First they came for the drivers.
That was my initial reaction to that plan to remake the state's finances that was released last week by a bipartisan committee called the Economic and Fiscal Policy Working Group.
The plan offers many useful cost-cutting measures, such as reforms in the state's retirement systems and more shared services on the county and municipal levels.
But it also includes yet another plan to pile the state's fiscal problems on the backs of the long-suffering Jersey driver.
The biggest such problem is public-employee pensions. There's a $155.5 billion deficit in the pension funds, the plan states. It recommends dedicating the revenue from the Turnpike Authority to shoring up the pension plans.
"Adding the New Jersey Turnpike system to the fund could reduce the unfunded liability by $15 billion to $18 billion, while adding a continuing revenue stream that could grow if New Jersey adds HOT lanes to federal Interstates as Virginia and Maryland did to cut congestion or if the federal government decides to permit barrier tolls in the future," the report states.
This did not sit well with Steve Carrellas, the state representative of the National Motorists Association, a driver-advocacy group.
"They can't take transportation money to solve the pension problem," he said. "It's another ill-conceived plan that didn't work last time and won't work this time."
Last time, of course, was 2008, when Democratic Gov. Jon Corzine promoted a complicated toll scheme that would have permitted the state to fund its pension plans, among other things. Corzine told a joint session of the Legislature we needed the plan because "Pigs will fly over the Statehouse before there's a realistic level of new taxes or spending cuts that can fix this mess."
Pigs flew, all right. But they were helium balloons released at a Statehouse rally organized by radio-station 101.5-FM to protest the Corzine plan.
That put an end to the Corzine toll plan, but not to the fiscal problems. Corzine turned out to be correct when he predicted the legislators would ignore those problems, which are now falling in the lap of the new Democratic governor, Phil Murphy.
Murphy had no role in preparing this report. He's made it plain that he's opposed to many of its findings, such as recommendations that the current system of defined-benefit pensions be phased out for future hires in favor of a hybrid system and a requirement that public employees move to health plans that are less costly.
As for how he feels about increasing tolls, Murphy has given mixed signals. When I asked him during the campaign last year if he intended to impose tolls on the Interstates, Murphy said he had no plans to do so.
However he named as his transportation commissioner Diane Gutierrez-Scaccetti. She is a veteran of two toll-road authorities, our own Turnpike Authority and Florida's Turnpike Enterprise (which is having its own problems with tolls). So that's something to watch.
But I suspect the real drama here is on the national level. President Trump has flirted with the idea of raising the federal gas tax by 25 cents a gallon and sending it to the states to be spent entirely on transportation.
The alternative would be to let the states start tolling the Interstates, and there are many interests pushing for that all over America.
It can be hard for politicians and bureaucrats to look at a car with an E-ZPass transponder without thinking of the massive amounts of revenue that could be generated by dinging the driver for just a few more bucks per day.
Carrellas said his association opposes any new tolls for the simple reason that tolls are much more expensive than taxes on a per-mile basis. A 25-cent gas-tax hike equals about a penny a mile for the average car. Meanwhile tolls can be as high as $1 a mile on the northern end of the Turnpike - presumably more if those HOT lanes are ever installed.
So that's an easy choice for motorists.
"We would definitely support a federal gas tax over a tolling plan," Carrellas said. "We don't support tolls. We do support raised gas taxes in general as long as they go to transportation. Specifically we'd like to see them go to roads, bridges and highways."
So would most drivers. Given the example of Corzine, you might wonder why the authors of this report would risk proposing once again to use tolls to help shore up the sagging pension plans.
I suspect it's for the same reason Willie Sutton gave when asked why he robbed banks: "Because that's where the money is."
But he got caught trying to grab it.
There's a lesson in that and the authors of this report ignore it at their peril.