High-Priced New Jersey

On Friday, October 2, the Raritan Valley Community College will host a 5-hour program entitled Making New Jersey More Affordable. It is being sponsored by the Somerset County Business Partnership, the Courier News and its web site, together with Allstate and the Affinity Credit Union.

I strongly support this gathering of powerful and influential people who will lend their voices to the debate. All gubernatorial candidates have been invited. I hope all are present and give specifics as to how they propose to pull New Jersey out of its downward financial vortex.

Although I can be highly skeptical at times, I generally have a cautiously optimistic outlook for the future. But for the love of me, I cannot figure out how this state will pull itself out of its financial morass unless it addresses the structural weaknesses which are strangling it.

Public service unionized salaries and benefits are out of control, with not a soul willing to give up a millimeter of ground. Year-after-year negotiated union salaries and benefits continue to rise at a rate above inflation during a time of deflation and national economic distress.

Dishonesty, fraud and corruption in government are rampant, and only the surface seems to have been scratched.

Remember the hollow promise of 1976 when the income tax was passed? It was intended to provide real estate tax relief for all homeowners, but decades of those revenues – billions – have been doled out with no conditions attached, or they have been spent for the preferential treatment of the few. The state never sets aside revenue collected for a specific purpose; instead, the money effectively goes into the general fund and you can kiss it goodbye.

Heck, we don’t even measure up to a state like New Hampshire which has no income tax and no sales tax, yet whose students produced an average 2009 SAT score of 1556, compared to New Jersey’s 1505 – lower New Jersey results for a lot more money, lower, even, than the national average of 1509.

The challenges facing New Jersey’s economic future are enormous, and they won’t be met simply by taxing the super-rich and cutting back on income tax rebates.