Even the most casual observer of New Jersey’s financial scene should be awarded an MBA simply for being exposed to our high-finance shenanigans. Take the word “securitization” for example. To the great unwashed, this may just be a big-time variant of the much reviled payday loan, but to the cognoscenti in Trenton it is just one of a full quiver of financial arrows that keeps this state’s head above water.

It’s easy to see the difference between a payday loan and a “securitized” income stream. Poor people get payday loans; rich financial experts securitize future revenue streams. That’s the complete difference. 

When we couldn’t wait for our annual $350 million or so of tobacco company booty, we “securitized” that income stream and wound up spending $1 billion or so that we’d hadn’t yet gotten. What did we get for that $1 billion - does anybody even remember. Maybe we had a big party in the Meadowlands and I wasn’t invited? 

Now we’re all learning a new term, “monetization of assets.” This is what many of us do when we’ve run out of payday loans, credit card advances but the sheriff is still at the door. We may go to a hock shop and sell ole’ Dad’s gold watch, but wouldn’t it be classier to say we monetized a fee asset to save our collective rears.  

So what’s the big deal in selling the New Jersey Turnpike? Nothing! 

This is just a case of everything that’s old is new again. The Authority was created to build and finance the pike by tolls because the post-war public simply would not pay increased taxes. It’s not that the public didn’t have the money; it’s simply that citizens wanted houses, cars and other parts of the WW II deferred dream and refused to fork over one more red cent to Trenton . . .  and they demanded the massive traffic jams be cleared up. 

The pike was such an iffy proposition back in the later-Forties, Wall Street moguls told NJ to take a hike or pay some stiff, prohibitive interest rates. New Jersey did what it does best: it put the arm on a bunch of regulated industries, Newark-based insurance companies, foisted the risky bonds off on them and slammed the blacktop down for one full year. Voila, the holiest of cash cows was birthed. 

For fifty years, the immense profits from the Turnpike were used, first, to give phony-baloney jobs to everybody’s cousin and, second, to build the pike into what some have described as the best, most complex and most heavily traveled road in the world. This road simply can’t expand anymore unless we double-deck it. So, let’s get what ever cash we can out of it and. . . . Have another party in the Meadowlands? 

 There’s nothing wrong with selling the Turnpike, cashing in on a brilliant idea from a half century ago. What we should be concerned with is what Trenton will do with $10 billion or so in cold, hard cash.  

What makes you, and me, think that this amount of money will pass through Trenton like fat through a goose and that there will not be a golden egg for your children or mine?