Promise Breaker

Here's a shocker.....not!

From IBD:

Posted 3/22/2006
New Jersey: Gov. Jon Corzine joins his tax-happy predecessor, Jim Florio — and former President Bill Clinton — in a rogues' gallery of Democrats elected under false fiscal pretenses.

Between election and inauguration, Clinton "discovered" a budget deficit worse than he imagined, and so the middle-class tax cut he campaigned on in 1992 had to be put on hold — forever, as it turned out — and income tax rates raised.

Similarly, Florio vowed not to raise taxes in his 1990 gubernatorial campaign, then slapped a $2.6 billion tax hike on New Jerseyans, the biggest in U.S. history. It made Florio a one-term governor.

Newly elected Gov. Corzine is the latest Democratic promise breaker — though the former Goldman Sachs CEO gets points for subtlety. Instead of restoring property tax rebates that were cut last year plus increasing them by 10%, as he promised, Corzine told New Jersey lawmakers he'll increase existing rebates by 10%.
New Jerseyans pay the country's highest property taxes, and the gimmicky rebate change may muddle some into thinking Corzine actually kept his promise. He didn't.

"It took Gov. Corzine less than 90 days in office to break his central campaign promise," Republican Assemblywomen Jennifer Beck complained. Nonelderly homeowners end up with only about $35 extra, say Republicans, but property taxes are up on average by over $1,300 per homeowner in the last four years.

Corzine is also breaking a pledge to fully fund state pensions, while hiking sales taxes by a percentage point and imposing a commercial property transfer tax, a corporate business tax surcharge and a cigarette tax hike, to name only some.

He avoided, so far, increasing New Jersey's gasoline taxes — among the lowest in the nation and a tax that three-quarters of state residents oppose raising. Instead, Corzine got the legislature to refinance $1.8 billion of debt in the state's going-broke transportation fund and to add $17 billion in debt over 30 years. As GOP state Sen. Anthony Bucco put it, "Our grandchildren will be paying for repairs to roads that we will be doing next year."

It may have been predestined. We're thinking of the Freudian slip in Corzine's budget speech. Delivering a line that was supposed to be "tax increases are a last resort," he started to say that "tax cuts" would be a last resort before correcting himself and joking about it. The real joke is on New Jersey taxpayers.