Goodbye, Fort Monmouth

Well, looks like Fort Monmouth is closing. If Bush approves the proposal, it will become law in 9 weeks, it says at the end of the article. 9 weeks more of 5000 jobs in NJ.

Obviously this is very bad news to someone like me who thinks that 5000 people suddenly out of work in NJ might have a detrimental effect on the state. Maybe? You think? I was going to write a lot more about this, but then I popped over to Blanton's and Ashton's, and found that GD Frogsdong already did.

Frequent readers of this blog know that for every dollar New Jersey sends to Washington in the form of taxes, we get only %0.57 back. New Jersey is last in that statistic. Closing Fort Monmouth will lower our return even further. This is a matter that should be of concern to every citizen in this state. Our money is going out to support things like $230 million dollar bridges in Alaska that will connect a community of 700 people to the mainland or to keep Alabama from slipping from the 19th into the 18th century, but what about New Jersey?

We fight, but with losing numbers. We get less of the things that we want, and yet we seem to pay for more of them. We, as a state, need to band together to fight for our rights to the amount of government support that we actually deserve.