Posted by
Defend America on Tuesday, March 23, 2010 9:51:16 PM
As I have mentioned before on this blog, I am from New Jersey and not very proud of it. New Jersey politics is pretty special. Only in NJ can a Republican be more liberal than a Democrat. When current governor Chris Christie was running for office, I opposed his candidacy on the basis that he was no conservative and I voted for his opponent in the Republican primary, Steve Lonegan. When Corzine lost the election I was happy only to see the teachers' union in New Jersey upset and Corzine without a job, but as the first few months that Christie has been in office and with his release of his first budget as governor, I don't know that Christie winning is so much better than Corzine getting another term.
The real Gov. Chris Christie budget: property-tax hikes to the horizon
March 23, 2010, 5:41AM
Back in the Nixon administration, Attorney General John Mitchell offered these words of wisdom to journalists: "Watch what we do, not what we say."
The Mitchell mantra is quite useful in analyzing the budget that the Christie administration presented last week.
During the campaign last year, Christie promised to
"slash state spending" so he could free up dollars for property tax
relief, among other things. But his first budget does the exact
opposite. State spending goes up — and so will your property taxes,
thanks to the tax relief he’s cutting.
Under the last budget put together by Jon Corzine,
the categories that represent actual spending by the state government —
governmental operations as well as employee benefits, rent, etc. —
totaled $5.7 billion. Christie is increasing that spending to $6
billion.
Last week, however, he boasted that his budget is lower
than Corzine’s last budget. How can that be? Simple. He slashed state
aid and grants. This is an old trick. A governor can always balance his
budget by forcing the towns and schools to raise property taxes.
That’s what Christie did. But he did it in a way that
even a liberal Democrat couldn’t have dreamed up. Corzine never would
have had the nerve to come up with a state school-aid formula that
zeroes out aid for 59 suburban school districts. But the "conservative"
Christie did. He even cut his own county’s aid by a third — and Morris
didn’t get much to begin with.
http://blog.nj.com/njv_paul_mulshine/2010/03/the_real_gov_chris_christie_bu.html