Corzine Offers No Consideration For Taxpayers

New Jersey State Treasurer Bradley Abelow has said that even with Governor Corzine’s $1.9 billion in tax increases this year, the state will have to close a budget gap of at least $2 billion next year.

This bad news should not come as a surprise. Corzine is not making the “hard choices” this year that are required to rein in the out of control spending in Trenton next year and into the future.

The Governor said if legislators didn’t like his spending and taxing plan they should come up with one of their own. Now that Republicans have come up with ideas to cut spending and three Democrats, led by state Senator Steve Sweeney, have proposed a plan to reduce spending on state workers by $700 million, Corzine rejects them.

Michael Barone provides an excellent reason for Corzine’s refusal to reduce the size of the state’s public workforce or to make state worker benefits comparable to those earned by workers in the private sector.

Liberal Democrats like to believe that government programs can improve people's lives and that it's a good idea to redistribute through taxes money from the rich to the presumably less well off. But in practice the redistribution they support turns out to be from the pockets of taxpayers generally to public employee unions and thence to the Democratic Party.

The big institutional force behind the demand for increased spending is the public employee unions, which combine a huge appetite for pay increases and generous pension and other benefits with a determination that their members should never be held accountable for results. This tends to produce overexpensive and undercompetent government: not what principled liberals should want.