EDITORIAL: Neither the Democrats or Republicans have devised a sound spending plan.
Our friends in Trenton are up to their old tricks again.
Both parties are attempting to claim the mantle of protecting the public purse and the public interest, but neither are willing to make the hard choices necessary to ensure that either are actually protected.
The Democrats, attempting to quiet the complaints of influential interest groups, are rewriting a badly constructed state budget, paying for a variety of programs and services including health care, special education, the arts, public colleges and universities, aid to local governments and property-tax rebates for homeowners with six-figure incomes primarily by taxing telephone bills and cigarettes.
The Republicans, for their part, are using smoke and mirrors to make it seem as though they would be cutting spending. Their plan would reduce the overall budget by about $1 billion by indiscriminately cutting state government operations, delaying building projects, slashing state aid to urban municipalities and poor school districts and inflating revenue estimates.
Neither side, however, has crafted what we would consider a sound spending plan.
The Democrats are doing little more than applying grease to the squeakiest wheels, scrambling to restore the proposed budget cuts that drew the loudest howls of protest from the most influential groups: the arts community, senior-citizen organizations, the higher-education establishment, local mayors and school boards. The biggest restoration in the proposed plan, however, is the $171 million to maintain NJ Saver property-tax rebates for homeowners earning between $100,000 and $200,000 a year designed to protect the seats of Democratic legislators serving affluent districts in North Jersey. At the same time, the majority of the new taxes and fees that will pay for some of these additions and restorations are regressive that is, they will take money from people who can least afford it.
In other words, the Democrats want to restore property-tax rebates for people earning six-figure salaries primarily by adding a 90-cent surcharge to the monthly phone bills and another 15 cents to a pack of cigarettes of people making minimum wage. It’s a tax plan that promises to widen rather than narrow the gap between New Jersey’s haves and have-nots.
The Republican plan is no better. It would impose a 10-percent across-the-board cut in state operations, saving $140 million. Delaying various building projects would save another $138 million. Eliminating distressed-cities aid to Newark, Camden, Trenton and other urban centers and reducing education aid to the state’s 30 poorest school districts would save about $220 million more.
On the revenue side, the Republicans contend the state will take in at least $320 million more than the Democrats are forecasting. This will happen, they say, because of the economic spark ignited by President Bush’s federal income tax cuts.
To put it another way, they want to slash benefits for the state’s poor and curtail government’s ability to serve the rest of us, while also relying on a phantom economic recovery predicated on a set of ill-conceived federal tax cuts for the wealthy.
Both plans are cynical attempts to protect their sponsors’ political base and do nothing to address the real budgetary constraints faced by the state.