More Shell Games?

I’m having some trouble with the math.

Gov. Christie is proposing to cut the state budget by 2.6 percent, but he says he’s increasing aid nominally to schools and keeping it stable for towns. He’s increasing spending on hospitals, college aid, capital projects and tax relief, and yet the over all budget is down.

Someone help me with the math.

The budget is smaller than last year, but only if you include the federal stimulus money the state received and that Christie has criticized repeatedly.  If you back out that funding – and the programs it paid for – then spending is up.

You also have to accept several assumptions that may not come to pass – such as the governor’s ability to get his pension and healthcare plans through the Legislature and his Medicaid reforms approved by the federal government.

 The governor deserves credit for attempting to tackle a crisis created by two decades worth of budget gimmicks and sleights of hands. Governors of both parties – which includes Christie himself – have plugged holes in budgets by making one-time revenue injections or one-time cuts, withholding payments into the state pension funds, and so on.

Gov. Christie withheld $3 billion from the pension fund last year – money that will have to be paid out at some point in the not-to-distant future. He plans to pay just half a billion this year, though much more is needed just to meet current obligations (which does not include all the back payments foregone).

He slashed school funding last year, forced schools to use up their rather minimal surplus accounts and now wants everyone to believe he is committed to public education. The quarter billion dollar funding increase this year leaves the schools more than three quarters of a billion behind where they were two years ago. I wouldn’t call that a boost in funding.

"Public education should not be a zero sum game,” Sen. Barbara Buono, a Democrat from Middlesex County, said in response to the speech. “Our target must be to fully fund our school funding formula.

"Last year, the governor cut $1 billion from our schools. Now, he proposes to underfund our constitutionally upheld funding formula by over $2 billion. This is a policy failure that our public schools and communities cannot sustain.”

But this is “The New Normal,” a new age of fiscal responsibility. That’s what he says, anyway.

The reality is that the governor is pushing ahead with an ideological promise – to expand charter schools, break the teachers union and other public worker unions by making them the villains in the high drama of bad budgeting.

It’s not just about shrinking the size of the budget but about shrinking the size of government so that it has little power to do what government is supposed to do: Protect average people in the state of New Jersey.

Remember, the governor’s efforts over the last two years have resulted in cuts to most programs that aid average citizens. At the same time, he wants to cut the corporate tax and he has vetoed tax hikes for millionaires.

So, as New Jersey kids face larger class sizes business pays less into the treasury and has a freer hand to do what it wants, leaving us all a little more vulnerable.