TAX SOLUTION: shrink STATE GOVERNMENT, DUH!
By Gordon Bishop (08/07/06)
Why won’t our elected politicians simply do what taxpaying voters want them to do: Stop all taxing-and-spending and shrink our federal and state budgets.
When corporate America can no longer balance their budgets, they do what all survivors do: Downsize their business operations.
The only difference between the private sector business world and the public sector governments is that businesses cannot increase taxes to pay their bills, while the federal government can just print more money.
Without taxes and a printing press, America’s great economic leaders manage to survive with common sense and no empty promises to stay in office.
If downsizing works in the private sector, it certainly can work in the public sector.
The only difference between a President, Governor, Mayor or Legislator and America’s corporate chiefs is the politicians cannot balance their budgets, while businesses (and families) must balance their checkbooks.
I’ve had it with excessive taxation and oppressive regulations that taxpayers can no longer afford. Unless voters wake up and declare another Tax Revolt as our founding fathers did in 1776, then we all deserve to go broke, together with our hopelessly helpless governments, from the feds and states, to the counties and municipalities.
In New Jersey, where I have lived and worked all my life (I’ll soon be 69), we have the highest property taxes and auto insurance premiums in the nation, not to mention the highest per pupil cost for public schools.
Now we have yet another liberal-socialist Governor, Jon Corzine, who goes before the State Legislature to make his “Tax Pleas” by declaring, “Let’s Make History!”
What arrogance – and stupidity.
Yes, this is the same Governor who made history by being the first Governor in New Jersey’s 227-year history to shut down state government for seven days to force the State Legislature to increase the sales tax by 13 percent, or from 6 cents to 7 cents. The shutdown resulted in a loss of $100 million or more of tax revenues.
Corzine’s predecessor, Jim McGreevey, raised the state budget by 18 percent and then resigned as Governor when he admitted he was having a sexual relationship with his Homeland Security chief, a male non-citizen who was not qualified for the job of protecting New Jersey’s more than 8.5 million citizens.
Corzine was elected by New Jersey’s 1,8 million registered Democrats who vote the party-line, even if the party puts up a 900-pound gorilla. There is half that number of registered Republicans in the Garden State.
The first thing Jon Corzine, a Wall Street “investor wiz,” did when he was sworn in as Governor, was to increase the state budget by nearly $2 billion. How can anyone possibly add $2 billion of debt to a state budget that already was $4.5 billion in the hole?
Only a liberal-socialist can understand that mathematical madness.
New Jersey taxpayers want lower property taxes and less government spending.
Corzine will follow two former Governors who lasted only one term in office (McGreevey only three years).
After raising taxes, including a 3.5 percent increase for New Jersey’s companies, Corzine’s cronies in the State Legislature praised the new Governor for having the “guts” to do what he did.
Guts? How about some “brains” here!
Liberal voters in New Jersey must be masochists who enjoy being beaten into numbness by more and more and more state taxes and fees.
Instead of organizing a long-overdue “Tax Revolt,” New Jersey’s liberal voters find themselves embracing a so-called “Wall Street Wonder” who’s totally out of touch with the real world.
After all, Corzine left his sweet Wall Street job with a $400 million “buyout.” That’s how Wall Street in today’s corrupt world rewards incompetence and irresponsibility.
Now Jersey’s stuck with a loser for four years, unless someone in the private sector has the “guts” – and “brains” – to launch a genuine “Tax Revolution,” such as the one that created the USA in 1776.
New Jersey did it once, booting Governor Jim Florio out of office when he tried to get reelected for a second term. Somehow, a Republican named Christie Todd Whitman, was elected Governor by a super-slim vote margin of 1 percent. When Whitman ran for reelection, she won again by 1 percent by knocking off a young State Senator and Mayor named Jim McGreevey.
I nicknamed Christie Whitman the “1 Percent Governor.” She served the taxpayers in her first term by lowering the sales tax from 7 to 6 percent and abolishing a few bureaucracies. But Whitman didn’t follow through in her second term, instead selling off the State Pension Fund, which will cost New Jersey taxpayers billions of dollars in interest payments over the next 20-30 years.
So much for New Jersey’s two-party system.
We now have a one-party system known as “Republicrats.” You can’t tell one from the other.
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