Iconcur with Kenneth J. O’Dowd, (“Reinstating ‘Millionaire’s’ Tax Might Make Sense for State,” News Transcript, Your Turn, April 28) that there would be considerable financial savings in New Jersey if we eliminated the redundant administrative overhead of smaller school districts by combining them with other contiguous districts.
However, his contention of “ … blaming the remnants of organized labor in the United States …” for major economic difficulties in New Jersey or the nation is a “straw man” and does not adequately address the issues.
Public employee salaries today are 1.45 times that of private employees in the same jobs, and all benefits of public employees are nearly three times that of private employees.
In addition, the growth of the public sector is unabated in good times and bad times, and in 2009 for the first time in the history of the United States there were more employees in government than in manufacturing.
Neither the federal constitution nor the New Jersey state constitution explicitly state or implicitly suggest a basic human “right” to any kind of health care to union or nonunion workers which “ … would be considered a basic human right in any other industrialized nation …”
PIGS is an acronym for Portugal, Italy, Greece and Spain in the European Union. These nations are about to default on their national debt. Greece is presently begging Germany and other EU nations to lend (give) them billions to forestall the inevitable.
The governments and unions in these socialist nations have a long history of corruption, profligacy and anti-capitalism. They are going bankrupt. No, they are bankrupt.
Public unions are growing in number as government spending continues to grow out of control. While only 8 percent of private employees belong to unions today, 36.5 percent of all government employees belong to unions, 41.9 percent of all local government workers hold union cards.
The typical union member nowadays is a local government worker lobbying city hall to raise taxes so the city can pay him more. Rather than striking to redress difficult working conditions, modern unions fight for more government because they are the government, drifting ever further from labor’s initial goal of improving the life of working Americans.
So Mr. O’Dowd wants to blame the wealthy for our local, state and national predicament and reinstate the “millionaire’s tax”?
Taxpayers who gross more than $400,000 are the job providers in our country and according to the Congressional Budget Office, in 2006, the latest year of available data, the top 20 percent of income earners paid almost 70 percent of all federal income taxes. In 2006, the top 20 percent paid 86.3 percent of all income taxes. It is even higher today.
So should we increase New Jersey state income taxes or property taxes? The first will result in less revenue to the state as those who pay the tax will continue to leave the state. The second is no longer possible; we do not have any more discretionary income to pay New Jersey public employees. Is it possible that Mr. O’Dowd is a government employee with a Ph.D.? He did not say.
John Greene is a resident of Jackson.