Push Comes To Shove
I said awhile ago that, despite some early promisnig signs, the real test of whether Governor Christie is taking our state’s budgetary problems and tax problems seriously would be in the details of his budget for the upcoming fiscal year. Those details are out. Paul Mulshine is not very impressed (to say the least), and neither am I – we get increased direct spending on the state level, with costs shifted even more to suburban municipalities via cuts in state aid to those municipalities (and thus even higher property taxes since those are expenditures that will not be easy for municipalities to cut…awesome!). As Mulshine points out, we essentially just get more of the same problems that we had during the Corzine years. Of course, we get the appearance of cuts to government spending since he’s technically cutting state spending. But in reality, all that he seems to be doing is shifting even more of the burden for existing state government spending onto the suburbs that carried him into office.
Somebody wake me up when the Republican Party is ready to get serious about actual governance again.
If municipalities need more money why aren’t they expected to raise it themselves instead of going hat in hand to the the state and expecting the state to increase taxes so they can fund local operations?Report
New Jersey’s property taxes are about 40% higher than any other state in the country (second is NH, which unlike NJ has no sales or income tax). In any event, it’s not as simple as that. The aid Mulshine is referencing is primarily education money. For various reasons, a handful of urban districts in the state essentially have money thrown at them. The suburban districts in question, however, get comparatively small amounts of money from the state even though they provide a disproportionate amount of the funding for that aid. As I understand it, Christie’s budget increases that imbalance, barely touching funding for the urban districts but slashing aid to the suburban districts that already put in more than they get out to begin with. Meanwhile, he actually increases direct state government spending. So the state government grows in size, the urban areas are enabled to continue wasting money, and the suburban areas pay for it, just indirectly.
He does nothing to actually address the underlying long-term fiscal problems of the state. Instead, he just rearranges the deck chairs to make it look like he’s doing something. Presumably the gamble is that he’ll be able to take credit for modest improvements in the state’s fiscal situation while taking none of the blame for the property tax increases in suburbia (which are officially a local government function).Report