Liberalism Bankrupted New Jersey Government
By Gordon Bishop (07/10/06)
Inevitably, liberalism, like cancer, destroys one cell at a time until the patient dies.
In New Jersey’s case, the patient is the State Government. It’s broke. It’s bankrupt. The government owes the State Pension Fund around $20 billion. The State Transportation Fund has run out of money.
New Jersey taxpayers are stuck with the highest property taxes in the nation, in addition to the highest automobile insurance, the highest per pupil cost, and just about every imaginable tax and fee that a liberal government can impose – all blessed by a liberal State Supreme Court.
I don’t feel sorry for New Jersey. The taxpayers and voters deserve what they get. They keep electing and reelecting tax-and-spend liberals who keep increasing the state budget year after year, decade after decade…until “the system” finally crashes.
For a state with a lucrative lottery and the biggest casino gambling operation in the nation outside of Las Vegas to run out of money is truly amazing.
But thanks to five liberal Governors over the past 25 years, along with liberal lawmakers (including liberal Republicans), New Jersey is up to its eyeballs in debt.
Democrat Jim Florio became Governor in 1989. The first thing he did was to increase the state budget by $3 billion. He told pollsters, “Don’t worry about it – the voters will forget about it four years from now” when he seeks reelection.
Florio was a one-term Governor. He was replaced by liberal Republican Governor Christine Todd Whitman, who did reduce the sales tax from 7 to 6 percent, but then put the State Pension Fund into deep debt. Somehow Whitman was reelected by 1 percent, the same 1 percent she needed to oust Florio. Her second win was beating a Mayor and State Senator, Jim McGreevey. Whitman was known as the 1 percent Governor.
McGreevey finally got into the Governor’s Office when Whitman left office (Governors can serve only two terms in New Jersey).
McGreevey increased the state budget by almost 18 percent. The national inflation rate that year was around 2-3 percent. Mc Greevey did taxpayers a big favor by resigning as Governor after he “outed” himself as a homosexual who was having an affair with his Homeland Security chief, who also had to step down because, as a citizen of Israel, he could not serve as Homeland Security Chief with zero security credentials.
Like Jim Florio, Jim McGreevey wasn’t playing with a full deck.
And then came a multi-multi-millionaire, Jon Corzine, the biggest tax-and-spend liberal in the U.S. Senate, representing, of course, the State of New Jersey.
The first thing liberal-socialist Corzine did this year after being sworn in as Governor was to increase the State Budget by almost $2 billion.
Now here’s a guy who worked as co-chairman of a big Wall Street brokerage house and was kicked out of that job with a $400 million “buyout” and immediately spends $62 million to buy the New Jersey Senate seat. How immoral, indecent and egotistical can you get?
Not satisfied with spending taxpayers’ money as a U.S. Senator, Corzine then spends another $50 million to buy the New Jersey Democrat party and to get elected as Governor. Along the way, his wife divorced him, taking half of his money as alimony.
During the gubernatorial race, Corzine’s ex-wife said the Republican candidate running against her ex-husband was a fine person because he kept his family intact. That statement may have cost Corzine a few thousand votes from women who sympathized with the former Mrs. Corzine.
But that’s not enough to beat a wealthy liberal who cares more about money, power and control than the taxpayers he’s supposed to serve.
That’s the way it is in New Jersey, home of the classic mobster Tony Soprano on the HBO TV series. New Jersey has become a laughing stock of America because of creeps like Corzine and Tony Soprano.
What’s the future for New Jersey? The same as what the future of America will be if it remains stuck on the same self-destructive path of tax-and-spend liberals-socialists-Marxists.
The federal government is fiscally and technically broke if you add up all of the IOUs the feds owe for Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, prescription drugs and all the rest of the unfunded “entitlements” created, unconstitutionally, by federal lawmakers.
America’s founders would be horrified if they could see what has become of our once stable and proud Constitutional Republic. We’re living on borrowed time and money.
Gordon Bishop
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