It’s two days since the constitutional deadline for a New Jersey state budget, so we are almost 48 hours into a partial government shutdown. The Star-Ledger is reporting that NJ governor Jon Corzine met on Sunday with democrats from the senate and assembly but as of 9PM there was no agreement. With the holiday and the weekend, the real shutdown action won’t be starting until Wednesday. There will be about 44,000 state workers on furlough, and another 35,000 working without pay, though everyone assumes they will get paid if when governor Corzine and the state legislature agree on a spending plan.

The 44,000 state workers on furlough are considered “non-essential” workers. The Star-Ledger has a department by department breakdown of essential versus non-essential workers. The department of labor has 3700 employees, but only 200 are essential. My favorite department, the department of state, has 191 employees and 3 of them are essential. They must be Nina Wells and her two drivers.

I just checked over at Google News and there are over 750 news stories about the budget stalemate. They seem to be concentrating about the impact on the Big Three of state sponsored gambling: the lottery, the casinos and the horse racing tracks. All are shut down or will be in the next day or two without an approved budget. The state will lose over $2 million a day just from casino taxes, and the lack of lottery sales will hurt small mom and pop convenience stores. People who stop in to buy lottery tickets also buy milk, cigarettes and stuff.

As we all know, this fight is basically over the sales tax hike. Governor Corzine is committed to the never ending growth of the government as you can see by his refusal to budge on his budget and his “I’m fighting for you!!” speech to protesting state government workers.

The folks at Enlighten-NewJersey point out that the problem isn’t that the state isn’t getting enough revenue. In five years, property taxes are up 40%, income tax revenue up 71%, sales tax revenue up 25%. The problem is out of control spending.

Assembly and senate democrats are making life difficult for the rookie governor, but they are also aware that many democrats, particularly those in south Jersey, are in districts that could easily swing back to the republicans if there is a tax revolt. They have also correctly noted that hiking the sales tax now to feed the budget monster will make it harder to use sales tax revenue as part of the solution to the property tax crisis.

The Star-Ledger and the Bergen Record are taking sides, and they’re both sticking up for Corzine. Friday’s Star-Ledger editorial was Grow up and sign the budget says the newspaper that has never met a tax increase it didn’t like. The budget they want signed is the Corzine budget. The Record editorial The shutdown begins warns of a voter backlash about the shutdown, but seems to think there won’t be any backlash at all about the Corzine tax and spend budget.

This entry was posted on Sunday, July 2nd, 2006 at 10:56 pm and is filed under New Jersey. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Responses are currently closed, but you can trackback from your own site.