One More Reason to Love Chris Christie
As if a long suffering Jersey girl would need another.
In a state on the edge of bankruptcy, he’s taken on the teachers unions. Check. He’s reformed the public pension and benefits system. Check. He’s balanced the state budget. Check.
And on the fourth of July, he struck a deal with the New Jersey state senate that has been in the works for months—to slash the property tax cap in half, from 4 percent to 2 percent. In New Jersey that's hitting it out of the park. All the better, when the cap was at 4 percent, local finance boards could invoke 14 different expenses as exceptions to the cap (one of which included a catch-all exception). Local residents, meanwhile, had no say—no vote—in whether their property taxes would expand beyond the cap.
Now, there are only four exceptions to the cap and local residents will need to vote upon all increases in property taxes above the 2 percent cap.
In a state as overtaxed as New Jersey, which has the highest property taxes in the nation, this is an astonishing political feat--almost unimaginable.
Three cheers for Governor Chris Christie! He'd be my presidential hopeful not for 2012--I want him to stick around Jersey for a few more years--but 2016 sounds good.
Here's Ricochet contributor Bill McGurn's excellent column on Chris Christie, from a few months ago, which put the Garden State governor's efforts on the national map.
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May '10
Re: One More Reason to Love Chris Christie
The more I learn about Chris Christie, the more I expect the man to reveal his real, super-villain identity without a moment's warning. He's a governor who talks and walks like a conservative, with both vigor & a sense of humor! Years of Batman cartoons suggest that Chris Christie and Bobby Jindal will be unleashing a robot army on the nation's nuclear silos any day now.
Jun '10
Re: One More Reason to Love Chris Christie
Christie is proof that if the public is told the truth, hard as it may be to accept, it will react correctly. What the teachers' union can't seem to grasp is that hard times for the wealth producers of the world should have an impact on the protected few, such as public service employees, also. Up to now the hard times were such that a little bit of juggling could stay the axe, thus keeping public service employees insulated. Not so anymore. What goes unrecognized by the public sector, and those living in high tax states, is that low tax states on the national level and tax havens on the international level keep governments honest. True, no one moves to save five points on their taxes, but when the margin increases as it has for New Jersey, the rich call the van lines, which call, by the way, is a lagging indicator of capital flight.
May '10
Re: One More Reason to Love Chris Christie
Christie continues to be a spring of hope. Conservatives should point out his success every chance they get, shout it from the rooftops, because Americans need to know that they can aim high this November.
Re: One More Reason to Love Chris Christie
Cas, your comment reminds me of something Gov. Chris Christie told the Weekly Standard's Fred Barnes in this article: "if you tax them, they will leave."
New Jersey residents are the most overtaxed people in the nation, and, as Christie tells Barnes, NJ has the dubious distinction of ranking first "in the number of college students who, once educated, leave our state.”
If you're interested in how residents of a state vote with their feet, fleeing states that place high tax burdens on them, check out this report, Rich States Poor States, put out by economists Arthur Laffer, Stephen Moore, and Jonathan Williams. It's one of the best--if not the best--sources of information about the fiscal policies of the 50 states, and how those policies ignite or hamper economic growth.
New Jersey, you'll see, is featured in a chapter (on page 39) called "Lessons on How Not to Govern a State."