New Jersey’s Tax Policies and Stagnant Economic Growth

Economic growth in New Jersey has declined to its slowest rate in nearly five years and is projected be about 0.6 percent through the spring of 2007.

The nine-month growth rate has not been so low since 0.4 percent was projected in November 2001, when the economy was emerging from a recession but still reeling from the terrorist attacks two months earlier.

Tax increases have consequences. Economic growth and private sector job creation are two casualties of the misguided taxing policies Democrats have enacted since taking control of state government in 2002.

We've had a pretty dramatic decline in private-sector job growth in the state," said James W. Hughes, dean of the Edward J. Bloustein School of Planning and Public Policy at Rutgers University.

The descent was fueled by an increase in business taxes enacted under the McGreevey administration, giving the state a reputation for hostility to business, Hughes said.

New Jersey is on pace to add about 34,000 jobs this year, less than half the 75,000 it should, and over one-third of the new jobs are in government even though that sector accounts for less than one-fifth of all jobs, Hughes said.

The state is broke, property taxes are soaring, businesses aren’t expanding, but New Jersey Democrats keeps the gravy train rolling by adding more government workers to already bloated payrolls.

During the past five years, "there was very little concern about the impact of tax policy on the economy," Hughes said.

Overall, while the state lost 117,600 high-paying service and manufacturing jobs, it replaced them with 113,200 low-paying service jobs. The first half of the first decade of the 2000s has been characterized largely by the contraction of high paying, private-sector office and manufacturing jobs, replaced by lower-paying private-sector employment and expanding public-sector, tax dependent jobs.

Since Democrats took control of Trenton in 2002, state spending and taxes have increased by 35 percent and debt has ballooned by a whopping 214 percent. New Jersey’s population has grown by less than two percent, while the number of state government workers has increased by more than 20 percent. The increase in all public-sector jobs in New Jersey has been increasing at the rate of 9 percent.

For a long time, a significant (and rising) share of the state budget has been used to redistribute income. Too little attention and too few resources were consistently dedicated to growing income.

That’s an understatement.