Does Christie have any justification for not putting the millionaire surcharge on?
As far as I'm concerned, no serious one. His most frequent public argument is that to do so would drive high earners out of the state and would thus lower tax revenue. Fairly stale argument.
Here's today's opinion piece from Charles Stiles, one of the most respected political commentators in the state. Writes for The Record which is a quite good regional paper in northern Jersey.
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Christie's Republicans take no prisoners
Tuesday, June 29, 2010
By CHARLES STILE
COLUMNIST
The New Jersey Republican Party doesn't do noblesse oblige. Not anymore.
In rubber-stamping Governor Christie's $29.4 billion tough-love budget, the New Jersey Republicans collectively shed their noble reputation for moderation. It is no longer a party of William Cahill, Clifford Case, Thomas H. Kean Sr. or Christie Whitman, the paternalistic Republicans who put the poor and elderly off limits from cost-cutting.
Under Whitman, New Jersey was one of the first states to subsidize health care for low-income residents. When New Jersey was required to comply with a crackdown on welfare in 1996, New Jersey adopted the most expansive form allowed under a new federal law.
That tradition was tossed aside on Monday. Those very programs are targets of "shared sacrifice" cuts. The new-breed Chris Christie Republicans — who enacted the budget with the help of a clutch of complicit conservative Democrats — are closer now in policy and spirit to the Republican Party of Palin and Gingrich and Tea Party activists. It is the party where ultra-conservatives like Bogota's Steve Lonegan have more power than establishment Republicans want to admit.
"They are becoming more like the Republican Party of the South," blurted a frustrated Mary Forsberg, the research director of the New Jersey Policy Perspective, the liberal think tank that took part in a news conference Monday to launch one last, futile protest of the budget. The event was upstaged by the budget drama of the moment — a private meeting between Christie and conservative Republican Assemblywoman Alison Littell McHose of Sussex who threatened, for a while, not to support the budget. The drama was short-lived. She pledged her support for the budget.
No such intrigue around the news conference, sponsored by Better Choices for New Jersey, a coalition of mostly Democratic-allied labor, ethnic and social service agencies that are now, under the right-leaning Christie regime, nomads in the State House halls. They cast their lot with the wrong team, the Jon S. Corzine team, and lost.
And besides, there is a fiscal crisis to manage. The days of the automatic handout are over, the new breed Christie Republicans assert. The voters who picked Christie are worried about their own job security and are appalled at the overspending of state government. Property-tax payers come first, second and last on the Christie priority sheet. The "core constituencies" no longer evince sympathy. They are viewed with contempt, a cause of the state's fiscal mess, not the reckless Wall Street investment bankers behind the economic meltdown.
"During these tough economic times people understand there is just not enough money to do everything we want," Sen. Steve Oroho, a conservative Republican from Sussex and Morris counties. "Savings needed to be found and difficult decisions needed to be made."
This blunt, grim bedside manner is new to the Republican Party. In the mid-1990s, when the conservative "Contract With America" backlash dominated the national agenda, groups representing the lowest strata could still count on a charitable, sympathetic ear among the moderate suburban and mostly pro-choice New Jersey Republicans who controlled the Legislature in the mid-1990s.
"It's [New Jersey GOP] just starting to lose some of its open-mindedness," Forsberg said.
New-breed Christie Republicans are not easily cowed by guilt. They have little patience and are quick to assert what seems like a reasonable policy rationale. Take the Earned Income Tax Credit offered to some 485,000 low-income households. Christie's budget calls for a 20 percent reduction in the amount that they claim, for savings of $45 million.
Christie officials say the cut is not as draconian as it seems — it brings New Jersey's generous tax credit more in line with what other states provide. And in the grand scheme of a $29 billion budget, the credit amounts to pocket change.
But a single parent with two children working for minimum wage will see a $300 cut. And New Jersey is one of the most expensive and densely populated states in the nation. This is a state crammed with cities — lots of them — crammed with the unemployed and the underclass. This is a state of Camden and Paterson, not Dubuque or Altoona. We're not like everybody else.
In the past, the Republican Party resisted pressure to cut funding for family planning clinics, which provide contraception and pregnancy counseling. But Christie's budget called for a $7.5 million wipeout of the funding, a move startling even some moderates who staged a mini-revolt of sort on Monday. A bill restoring that money passed with veto-proof majorities when seven Republicans supported the bill.
But the measure passed with a new string attached — the money cannot be used for abortions, lawmakers said. And it was also telling that a pro-choice Republican Senate Minority Leader Tom Kean Jr. voted against restoring the money, stressing economic reasons. He said "today is about putting the state on a more firm financial footing, going forward."
That's a far cry from his father's position. Thomas H. Kean Sr., confronted with similar pressure to cut the same funding in 1989, declared that he would oppose any effort to bar the use of public funds for abortions or abortion counseling, thereby limiting the availability of abortions for poor people but not for those who can afford to pay.
But that was a different time. It was a different party.
The New Jersey Republican Party doesn't do noblesse oblige. Not anymore.
In rubber-stamping Governor Christie's $29.4 billion tough-love budget, the New Jersey Republicans collectively shed their noble reputation for moderation. It is no longer a party of William Cahill, Clifford Case, Thomas H. Kean Sr. or Christie Whitman, the paternalistic Republicans who put the poor and elderly off limits from cost-cutting.
Under Whitman, New Jersey was one of the first states to subsidize health care for low-income residents. When New Jersey was required to comply with a crackdown on welfare in 1996, New Jersey adopted the most expansive form allowed under a new federal law.
That tradition was tossed aside on Monday. Those very programs are targets of "shared sacrifice" cuts. The new-breed Chris Christie Republicans — who enacted the budget with the help of a clutch of complicit conservative Democrats — are closer now in policy and spirit to the Republican Party of Palin and Gingrich and Tea Party activists. It is the party where ultra-conservatives like Bogota's Steve Lonegan have more power than establishment Republicans want to admit.
"They are becoming more like the Republican Party of the South," blurted a frustrated Mary Forsberg, the research director of the New Jersey Policy Perspective, the liberal think tank that took part in a news conference Monday to launch one last, futile protest of the budget. The event was upstaged by the budget drama of the moment — a private meeting between Christie and conservative Republican Assemblywoman Alison Littell McHose of Sussex who threatened, for a while, not to support the budget. The drama was short-lived. She pledged her support for the budget.
No such intrigue around the news conference, sponsored by Better Choices for New Jersey, a coalition of mostly Democratic-allied labor, ethnic and social service agencies that are now, under the right-leaning Christie regime, nomads in the State House halls. They cast their lot with the wrong team, the Jon S. Corzine team, and lost.
And besides, there is a fiscal crisis to manage. The days of the automatic handout are over, the new breed Christie Republicans assert. The voters who picked Christie are worried about their own job security and are appalled at the overspending of state government. Property-tax payers come first, second and last on the Christie priority sheet. The "core constituencies" no longer evince sympathy. They are viewed with contempt, a cause of the state's fiscal mess, not the reckless Wall Street investment bankers behind the economic meltdown.
"During these tough economic times people understand there is just not enough money to do everything we want," Sen. Steve Oroho, a conservative Republican from Sussex and Morris counties. "Savings needed to be found and difficult decisions needed to be made."
This blunt, grim bedside manner is new to the Republican Party. In the mid-1990s, when the conservative "Contract With America" backlash dominated the national agenda, groups representing the lowest strata could still count on a charitable, sympathetic ear among the moderate suburban and mostly pro-choice New Jersey Republicans who controlled the Legislature in the mid-1990s.
"It's [New Jersey GOP] just starting to lose some of its open-mindedness," Forsberg said.
New-breed Christie Republicans are not easily cowed by guilt. They have little patience and are quick to assert what seems like a reasonable policy rationale. Take the Earned Income Tax Credit offered to some 485,000 low-income households. Christie's budget calls for a 20 percent reduction in the amount that they claim, for savings of $45 million.
Christie officials say the cut is not as draconian as it seems — it brings New Jersey's generous tax credit more in line with what other states provide. And in the grand scheme of a $29 billion budget, the credit amounts to pocket change.
But a single parent with two children working for minimum wage will see a $300 cut. And New Jersey is one of the most expensive and densely populated states in the nation. This is a state crammed with cities — lots of them — crammed with the unemployed and the underclass. This is a state of Camden and Paterson, not Dubuque or Altoona. We're not like everybody else.
In the past, the Republican Party resisted pressure to cut funding for family planning clinics, which provide contraception and pregnancy counseling. But Christie's budget called for a $7.5 million wipeout of the funding, a move startling even some moderates who staged a mini-revolt of sort on Monday. A bill restoring that money passed with veto-proof majorities when seven Republicans supported the bill.
But the measure passed with a new string attached — the money cannot be used for abortions, lawmakers said. And it was also telling that a pro-choice Republican Senate Minority Leader Tom Kean Jr. voted against restoring the money, stressing economic reasons. He said "today is about putting the state on a more firm financial footing, going forward."
That's a far cry from his father's position. Thomas H. Kean Sr., confronted with similar pressure to cut the same funding in 1989, declared that he would oppose any effort to bar the use of public funds for abortions or abortion counseling, thereby limiting the availability of abortions for poor people but not for those who can afford to pay.
But that was a different time. It was a different party.
northjersey.com |
