PACKET EDITORIAL, June 23
By: Packet Editorial
When Gov. Jon Corzine delivered his brief, dolorous and virtually applause-free budget message to the Legislature back in March, he took pains to point out that he wasn’t wedded to every draconian measure he felt compelled to put forward to balance the state’s revenues and expenditures.
The governor made it clear he didn’t really want to raise the sales tax from 6 to 7 percent; hike cigarette, alcohol and other nuisance taxes; place a levy on hospital beds; cut various programs and services; and dig deep into taxpayers’ pockets to fill the gaping hole previous governors and legislatures had left in the state pension fund. So he issued a bold challenge to the Legislature: Come up with a better idea before June 30, when the current fiscal year expired, and he’d be happy to consider it.
We’re pretty sure Gov. Corzine meant what he said. Unfortunately, nobody in the Legislature appears to think so. Instead of rising to the governor’s challenge, lawmakers of both parties have sunk down into the trenches, from which they have taken potshots and, from time to time, fired broadside salvos at selected elements of his budget proposal.
With exactly one week to go before the clock runs out on budget deliberations, what we’ve witnessed from the Legislature is an unending barrage of prevarication, pontification, pandering, threats, criticisms and complaints about the Corzine budget, along with resolute avowals that lawmakers will do everything in their power to block it.
The Assembly Democratic leadership says the sales tax increase is out of the question. The Senate Democratic leadership says the hospital tax is doomed, and the nuisance taxes won’t even come up for a vote. The Republicans, in the minority in both houses, simply oppose everything.
Absent from these four months of bipartisan bombast has been anything resembling a reasonable, constructive response to the governor’s challenge. A trio of South Jersey Democrats made headlines when they advocated reopening negotiations with unions representing state workers but they knew full well that, with no contracts up for renewal this year, there was no way this was going to happen. And when our own state senator, Lawrence Township Democrat Shirley Turner, floated a trial balloon earlier this week to raise taxes, parking fees and hotel room charges at Atlantic City casinos, her colleagues greeted the idea with deafening silence.
Otherwise, as best we can tell, nobody has offered any serious alternatives to the combination of tax hikes and spending cuts proposed by the governor. That’s because legislators, even those from relatively safe districts, realize there’s nothing to be gained by going out on a limb and saying what they’re for. Not when it’s so much easier and so much more helpful to their re-election prospects to emphasize only what they’re against.
In the past, too many governors of both parties have accommodated this legislative mindset by resorting to one-time, stopgap measures and gimmicks to balance the state budget. Not this governor. Not this time. Now, it’s the Legislature’s turn, in the seven days it has left, to match Gov. Corzine’s responsible leadership on the fiscal front with some political courage of its own.