The next stop for New Jersey in its debt collection fight with the federal government may be federal court.I love how NJ, a state that is supposedly so strapped for cash, was able to find a spare 800Gs to spend on lawyers just to argue that NJ shouldn't have to pay the money back. And this is, mind you, before there has been a single bit of litigation filed.
On Friday, the Transportation Department flatly rejected the state’s arguments for refusing to repay $271 million that was spent on a project, canceled last year, to build a pair of rail tunnels under the Hudson River. The message to Gov. Chris Christie was blunt: Repay now or we will collect the debt the hard way. Plus interest.
You gotta love teabagging politicians like Christie: They are so big on "we have to pay our debts", unless it is money that they owe to the Feds. Then they want to weasel out of it. If it is money that they owe to the banksters, then they'll happily sell poor people to the Soylent Corporation, but they have no problems with ratcheting up the Federal debt by stiffing the Treasury.
Ray LaHood ought to send Vinnie to see Christie with a stark, simple message: "Pay up, Fatso, or else."
2 comments:
The collection action's actually fairly simple on this one. New Jersey gets over $800M/year in federal transportation funds. Just take the $271M out of that $800M. Problem solved. Well, except for the fact that New Jersey's checks to road contractors will start balancing because those checks are predicated on having that federal money in the bank, and the road contractors will stop work until the state pays *them*, meaning that New Jersey's roads will start looking even more cratered than they already look, but hey, that ain't LaHood's problem.
The whole problem arose because LaHood wanted to be *NICE* to Christie by allowing New Jersey to pay the money back over ten or twenty years time so that they wouldn't have to cancel normal road maintenance due to LaHood withholding the whole glop of money at once. Christie, apparently, doesn't understand nice. So be it.
- Badtux the Vicious Penguin
Time to call 'Nicky the Fish' on that rat bastard...
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