New Jersey Republican Gov. Chris Christie stood before the Democrat-controlled legislature last week and, like a surgeon explaining a life-saving procedure to a skeptical patient, outlined deep budget cuts to close a gaping $11 billion budget wound necessary to save the critically ill state from following California into financial meltdown.
Like California’s, New Jersey’s ills were self-inflicted. General fund spending increased 40 percent in five years. The Tax Foundation blames the Garden State’s tax-and-spend policies for creating the nation’s worst business climate.
“The irresponsible budgeting of the past, coupled with the failed tax policies that lie like a heavy wet blanket suffocating tax revenues and job growth, have required these extraordinary steps,” Christie, a former U.S. attorney said, echoing his Election Day pledge to voters that he was prepared to “turn [Trenton] upside down” to restore the state to financial health.
Christie may have to do just that. Democratic lawmakers immediately denounced his budget plan.
In a shockingly frank 24-minute speech that ricocheted around the blogosphere earlier this month, Christie told 200 New Jersey mayors that “at some point there has to be parity … between what is happening in the real world and what is happening in the public sector world.”
The cure will not be easy. Former Democratic Gov. Jon Corzine negotiated a deal that prevents his successor from laying off or furloughing any unionized state workers until 2011 — or pay a $330 million penalty.
“I will sign strong pension and benefit reform bills … as soon as you send them to my desk,” Christie vowed as he laid out his $29.3 billion budget proposal. “But until that reform is enacted, we cannot in good conscience fund a system that is out of control, bankrupting our state and its people and making promises it cannot meet in the long term.”
Already Christie has cut 375 of 378 state programs. One of his most controversial proposals is a 5 percent across-the-board reduction in state education funding affecting 500 school districts; 100 will lose all state aid for the remainder of the year. But Christie says he used a “scalpel,” and none of the cuts exceed each district’s reserves.
“Our solution does not take one penny from an approved school instructional budget, does not take one dime out of the classroom, not one textbook will be left unbought, not one teacher will be laid off, not one child’s education will be compromised for one minute, and not one dollar of new property taxes will be needed,” Christie told lawmakers. “Now the union protectors of the status quo will claim otherwise and once again they will be proven to be self-interested and wrong.”
Predictably enough, the 200,000-member New Jersey Education Association attacked Christie’s “doomsday budget” as hundreds protested in his home town. The Communications Workers of America warned that it would challenge any efforts to override their negotiated pay and benefits packages in court.
The state pension system is $46 billion short, and an 18-month deferral of a negotiated 3.5 percent pay raise for public employees expires July 1. Even though they already make one and a half time more than their private sector counterparts, public union employees are allowed to “retire” early and collect a government salary and a pension at the same time. Their insatiable demands for more are sucking New Jersey dry.
But 52 percent of the most overtaxed residents in the nation recently told pollsters they are now willing to swallow the governor’s strong medicine. New Jersey taxpayers finally understand that they really have no other choice.
Barbara F. Hollingsworth is The Examiner’s local opinion editor.
