Sweeney: More Compromise Budgets Likely in Years Ahead

By Mark J. Magyar (courtesy of NJ Spotlight)

When it came to negotiating this year’s budget, there just wasn’t enough money to fight over, and there won’t be for the next several years either, Senate President Stephen Sweeney (D-Gloucester) said Monday.

With the state’s pension obligations eating up the lion’s share of normal revenue growth through Fiscal Year 2018, compromise budgets like the $32.9 billion spending plan that cleared both the Democratic-controlled Senate and Assembly Monday are likely to be the rule for the next four years, Sweeney said.

“What happened this year is going to happen over the next several years,” Sweeney said. “There’s no money. There are no other programs we can cut. That’s why this negotiated budget was so easy to negotiate.”

Despite Republican Gov. Chris Christie’s saber-rattling over pushing for a tax cut, even “the governor recognized there’s no money for it,” Sweeney said. In fact, Senate Budget Chairman Paul Sarlo (D-Bergen) said “there was no real mention of a tax cut” in the meetings he had with Christie.

The inability of the state over the past two years to fund even the first-year $183 million to $215 million cost of the property tax credit on the income tax that Sweeney proposed in March 2012 and Christie endorsed the following month raises doubts about how the state could possibly find the estimated $1.6 billion needed by the fourth year to pay for the maximum $1,000 per homeowner tax cut.

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