Jersey Guy
became having a lot of speech is absolutely crit- ical to a democracy. Where there is no free speech--China, for instance--the government is not more efficient because they've extract- ed...
...The state is increasing the spending cap by a little bit more than 50 percent and increasing the number of people we have to communicate with by around 7 times...
...But New Jersey limits the amount you can spend to air your views...
...It seemed to me I could keep the taxpayers happy and actually educate children...
...They represented the providers, the teachers unions.The most powerful single group in the Democratic coalition is the NEA (National Education Association, the teachers union), then it's AFSCME (American Federation of State, County, and Municipal Employees), and then the AFL-CIO.Trial lawyers are another key governmental interest group...
...began in late 1996 when the dollar price of gold and all other commodities began to fall...
...In a city that's six percent Republican...
...Now, in the general election, I have $8.9 million to communicate with 2.5 million voters...
...So they're thinking,"a nice left-wing revolutionary...
...Deflation--a significant ndersupply of money relLtive to demand--is first 6gnaled by a fall in sensitive commodity prices, which can change rapidly in highly liquid "spot" markets...
...n its simplest form, is non:aring debt of the governacquire more money, eco:tors give up "goods" or which is why gold and sencommodity prices react to changes in the demand dollar liquidity...
...Like inflation, it occurs when a central bank--in our case, the Fed--fails to match the supply and demand of money in the marketplace...
...Number 38 in test scores...
...He'S busy wrestling Democrat Jim McGreevey for New Jersey's governorship...
...Throughout the boom and bust of the late 1990s and the new millennium, I detailed this foe's attacks as it stomped its way through Asia, Russia, Brazil and the U.S...
...twelfth year of a deflation, :)ubled in value over the last ; there hit a 17-year low in i only now are its political .'aders beginning to under;t rates cut close to zero perao effect...
...The Spectator's Bret Swanson spent a cloudy, humid, late-August day with Schundler on the campaign trail...
...The former Wall Streeter's most impressive credential: two terms as the avowedly conservative, wildly popular mayor of mostly poor, mostly ethnic,Jersey Citymit's only GOP mayor since 1917...
...Indeed, although cuts in tax rates are entirely positive for the econospurring the demand for money...
...Financed with high-yield bonds, telecom companies like low-earth orbit satellite operator Globalstar and networksViatel,Winstar, Teligent, and 360networks are bankrupt, and many of their compatriots building the new Internet infrastructure are teetering on the edge with stocks trading for just a few dollars and bonds trading for pennies on the dol2OO...
...How do you improve that dismal scenario...
...Reform is when you change what you're doing...
...Revolution is when you change who has the power to do things...
...Sounds like an inverse relationship...
...Bret Schundler isn't looking that far ahead...
...So instead of giving the teacher a paycheck, you give them the base student amount per child for every child enrolled in their program...
...Why did you leave the Democratic Party...
...farm and energy economies, and later as it crashed into Wall Street and SiliconValley...
...Where does New Jersey rank as far as state spending on education...
...Teachers would be able to pay themselves $100,000, cover all their costsmrent, electricity, books, papermand they'd still be able to take the kids to Europe for the summer...
...n 1995, I predicted that inflation 'S days were numbered.A year later I warned of a new, more exotic enemy deflation...
...For every child in a charter school established by the district, the state should cover 20 percent of the cost per child directly and you can take it off the property taxpayer...
...In 2000, more than $40 billion in corporate debt went unpaid, a record until this year...
...Since 1997, there has been a steady advance in bankruptcy rates, with a record 1.6 million filings in 1998...
...One hundred percent wage reductions, also known as layo~, are frequent...
...In 1997-98, the pivotal price of oil plummeted from $25 to $10 per barrel...
...Yeah, and 48th in the percentage of dollars actually making it into the classroom...
...To put it in perspective, what's called the "base student," which doesn't include the capital costs per school, the cost of the building, special needs, teacher pension subsidies~gets an amount of about $10,000 per child, probably increasing substantially this year...
...Corporate defaults increased to $58 billion in the first half of 2001, with the important telecommunications sector accounting for $16 billion...
...Laws that serve to drive money out of politics are going to give us a worse government, inefficient and abusive of rights and that's what our government will become if we extract the money from politics...
...Everybody's still nodding their heads...
...Quite an indictment...
...It doesn't get you close to $250,000...
...There was nothing he could do until the political establishment realized that conventional medicine would not work...
...What have your against-the-odds experiences taught you about politics...
...When I say, "Money's power and you're not going to have the ability to do what's best for children as long as politicians are controlling our education dollars.You need to be able to control those dollars...
...Losses for General Motors, Ford, DaimlerChrysler, and other auto finance companies could total $18 billion over the next few years...
...Now the teachers might make $70,000 on average with health benefits...
...What about teachers...
...On January 7, I met with Dick Cheney in his transition office near the White House, to warn him that the Bush administration had inherited an economy with a rare disease curable neither by Federal Reserve interest rate cuts nor by the timorous and dilatory series of tax rate reductions then being proposed by his administration...
...In April, I gave the same warning to Treasury Secretary Paul O'Neill, and to SenatorTrent Lott, who was then majority leader...
...And they were hostile to reform.They were totally against school choice because they didn't represent people who were supposed to be the beneficiaries---children and their parents...
...Over the next two years, petroleum exploration and investment in production and infrastructure ground to a halt...
...Then you figure out the other in-classroom costs, like heat, hot water, electricity, insurance...
...Maybe you're total in-classroom cost is around $110,000$120,000, and you end up with more than half the money being spent on bureaucracy outside the classroom...
...Under that scenario, the teacher gets more money by running an effective school where people want to enroll their children...
...The problem, I told him, was a pure monetary disorder that would cause serious damage unless corrected...
...Where there is no free speech--China, for instance--the government is not more efficient because they've extracted money from politics...
...The car leasing business is in turmoil...
...Schundler's basic message is no secret: lower taxes and educational choice, thanks to which Jersey City in the 1990s led the state in new construction activity and created more new jobs than New Jersey's five other largest cities combined...
...became having a lot of speech is absolutely critical to a democracy...
...Bank of America will take a $1.25 billion charge in the third quarter to exit this business because of rapidly falling prices for used cars...
...T he current deflationary process in the U.S...
...In the absence of a SEPTEMBER/OCToBER reference point by which to gauge an under-or over-supply of money, the Fed has to guess...
...Now it ravages global telecommunications companies and capsizes every Third World economy that counts its debt in dollars, from Argentina to Zimbabwe...
...It comes down to whether or not I'll be able to communicate effectively with the people with the limited amount of money that we have to communicate with them...
...Number one in spending...
...They either pay for other services from the district or they buy on the open market...
...In one of many misleading signals whereby monetary ease and monetary tightness mimic each other, the sudden deflationinduced scarcity pushed the price to $35 per barrel in 2000.This, after the global economy had emerged from the Asian crisis against a backdrop of diminished crude supplies...
...I'm not .joking here...
...Imagine this concept in education, where you get financially rewarded for running an effective '48 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR 9 SEPTEMBER/OCToBER 2OO...
...They talked about social justice and caring for the poor, but what I saw (campaigning for Hart in 1984) was that the Democrats' core constituencies had become government interest groups themselves...
...Then they pay you back a rent for the room...
...9 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR...
...Deflation is especially destructive to debtors, who are committed to paying down their debt with more valuable dollars out of incomes that shrink because of declines in the prices of things they produce...
...Sip us up...
...The core constituency in the Republican Party is the taxpayer...
...What are the teachers saying...
...My overriding concern was seeing that poor children could get educated...
...T...
...But why the GOP...
...The Garden State is liberal heartland...
...In late February, I advised my Wall Street clients that, until the problem was corrected, there would be no reason to buy equities.The adjustment to a monetary deflation takes time, but it is inexorable, forcing all nominal prices to fall--including the price of wages, assets, and all goods and services, even the price of haircuts...
...So it's going to be hard to communicate with the broader electorate at the same depth I was able to communicate to the primary voters...
...No McCain-Feingold for you...
...It's just outrageous...
...The reason I can get elected in a place like Jersey City is that, to some folks, I sound more left-wing than the Democrats.When I go out to a housing project, for example, and say that I think politicians don't always care about the people, that they frequently have their own political self-interest at heart, everybody's nodding their heads up and down, saying, "Yes, it's true...
...If you have enough of an ability to communicate with people, if you actually have ideas that are attractive, you can win no matter what...
...How do you connect with blacks and Hispanics--major constuencies in your city...
...They're just going to spend the money in a way that benefits themselves, not you...
...The problem is communicating it to them all because the union will oppose it...
...About twice the national average...
...If you have 25 students in a class, that's $250,000 of operational spending...
...The government is ON THE STUMP WITH BRET SCHUNDLER O ur good friend Bill Buckley says: "Look for him in 2008...
...then again, Schundler, 42, has already beaten the state's "moderate" (think Christie Whitman) GOP machinemincluding 21 out of 22 Republican county chairsmto win the nomination in June's primary...
...It's enough to forgive an apostate Democrat who started in politics backing Gary Hart...
...I had $5.9 million to communicate to about 330,000 voters during the primary...
Vol. 34 • September 2001 • No. 7
