The Glade 4.0

New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie clearly is serious about doing what he was elected to do -- getting the budget under control, without reflexively raising taxes.

Noting that Jersey's current budget contains "the same worn-out tricks of the trade that have become commonplace in Trenton, that have driven our citizens to anger and frustration and our wonderful state to the edge of bankruptcy," Christie on Thursday declared a new day.

Facing a $2.2 billion deficit in the current budget, the governor imposed fiscal emergency measures: By executive order, he froze $1.6 billion in unused state funds and started chopping in the areas where the money is -- education and health care.

Cuts include $475 million in school aid, $62 million in support for colleges and $12 million to hospitals.

Christie also cut state aid to New Jersey Transit and zeroed out New Jersey's department of Public Advocate (if only New York City would do the same!).

The cuts are likely just the start.

On top of the current fiscal hole, Christie anticipates having to close a deficit of $11 billion in the budget for next year that he'll propose March 16.

Not surprisingly, the Democrats who control both chambers in Jersey's Legislature howled bloody murder and pushed options other than spending cuts.

Senate President Stephen Sweeney urged raiding the rainy day fund.

Others suggested hiking the gas tax -- one of the few New Jersey levies that's not well above the US average.

But Christie has let it be known that he'll stick to his campaign promises and oppose any gas-tax hike.

In the days ahead, Christie will face even more opposition to spending cuts. But he'll never have a better chance than now to give the Garden State the fiscal medicine that it needs.

Keep going, governor. If only folks in Albany might follow your lead.

Read more: http://www.nypost.com/p/news/opinion/ed ... z0fVqfLQCa

Gov. Chris Christie is making good on his promise to get tough with New Jersey's $2.2 billion budget gap -- by taking aim at one of the drivers of the state's out-of-control taxes: school budgets.

Under Christie's budget, New Jersey's 605 school districts will see their state aid reduced by 5 percent of their last budget. That trims state spending by $820 million, forcing school districts to make deeper cuts or raise property taxes.

If it stopped there, Christie's one-time aid cut would do nothing but aggravate property-tax payers. But he's also seeking a constitutional amendment on the November ballot to lower the property-tax cap from 4 to 2.5 percent -- preventing localities from guzzling at the local revenue tap while blaming it on Trenton's stinginess.

Federal stimulus money let Jersey avoid major spending cuts the last two years -- but now the state is broke. And school budgets have plenty of fat to lose. They've been growing evermore bloated since 1976, when the state Supreme Court more or less forced New Jersey to institute an income tax to fund what the court deemed more equitable school spending.

It might be Dash, but having seen those actions implemented here over the last decade, it doesn't actually work well.

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TRENTON - New Jersey's public employee labor unions, long seen as a potent political force and often depicted as an 800-pound gorilla looming over the Statehouse, are running short of friends in Trenton.

Gone is Gov. Jon S. Corzine, who regularly sided with unions. In his place stands Gov. Christie, a Republican who has sharply criticized labor's influence, leadership, and benefits.

Public labor unions have found no refuge among Democrats, their traditional allies. Democratic labor leaders in the Legislature have been among the most vocal supporters of cuts to government benefits, saying taxpayers can no longer afford the perks.

Senate President Stephen Sweeney (D., Gloucester), business officer for an ironworkers' local, made cutting public employee pensions and health coverage his first priority as head of the chamber. Fellow Democrats, sensing unease with high taxes and public resentment toward government workers' benefits, joined behind him and the governor.

Even Sen. Donald Norcross (D., Camden), president of the Southern New Jersey AFL-CIO, rose to speak in favor of a series of pension and benefit cuts that won overwhelming support in the Senate and Assembly and were signed into law last month. More than three of every four lawmakers voted for the measures. Both the Senate and Assembly are controlled by Democrats.

"People in the labor movement feel like Democrats are abandoning their friends, are being intimidated by the governor's attack on public workers, and are failing to articulate a clear defense of the workers who provide the education for our kids and the services that the people of the state depend on," said Robert Master, the Communications Workers of America's regional political director. "It's very disappointing."

He raised the possibility of unions' fielding their own candidates in next year's elections.

If you think that Snooki getting socked in the kisser during an episode of "Jersey Shore" epitomizes life in the Garden State, you haven't been paying attention. The best reality show on television today isn't running on MTV. It's in Trenton, where Gov. Chris Christie is offering the voters a dose of Reagan Republicanism—with a Jersey twist.

When he was elected back in November, Mr. Christie's victory was thought to augur growing disenchantment with Barack Obama. For the former federal prosecutor, however, his victory was primarily about local disenchantment with New Jersey's overtaxed economy and spendthrift government. Now he is in the thick of what will probably be the defining moment of his governorship: the attempt to enshrine his vision for the future in the state budget.

Budgets are serious business, but it's been a long time since anyone in New Jersey has been serious about the budget. This year, gross mismanagement and accumulated fictions have left state taxpayers a $10.7 billion gap on a total state budget of $29.3 billion. Mr. Christie's answer is simple: "a smaller government that lives within its means."

However quaint that may sound, when you have to cut nearly $11 billion in state spending to get there, you are going to get a lot of yelling and screaming. Most comes from the New Jersey Education Association, hollering that "the children" will be hurt by Mr. Christie's proposals for teachers to accept a one-year wage freeze and begin contributing something toward their health plans. What makes the battle interesting is the way Mr. Christie is throwing the old chestnuts back at his critics.

Here are a few examples, culled from his budget address, public meetings and radio appearances:

The children will be the ones to suffer from your education cuts. "The real question is, who's for the kids, and who's for their raises? This isn't about the kids. Let's dispense with that portion of the argument. Don't let them tell you that ever again while they are reaching into your pockets."

Your policies favor the rich. "We have the worst unemployment in the region and the highest taxes in America, and that's no coincidence."

Why not renew the 'millionaire's tax'? "The top 1% of taxpayers in New Jersey pay 40% of the income tax. In addition, we've got a situation where that tax applies to small businesses. I'm simply not going to put my foot on the back of the neck of small business while I want them to try to grow jobs by giving more revenue to New Jersey."

Budget cuts are unfair. "The special interests have already begun to scream their favorite word—which, coincidentally, is my 9-year-old son's favorite word when we are making him do something he knows is right but does not want to do—'unfair.' . . . One state retiree, 49 years old, paid, over the course of his entire career, a total of $124,000 towards his retirement pension and health benefits. What will we pay him? $3.3 million in pension payments over his life, and nearly $500,000 for health care benefits—a total of $3.8 million on a $120,000 investment. Is that fair?"

State budget cuts only shift the pain to our towns. "[L]et's remember this, in 2009 the private sector in New Jersey lost 121,000 jobs. In 2009, municipalities and school boards added 11,300 jobs. Now that's just outrageous. And they're going to have to start to lay some people off, not continue to hire at the pace they hired in 2009 in the middle of a recession."

Isn't your talk of 'stopping the tax madness' just another 'Read My Lips' promise? "[Mine is] much better than 'Read my lips.' I'm sorry, it's just much better. Much stronger. . . . It's gonna be how my governorship will rise or fall. I'm not signing a tax increase."

In some ways, Mr. Christie can speak bluntly precisely because the state is such a mess. Indeed, that's one reason he won election in a blue state. The challenge remains daunting: No governor has yet succeeded in turning around a state as overtaxed and overspent as New Jersey. Indiana under Gov. Mitch Daniels probably comes closest, but Indiana was not nearly as bad as New Jersey.

If he is to survive the headlines about budget cuts and pull New Jersey back to prosperity, Mr. Christie knows he needs to put the hard choices before the state's citizens, and to speak to them as adults. He's doing just that. One reporter for the Newark Star-Ledger summed up Mr. Christie's rhetoric this way: "[F]inally we have a governor who is as teed off as the rest of us at how government spending and taxes have skyrocketed over the past decade."

It's far too early to declare Mr. Christie's Jersey-style Reaganism a success. But it's the one reality show truly worth watching.

The special interests have already begun to scream their favorite word—which, coincidentally, is my 9-year-old son's favorite word when we are making him do something he knows is right but does not want to do—'unfair

HADDONFIELD, N.J. — They're the kind of obscenity-laced schoolyard taunts that could get a student suspended.

But the target of this tirade is New Jersey's Gov. Chris Christie — and the perpetrators are the state's teachers, irate over his calls for salary freezes and funding cuts for schools.

In Facebook messages visible to the world — not to mention their students — the teachers have called Christie fat, compared him to a genocidal dictator and wished he was dead. The postings are often riddled with bad grammar and misspellings.

"Never trust a fat f...," read one profane post on the Facebook page, "New Jersey Teachers United Against Governor Chris Christie's Pay Freeze," which has some 69,000 fans, many of them teachers.

"How do you spell A-- hole? C-H-R-I-S C-H-R-I-S-T-I-E," read another.

The rhetoric has become ever more heated as residents of most of the state's school districts get ready to vote Tuesday on property tax levies that support district budgets. And while many of the postings are emotional, most aren't personal attacks.

Christie, a first-year Republican governor who inherited a state in dire financial straits, wants voters to reject the proposals in districts where educators won't agree to salary freezes for the coming school year.

The acrimony intensified last month when Christie proposed cutting state and federal aid to districts by 11 percent, calling it a way to share sacrifice as the state tries to rein in spending.

That's when the Facebook attacks really took off.

One educator, a librarian with a Master's degree, described the cuts as "rediculous."

Another pointed out that Christie's late mother was a member of the teachers union: "It's not right to bite the hand that feeds you. Oh I forgot it's Chirs Christie, He's so large I bet he'd bite anything that's put in front of his face!"

"Remember Pol Pot, dictator of Cambodia?" warned another. "He reigned in terror, his target was teachers and intellectuals. They were either killed or put into forced labor... King Kris Kristy is headed in this direction."

Christie's supporters have responded with a Facebook page of their own. "Teachers need to sit down and shut up. They live in a dream world where they work 180 days a year," it asserted. "Way overpaid to start with, they could never make it working in the real world."

Even in these tough economic times, teachers in most New Jersey districts have continued to get annual negotiated raises — often around 4 percent — and don't have to help pay for their health insurance.

So Christie has offered more money to districts that can get teachers unions to revise their contracts and freeze salaries for the upcoming school year — and agree to start paying 1.5 percent of their salaries toward their health insurance.

So far, teachers in only 20 of the state's 590 school districts have agreed to any concessions.

In 2006, the last year for which data was available, New Jersey teachers made an average of $58,000. The salary, in one of the highest cost-of-living states, was fourth in the nation.

Earlier this month, an opinion column in the Star-Ledger of Newark, the state's largest newspaper, took teachers to task for their attacks on the governor.

"Here are words to live by from a guy teaching you critical life tools," it said of one expletive-ridden post. "Write them down. There might be a quiz."

Some have cooled the rhetoric and even apologized.

After a New Jersey teacher's union wished Christie dead — like "my favorite singer, Michael Jackson" — the group's president, Joe Coppola of the Bergen County Education Association, called it a bad attempt at humor and apologized.

Christie's people weren't impressed. "The union is, has been, and probably always will be a bully," the governor's spokesman, Michael Drewniak, said in an interview last week.

It's Christie who's the real bully, asserted Marlene Brubaker, a Camden County Technical School science teacher who wrote the post comparing the governor to the Khmer Rouge leader, Pol Pot.

"I'm not saying this guy is killing us physically," she said. "I would say he's trying to kill us spiritually," by disrespecting teachers and spreading the myth that they're overpaid.

Her salary, which public records show is a bit more than $50,000 a year, isn't enough to make ends meet, she added, so she also has to tutor and work as a home health aide.

The debate appears to be taking a slightly more civil course lately, especially after the founder of the anti-Christie page was shut out from posting on the site for about a week because of all the hateful comments.

"I have deleted and will continue to delete commets comparing Governor Christie to genocidal maniacs," read a recent post, complete with a typo. "He is not a genocidal maniac. He is a crappy governor."

New Jersey voters took a stand on school spending and property taxes Tuesday, rejecting 260 of 479 school budgets across 19 counties, according to unofficial results in statewide school elections.

In the proposed state budget he unveiled last month, Gov. Chris Christie slashed $820 million in aid to school districts and urged voters to defeat budgets if teachers in their schools did not agree to one-year wage freezes. The salvo ignited a heated debate with the state’s largest teachers union.

Christie said the cuts were necessary to help plug an $11 billion state budget gap.

In many districts Tuesday, the governor made himself heard as 54 percent of the spending plans were rejected, according to unofficial returns. If the trend continues, it would mark the most budget defeats in New Jersey since 1976, when 56 percent failed. Typically, voters approve more than 70 percent of the school budgets.

Key districts where budgets failed yesterday included Edison, Parsippany, Bridgewater-Raritan and Woodbridge. Budgets passed in Mountain Lakes, Piscataway, Livingston and Jersey City.
In wealthy Somerset County, voters defeated 15 of 17 spending plans; in Hunterdon County, 23 of 28 budgets failed. In the governor’s hometown, Mendham Township, the budget was narrowly approved.

Jeffrey Brookner, president of the Bridgewater-Raritan school board, said "lots of factors played into the defeat. One of those factors is the role that the governor played."

Voter turnout was also high in elections that typically draw little interest. In Sparta, where turnout rivaled some presidential elections, the budget was defeated by roughly a 3-to-1 margin. Sparta teachers agreed to a one-year wage freeze late last week, but the budget still called for a nearly 10 percent tax increase for residents in the Sussex County community.

"The school system is the only thing they’ve got in Roselle Park, and you’ve got to support it," Gibeault said.

Districts were sent reeling by the cuts Christie proposed, which slashed aid to each district by an amount equal to 5 percent of their overall budgets, but resulted in eliminating 40-, 50- or even 100 percent of many districts’ state aid. School boards proposed laying off teachers, slashing programs and increasing class sizes.

Most also planned to raise property taxes: About 83 percent of districts sought property tax hikes, according to a survey by the New Jersey School Boards Association.