441 Billion Reasons Jon Corzine Is Wrong For New Jersey

Bret Schundler is calling Jon Corzine the new spending champ and for good reason. New Jersey’s Senator Corzine sponsored or cosponsored $441 billion of new spending during the 108th Congress. That’s $441 billion more in spending by the federal government to be paid for by your tax dollars. Corzine had the most costly agenda in the Senate - racking up another #1 for New Jersey.

Thankfully, Corzine wasn’t able to enact his agenda as part of the minority party in the Senate. Now imagine a Governor Corzine backed up by a majority of Democrats in New Jersey’s legislature. Pray that doesn’t come to pass, because if it does we’ll be looking back at today’s budget deficits, state and property tax levels with a longing for the good old days.

Instead of working to secure a more equitable distribution of federal tax dollars to New Jersey, Senator Corzine was working toward increasing income taxes for the very people he is supposed to represent. We’ve noted this before, but it bares repeating – for every dollar of income tax New Jersey taxpayers send to the federal government, New Jersey receives 57¢ in return, the lowest return in the nation.

Jon Corzine understands our state’s poor return on investment for our federal income tax dollars and obviously doesn’t care. There is no other possible explanation – the man simply does not care about the consequences of his spending philosophy on taxpayers.

We can’t rely on newspaper, television or radio reports and commentary to convey this information to voters. Concerned voters of the blogosphere might want to develop a game plan to reach voters with the facts and the importance of this year’s election. We can’t just sit back in our pajamas and hope people will stumble onto our blogs.

The National Taxpayers Union Foundation studied the cost or savings of all legislation introduced in the 108th Congress that affects federal spending by at least $1 million.

Agenda totals for individual lawmakers were developed by cross-indexing their sponsorship and cosponsorship records with cost estimates for 1,406 House bills and 1,075 Senate bills using accounting rules that prevent the double counting of overlapping proposals.

In the Senate, Republican spending agendas ranged from a net savings of nearly $25 billion (Sen. Larry Craig (ID)) to $112 billion in new spending (Sen. Olympia Snowe (ME)). The net spending agendas of Democrats in the upper chamber ranged from savings of $295 million (Sen. Russell Feingold (WI)) to new spending of $441 billion (Sen. Jon Corzine (NJ)).

All sponsorship and cost data in the report were reviewed confidentially by each Congressional office prior to publication.