PACKET EDITORIAL, Dec. 8
By: Packet Editorial
Few things in life are as predictable as government studies.
Whenever government at any level decides to take a good look at itself, it appoints a task force, an ad hoc committee, a blue-ribbon commission or some other designated body to study, analyze and offer recommendations about what to do to make things run more smoothly, efficiently or productively.
And what the task forces, committees or commissions come back with is exactly what everybody knew they would come back with before the whole exercise began.
We’ve had this experience in Princeton many times. Either the township or the borough (usually the township) decides it’s time to take a good look at whether the two municipalities would benefit from consolidation. So a special commission is established, the issue is studied from every conceivable angle, and the recommendation comes back that things in Princeton would run much more smoothly, efficiently and productively if the municipalities were consolidated.
Then the recipients of the study in this case the voters in the borough turn the whole thing down.
Things are not much different at the state level. The governor and the Legislature recognize that property taxes in New Jersey are intolerably high, so they initiate a comprehensive study of the situation with the stated purpose of reforming the state’s inequitable tax structure. In the 1970s, this was the charge of the Cahill administration’s Tax Policy Committee. In the 1980s, it was the Kean administration’s State and Local Expenditure and Revenue Policy Commission. In the 1990s, it was the Whitman administration’s Property Tax Commission. And in 2006, it’s the four joint legislative committees that released reports last month listing 98 specific recommendations for reform.
In every case, these studies have recommended streamlining state agencies, consolidating county and municipal services, changing the formula for funding public education, economizing on public employee pension and benefit plans and shifting the tax burden from county and local property taxes to a more broad-based state levy. And these recommendations have, for the most part, been ignored.
It’s possible, of course, that the 2006 exercise will break the mold that this governor and this Legislature will dare to tread where their predecessors didn’t. But we can’t say we hold out a great deal of hope for this eventuality.
Which brings us to the federal level, where President Bush, battered and beleaguered by an unpopular war in Iraq that has cost him the confidence of the electorate and cost his party control of both houses of Congress, sought the counsel of the bipartisan Iraq Study Group. This group, unlike the neoconservative ideologues who fashioned the administration’s Middle East policy, took a long, hard, objective look at conditions in Iraq and throughout the region, and offered a realistic assessment of the situation with which no reasonable person could disagree it’s bleak, and getting bleaker.
The study group offered up a series of recommendations that likewise contained no surprises. First and foremost, it encouraged a "diplomatic offensive," rather than a military strategy, to quell sectarian violence in Iraq. It noted that failure to include Iran, Syria and other unfriendly regimes in "region-wide diplomacy and engagement" would doom U.S. efforts to failure. It rejected a "stay-the-course" strategy, while at the same time cautioning against a specific timetable for the withdrawal of U.S. forces.
In short, it encouraged the Bush administration to give up a fruitless, go-it-alone armed conflict and redirect its focus toward diplomatic efforts aimed at achieving a political solution hardly an original or earth-shattering recommendation.
What remains to be seen, of course, is whether the president has any intention of following this suggestion. Or whether it will, like so many similar initiatives over so many years at so many levels of government, turn out to be mere window dressing.

