The voters who keep approving school budgets are also in the circle of blame, as are those municipal officials who refuse to make really serious cuts when the budgets are turned down. When the Wyckoff school budget was defeated by about 20 votes earlier this year, the township’s officials cut the school budget by almost $500,000 – and almost none of it interfered with the educational operation of the school. Local contractors and crafts people volunteered to do some of the light construction and decorating work that had to be postponed due to budget cuts, and due to the volunteer spirit, the kids didn’t suffer at all. The coda to this is that, in response to questions asked at a Wyckoff Township Committee meeting, township officials reported that they had asked the administrators and the teachers to accept -- not a pay cut, but a reduction in increases – and had been turned down. It’s time somebody got real out there. When you are living in the middle of Foreclosure Country and municipal employers in mighty Ridgewood are being told to take an unpaid furlough or hit the bricks, it might be a good idea for teachers to accept a wage freeze rather than tell their students how badly teachers are paid. Some of my tutorial students used to tell me how badly their teachers were paid. When I quoted the actual salaries, those who knew how much money their parents earned said they felt betrayed. After explaining to the teachers that the money isn’t there, we might also look into the problem of redundant administrative jobs, which are at the high end of tax money waste. The “American Way” extols people who work hard and keep their nose to the grindstone and their shoulder to the wheel until they land the job that pays for all their dreams – provided that job is in the private sector and takes its money from people who spend voluntarily and not from people who stand to lose the house if the taxes get much higher, or who can’t afford to send their kids to the colleges the kids like best because it costs too much. Schools in our area certainly aren’t awful, but the idea that they are “great” is a false cliché. I know from experience. Most kids learn their mathematics exclusively from the schools, unlike English and history, which the kids can pick up from family conversations, TV, or the Internet. My tandem math tutor and her sometime adjunct were high school kids when they discovered they could add 100 points to the SAT scores of kids who attended high school in Northwest Bergen County and had never learned some of the basic principles of SAT-level mathematics. (They were younger than some of the people they tutored, and still knew math techniques that the American-born kids had never learned.) Paying a high school senior or a college freshman to teach you what the teachers didn’t isn’t much of an endorsement of “great” schools. I once tutored a kid who was an A-B student in a Northwest Bergen County high school. The student, who had no special needs, was an American-born white kid with English-speaking parents, but had never heard the words “seldom” or “chart.” I notice there is no shortage of institutional SAT preparation operations, either. Isn’t that the school’s job? Will continued raises in hard times help kids learn basic math, or define the words seldom or chart? I do not think they will. The problem may solve itself. Most colleges aim at producing professionals, and at producing administrators and sales personnel. The professionals are clearly necessary, but the need for administrators and sales personnel is postulated on having something to administer besides government work (as in factories), and something to sell (as in useful products). Examine the goods being sold anywhere except in food or hardware stores or book stores, and see where it’s made. It won’t always be the same country, but it generally is not the United States. How much longer will the schools keep turning out graduates who won’t be able to find college graduate jobs - until the nation goes bankrupt? This could happen sooner than anybody thinks. We can get a handle on excessive educational spending now, or we can reach for that handle as the slipstream sucks us out the door at 40,000 feet. Good to have a choice. My son, who understands cars better than I do, recently got my car through inspection. It’s an equitable division of labor. He takes a little time off to take care of the car, and I write newspaper columns to help save the economy. In case you haven’t noticed, New Jersey Automobile Inspection has been cancelled, except for emissions control. Before they started to do inspections in service stations, this was an annual nightmare for people with older cars. I have vague, mercifully fading, memories of grouchy old men who gave the nod to young women in miniskirts and flunked young men on the slightest misgiving that their cars were less than perfect. Right around the corner from the primary inspection site in Lodi, there used to be a garage where the mechanics would fix whatever was wrong so you could get it all done in just one day of sitting in the broiling sun on the asphalt reflector pad. This being New Jersey, I have to wonder if any money changed hands between the guys who flunked the cars and the guys who fixed them. This being America, I’m saying that I wonder, and not that I can prove anything. Libel suits are more expensive by far than designer clothing or other suits made by a tailor and not a lawyer. My car passed the emissions test, and my son responsibly got a replacement backup light installed so that it would have passed the mechanical inspection if there had been one. I left him the registration and the insurance card, and he returned it to me. I was trying to insert the registration card in my wallet when a traffic light changed and took my mind off the project. By the time I remembered it, I couldn’t find it. I made a quick call to the New Jersey Department of Motor Vehicles. The woman I spoke to told me not to worry, my registration had been paid, and New Jersey would mail me a duplicate registration. She was so helpful and nice that I had to ask about her job. “I guess I’m okay for right now, but we’re all worried about what’s going to happen in January,” she said. I wished her luck, and I was being sincere. People who do their jobs have a right to hold onto them provided their salaries and benefits aren’t outrageous. It’s fairly incredible to me that New Jersey got rid of the nightmare known as auto inspection. I received a rush similar to the one I received when I woke up one morning and found out that the Soviet Union had crumbled. Best of all, the State of New Jersey saved mega-bucks running a program where a lot of the employees already had a pension to fall back on. When it’s taxpayer money, one pension ought to be enough. According to federal officials, 45 percent of employed people pay no income tax at all. Some of these people are low-wage earners who receive earned-income credits, but some of these people are also big ticket earners so cleverly invested that the deductions they can claim by owning real estate and other deductible investments wipes out anything they owe Uncle Sam. Of course, if they live around here, the property taxes they pay on their houses more than makes Getting a handle on excessive spending Bergen County Executive Dennis McNerney and the Bergen County Board of Chosen Freeholders, along with the Bergen County Division on Disability Services, the Heightened Independence and Progress Organization, and Bergen Community College held a celebration in honor of the 20th Anniversary of the Americans with Disabilities Act. The ADA is a Federal Civil Rights law which guarantees individuals with disabilities equal opportunity in employment, public accommodations, state and local government services, transportation, and telecommunications. The event was held at Bergen Community College in Paramus. Pictured are Bergen County Sheriff Leo McGuire, Tammy Molinelli, Julia Orlando, Bergen County Freeholder Chairman James M. Carroll, and Anthony Oaker. ADA’s 20th Anniversary marked