Looney Liberal of the Week: Jon Corzine

TRENTON, NJ -- This week's award goes to Jon Corzine, Governor of the State of New Jersey, for shutting down the state government in order to impose a tax hike on the already over-burdened people of New Jersey, and thereby breaking his campaign promise to NOT raise taxes. Read my lips: What an idiot.

The State of New Jersey has had budget problems for years due to the fiscally irresponsible Democratic leadership in Trenton. Corzine can't blame his problems on Republicans, because the state has been controlled by Democrats since at least 2002. There has been a Democratic governor in place since 2001. The result has been a $4.5 billion budget deficit, which stems primarily from the fact that NJ's government employee pension plan has been going unfunded for a number of years, and is now UNDER-funded.

New Jersey has had budget problems for years, but this is the first time the state government was shut down. Corzine did this for only one reason, to get his sales tax hike through. Although he ran on a platform of NOT raising taxes, he back-tracked on that promise almost the minute he got into office. He not only wanted to raise the sales tax, but the income tax and other taxes as well. It figures... he's a typical "tax-and-spend" Democrat. Corzine and the Democratically-controlled Assembly and Senate have made absolutely no efforts to cut spending. State Republicans have identified $2.2 billion in savings, but the Democrats have not acted. To make matters worse, this proposed $2 billion tax hike will not cover the proposed $3 billion increase in spending!

In order to make this tax hike more palatable, the Dems in Trenton have decided to use "half" the money raised by the sales tax hike to offset property taxes. On the surface that sounds good... eliminating a mandatory property tax and replacing it with a discretionary sales tax. But this offset has disadvantages as well. First, it will impact the state economy because people will buy less. Second, if people buy dramatically less, it will impact state revenues and bring us back to square one. Third, the citizens of New Jersey will lose a deduction on their federal income tax by paying lower property taxes, thus increasing their federal tax burden as well as their state tax burden! Why should we leave the Feds out of this financial give-away?

New Jersey already pays more to the federal government than it receives, making it a "donor" state. In other words, NJ citizens are paying for subsidies to other states. In fact, NJ ranks "50th" in terms of amount received from the feds versus amount paid to the feds. In 2004, NJ received only 55 cents for every dollar paid.

New Jersey's property taxes are currently the highest per capita in the nation (no doubt why the Democrats want to reduce them). New Jersey's corporate taxes are the 8th highest in the nation. New Jersey ranks 49th in the Tax Foundation's State Business Tax Climate Index. So what's a Dem to do? Raise taxes of course!

And why not furlough 45,000 state employees in the process, forcing them to lose a week's pay? And why not make the remaining 36,000 state employees remain on the job without pay? And why not force local businesses to lose thousands of dollars in revenue? And why not force casinos to lose millions of dollars of revenue? And why not have the state lose an estimated $1.3 million per day in revenue? After all, we can just raise more taxes to cover the shortfall!