NJ Pols Not Likely to Face Up to Fiscal Crisis Before 2017

New Jersey faces a major long-term fiscal crisis that it should deal with now, but don't look for political leaders from either party to even talk about the problem seriously until at least 2017, political scientists agree.

"There's the reality of the numbers and the reality of the political situation," said Ben Dworkin, director of Rider University's Rebovich Institute for New Jersey Politics. "The numbers are daunting. Even after the recent reforms, we are still talking about tens of billions of dollars needed for pension and retiree health benefits."

But candidates know that "the more optimistic you are, the more likely you are to win," Dworkin said. "That's why we're far more likely to do nothing than something in the near future."

Neither Gov. Chris Christie nor his Democratic opponent, Sen. Barbara Buono (D-Middlesex), is likely to lay out a plan to address the looming fiscal crisis in this year's campaign. But Christie's presidential ambitions make it unlikely that the state will do anything meaningful over the next four years if he is reelected, Dworkin and Patrick Murray, director of the Monmouth University Polling Institute agreed. 

That's bad news for New Jersey. The longer the state delays dealing with its long-term fiscal crisis, the more costly it will be to fix the problems, said Richard Keevey, the author of the State Budget Crisis Task Force report on New Jersey's finances, in his keynote address to the spring symposium of the Association of Government Accountants' Trenton chapter Friday.

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