Ask for the Sun to Get the Moon

Via The Daily Journal:

If Gov. Jon S. Corzine is going to push ahead with a scaled-back version of his toll road plan, it will likely be without the complex public benefit corporation that he proposed creating to run the roads, Sen. Raymond Lesniak said Friday.

"It would be a lot easier to accomplish without the public benefit corporation," said Lesniak, D-Union. "It's more likely that we do whatever we're going to do without it."

Lesniak said Corzine's plans to cut state debt and fund transportation projects, which has little public or legislative support, may still be viable but with "substantially" smaller toll increases than those Corzine first proposed.

The governor's plan to raise tolls 800 percent by 2022, and by inflation thereafter, would have halved state debt and funded decades of transportation projects, but Corzine acknowledged Thursday that the plan doesn't have the votes to pass the Legislature.

Does anyone doubt that this "substatnially smaller toll increases" will be in triple-digit percentages?

And watch, over the next few weeks, how the spin changes. Up until now, Corzine has been talking about "50% increases over the course of n years", but now Corzine and the "alternative"-proposing Democrats will be talking about the 800% increase in tolls that was originally proposed. "We're not octupling your tolls", they'll say, "we're just raising them by 25% a year for five or six years. Isn't that courageous of us?"

Is this not a classic case of asking for the sun so you can get the moon?

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