Christie Declares ‘New Normal’ in Budget Proposal
By DAVID M. HALBFINGER
TRENTON — A pugnacious and boastful Gov. Chris Christie proposed a no-growth budget for New Jersey on Tuesday, saying he had inspired a legion of copycat governors from Albany to Sacramento and was not about to let up in his efforts to shift money from public workers to property-tax payers and businesses that create jobs.
Declaring that his deep cuts last year had “established the new normal,” Mr. Christie, a Republican, carved out a modest increase for public-school aid, kept municipal aid flat, offered small increases for indigent care at hospitals and financial aid for college students, and set aside a bigger amount to support improvements in the state’s vital transportation system.
But to pay for his priorities, Mr. Christie, who has waged a 14-month rhetorical war against the teachers’ and other public-sector unions, stepped up the pressure to slash their members’ health and retirement benefits.
The governor conditioned a doubling of the middle-class property tax rebate, for example, on the passage of changes that would make public employees pay 30 percent of the cost of their health insurance, compared with an average of 8 percent that Mr. Christie said many now pay.
He also offered to make a partial payment to the state’s woefully underfunded pension system, but only if the system was overhauled to require bigger payments from workers, smaller payouts and an increase in the retirement age.
“Please, let’s not pick the special interests over our overburdened taxpayers,” Mr. Christie said during his budget address.
Mr. Christie said that even in Wisconsin, where Gov. Scott Walker’s proposal to cut the benefits and collective bargaining rights of public workers had set off a firestorm of protests, officials “have decided there can no longer be two classes of citizens: one that receives rich health and pension benefits, and all the rest who are left to pay for them.”
New Jersey union leaders assailed Mr. Christie’s proposals, vowing to take their case to the public in advertisements, public forums and demonstrations in Trenton if need be.
“We’ll be pushing back for sure,” said Steve Wollmer, a spokesman for the New Jersey Education Association, which represents 200,000 teachers and school workers. Mr. Wollmer said Mr. Christie’s reforms would cost many teachers $12,000 or more a year. “This governor is good at talking about shared sacrifice, but in the end, he’s balancing the books on the backs of our members,” he said.
Hetty Rosenstein, state director of the Communications Workers of America, the largest state employee union, said Mr. Christie was pitting home owners and middle-class government workers against one another. “It’s like he’s playing a game of ‘Survivor’ with working people — ‘Who gets voted off the island?’ — instead of looking to where there really is money,” Ms. Rosenstein said.
Mr. Christie, who was elected in 2009, seemed to want to take credit for budget-cutting measures being used in state houses across the country by this year’s crop of rookies — as if he had copyrighted austerity.
Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo, Democrat of New York, Mr. Christie said, was following in his footsteps, and “even the choice of words are similar to where New Jersey was one year ago.” Mr. Christie also quoted the call by Gov. Jerry Brown, Democrat of California, for wage cuts and an end to fiscal gimmicks, adding, “Sound familiar?”
“Democratic governors and Republican governors now look to New Jersey as a beacon of hope,” Mr. Christie said.
But the governor offered little detail on the sacrifices that would be asked of those who did not belong to public-sector unions. His $29.4 billion budget calls for $540 million in Medicaid savings, with $240 million coming from pushing 121,000 elderly and disabled recipients into managed-care programs that are now mainly reserved for families on welfare. The rest, $300 million, is both ambitious and vague: it will require a federal waiver, and administration officials said it was too soon to say if or how services would be cut.
With the state’s education system still reeling from Mr. Christie’s cuts a year ago, when dozens of districts lost all their state aid, the governor offered to increase funding to every school district by an amount equal to 1 percent of its current-year budget.
The budget basically holds spending flat at the current year’s level.
“Today marks the line in the sand that separates the way things used to be and the way they are going to be,” Mr. Christie said. “And we will not be going back.”
Mr. Christie is offering to prepay a scheduled pension contribution of $506 million before the new fiscal year, if the Legislature enacts his pension overhaul. That would allow the governor to say he has cut spending for a second year in a row. Otherwise, spending would actually grow slightly.
Most galling to union leaders, who argue that the governor is using them as scapegoats for an economic crisis they say was caused by Wall Street millionaires, was Mr. Christie’s call for $200 million in new tax breaks, including an increase in the estate-tax exemption to $1 million, from $675,000. The governor said this would help small-business owners.
Just how much resistance the unions will mount is an open question. The New Jersey State A.F.L.-C.I.O. is staging a rally in Trenton on Friday in support of its brethren in Wisconsin, where labor’s fight is more existential. But its efforts in New Jersey have been more low-key: lobbying sympathetic lawmakers for a pension-reform package labor can live with.
“What exactly are we going to do if this comes down to a fight?” said Charles Wowkanech, the state A.F.L.-C.I.O.’s president. “I can’t answer that now. But we will do everything humanly possible to maintain a defined-benefit pension for the working men and women of this state.”
Declaring that his deep cuts last year had “established the new normal,” Mr. Christie, a Republican, carved out a modest increase for public-school aid, kept municipal aid flat, offered small increases for indigent care at hospitals and financial aid for college students, and set aside a bigger amount to support improvements in the state’s vital transportation system.
But to pay for his priorities, Mr. Christie, who has waged a 14-month rhetorical war against the teachers’ and other public-sector unions, stepped up the pressure to slash their members’ health and retirement benefits.
The governor conditioned a doubling of the middle-class property tax rebate, for example, on the passage of changes that would make public employees pay 30 percent of the cost of their health insurance, compared with an average of 8 percent that Mr. Christie said many now pay.
He also offered to make a partial payment to the state’s woefully underfunded pension system, but only if the system was overhauled to require bigger payments from workers, smaller payouts and an increase in the retirement age.
“Please, let’s not pick the special interests over our overburdened taxpayers,” Mr. Christie said during his budget address.
Mr. Christie said that even in Wisconsin, where Gov. Scott Walker’s proposal to cut the benefits and collective bargaining rights of public workers had set off a firestorm of protests, officials “have decided there can no longer be two classes of citizens: one that receives rich health and pension benefits, and all the rest who are left to pay for them.”
New Jersey union leaders assailed Mr. Christie’s proposals, vowing to take their case to the public in advertisements, public forums and demonstrations in Trenton if need be.
“We’ll be pushing back for sure,” said Steve Wollmer, a spokesman for the New Jersey Education Association, which represents 200,000 teachers and school workers. Mr. Wollmer said Mr. Christie’s reforms would cost many teachers $12,000 or more a year. “This governor is good at talking about shared sacrifice, but in the end, he’s balancing the books on the backs of our members,” he said.
Hetty Rosenstein, state director of the Communications Workers of America, the largest state employee union, said Mr. Christie was pitting home owners and middle-class government workers against one another. “It’s like he’s playing a game of ‘Survivor’ with working people — ‘Who gets voted off the island?’ — instead of looking to where there really is money,” Ms. Rosenstein said.
Mr. Christie, who was elected in 2009, seemed to want to take credit for budget-cutting measures being used in state houses across the country by this year’s crop of rookies — as if he had copyrighted austerity.
Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo, Democrat of New York, Mr. Christie said, was following in his footsteps, and “even the choice of words are similar to where New Jersey was one year ago.” Mr. Christie also quoted the call by Gov. Jerry Brown, Democrat of California, for wage cuts and an end to fiscal gimmicks, adding, “Sound familiar?”
“Democratic governors and Republican governors now look to New Jersey as a beacon of hope,” Mr. Christie said.
But the governor offered little detail on the sacrifices that would be asked of those who did not belong to public-sector unions. His $29.4 billion budget calls for $540 million in Medicaid savings, with $240 million coming from pushing 121,000 elderly and disabled recipients into managed-care programs that are now mainly reserved for families on welfare. The rest, $300 million, is both ambitious and vague: it will require a federal waiver, and administration officials said it was too soon to say if or how services would be cut.
With the state’s education system still reeling from Mr. Christie’s cuts a year ago, when dozens of districts lost all their state aid, the governor offered to increase funding to every school district by an amount equal to 1 percent of its current-year budget.
The budget basically holds spending flat at the current year’s level.
“Today marks the line in the sand that separates the way things used to be and the way they are going to be,” Mr. Christie said. “And we will not be going back.”
Mr. Christie is offering to prepay a scheduled pension contribution of $506 million before the new fiscal year, if the Legislature enacts his pension overhaul. That would allow the governor to say he has cut spending for a second year in a row. Otherwise, spending would actually grow slightly.
Most galling to union leaders, who argue that the governor is using them as scapegoats for an economic crisis they say was caused by Wall Street millionaires, was Mr. Christie’s call for $200 million in new tax breaks, including an increase in the estate-tax exemption to $1 million, from $675,000. The governor said this would help small-business owners.
Just how much resistance the unions will mount is an open question. The New Jersey State A.F.L.-C.I.O. is staging a rally in Trenton on Friday in support of its brethren in Wisconsin, where labor’s fight is more existential. But its efforts in New Jersey have been more low-key: lobbying sympathetic lawmakers for a pension-reform package labor can live with.
“What exactly are we going to do if this comes down to a fight?” said Charles Wowkanech, the state A.F.L.-C.I.O.’s president. “I can’t answer that now. But we will do everything humanly possible to maintain a defined-benefit pension for the working men and women of this state.”
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