Karen Heller: The lesson from the streets: Big money is not the answer

Friends, what have we learned this past week? Plenty.

Pundits will tell you that Chris Christie won New Jersey's gubernatorial race and Jon Corzine lost it because there's a backlash against President Obama's agenda.

Wrong. Fewer than half of registered voters went to the polls, mostly to vote against Corzine, a sweater vest with a nominal pulse.

Despite making millions in Wall Street, then spending them on his campaign, Corzine proved a poor manager who did little about New Jersey's punitive property taxes. Also, it was not a good year to be associated with Goldman Sachs.

As a federal prosecutor, Christie went after politicians. Voters love this. Christie even went after politicians dealing with rabbis selling kidneys and fake Gucci bags, which, really, you cannot make up.

You can mock a politician about almost anything, such as wealth and sweater vests. But not, as Corzine learned in attacking Christie, his weight. Then you insult voters, too.

What does this tell us? It is easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle than for a former Goldman chairman to be returned to Trenton.

New Jersey spent millions trying to fix the heartbreak of Camden. The lesson? You can give poor people fish in a fancy aquarium, as The Inquirer's Matt Katz reports, but if they don't have proper sewerage and their streets remain unsafe, all that good will amounts to is squalor.

Cities are healed by people, not merely cash going into the pockets of the powerful. Plenty of folks have to be enticed to move to hurting cities, to put down roots, improve housing, launch businesses serving residents, invest emotionally and financially in revitalizing a community.

And places like Camden need involved, committed local governance. Otherwise, the state is pouring money down a clogged drain.

In Philadelphia, the Board of Revision of Taxes is the poster child in a very crowded field for municipal incompetence. Turns out the board violated the Sunshine Act by voting privately to shift the setting of property values for taxes to the Finance Department, according to City Solicitor Shelley Smith.

This is a whole new level of ineptitude. They ought to hand out medals for this. The BRT is so incompetent and secretive - the former sort of forcing the latter - that it can't even put itself out of business legally.

What the BRT doesn't do is important. It fails to collect money for services while the city squanders funds on malfunctioning departments - like the BRT.

City Council, with a staff of 200, wants to hire a publicist for as much as $100,000. True, Council could benefit from a better image. Most days, it does not feel the love. Guess what? It already has a communications director, who earns $96,000. So, in the age of cutbacks, Council plans to spend twice as much to burnish its image, damaged, in part, from being wasteful.

In Harrisburg, however, money thrown at legislators can do wonders, though not for taxpayers, whom - correct me if I'm wrong - they serve.

Special interests spent $1.5 million to avert levies on cigars and smokeless tobacco projected to net the commonwealth almost $38 million in new taxes this fiscal year. One purveyor told The Inquirer's Mario Cattabiani that he spent money on receptions and cigars for lawmakers as revenue for Pennsylvanians went up in canapés and smoke.

Natural-gas interests did even better, dispensing $1.6 million on lobbyists. That's a drop in Marcellus Shale drilling revenue to avoid taxes that would have produced $107.2 million in funds this year.

"Invest a lot of money, and you are going to have a lot more clout at the bargaining table," said Barry Kauffman of Common Cause of Pennsylvania.

But it isn't a lot of money. A $3.1 million investment created a $145 million loss in state revenue. Legislators can be wined and dined and smoked to protect the interests of the few over the concerns of the many, proving that they're lobbyist-wise and taxpayer-foolish.