| For those who missed Paul Mulshine's hysterically accurate assessment of Chris Christie's magical budget (or Jason Springer's take on it), he has hit on something that finally seems to be catching on in terms of Chris Christie's vague comments that truly highlight his lack of understanding, or lack of seriousness when it comes to something that NJ households have to do every day, every week, every paycheck - balance their budgets.
First, Christie said that it is merely his responsibility to criticize Corzine on the budget, even though the budget is one of the, if not the single largest thing that the Governor's job entails. Then, he offers vague comments about cutting everyone's income taxes, cutting everyone's property taxes, cutting business taxes and "cutting government waste". Then we find out that, yet again, Christie is knee deep in contradictions regarding ripping off the state pension plan as it is ok when his people do it.
Then, he was called on the $3 billion hole that his cuts would cause in the budget (and that was before the decreased revenue numbers recently released). So then (if you can still follow), Christie decides that he would close the budget gap by laying off an unspecified "thousands" of state workers (all while giving them the double whammy of declining stimulus money which would help them with unemployment benefits).
But even with this - there are no numbers for tax cuts, there are no numbers for what services would have to be cut, since taxes pay for services like garbage collection, snow removal, repairing roads, emergency services and many other things that every NJ resident probably takes for granted.
Mulshine says that Christie "might as well propose a law requiring the rivers to run with whiskey and the mountains to be made of ice cream." But it is even worse than that - his actual magical mystery fantasy budget is something we would expect from an evil wizard like Voldemort or something like Homer Simpson in the Land of Chocolate. Free ice cream for everyone. Everyone gets a pony. Lower income taxes. Lower property taxes. Lower business taxes. A rainbow on every block - but without the rain.
And then.....tens of thousands of state layoffs, but continuing to have his buddies draw state pensions from $3,000 per year jobs, profit from the millions in no-bid contracts he gave them and hold dual offices. Cuts in services across the board. Cuts to unemployment benefits. Higher payroll taxes for employers due to his recklessness. Higher debt as reduced revenue would not be able to pay it off. Cuts to education, cuts to hundreds of programs due to the decreased revenue from less tax collections.
And what happens when the two-faced wizard runs out of his snake oil and has to deal with reality?
The fact is, Christie's promises are unrealistic and either he is well aware of it and is deliberately trying to deceive voters, or he isn't aware of it and is severely lacking in basic budgetary skills.
Either one makes him unfit for Governor. |
