Rome wasn’t destroyed in a day. Neither was New Jersey. It’s worth keeping in mind amid the headlines about Gov. Chris Christie and his state’s credit ratings.
Today, Jersey Democrats are chortling over the governor’s financial woes, which include an $807 million budget hole and the possibility of a record-tying sixth bond downgrade by Wall Street.
Recently, the Mercatus Center at George Mason University ranked New Jersey dead last in fiscal stability, thanks largely to “15 years of underfunding its state and local pensions.” Which helps explain why 94 percent of new state spending is now eaten up by benefits, pensions and debt service.
Yes, Christie has overestimated budget revenues and borrowed more than he should to close gaps. But it was Democrat Jim Florio who doubled the top income-tax rates, and that he and a later Democratic governor, Jim McGreevey, signed on to public pension deals that made the whole system more shaky and untenable in the long run. The problems exposed today are just the top of a mountain many years in the making.
Not that Republicans are absolved from blame: Christie Whitman borrowed billions to avoid making required payments into the pension system. She, too, borrowed and bonded to paper it over.
We would like to see Gov. Christie do more to reform a state whose problems come from a government that lives beyond its means.
But our guess is that what really riles Christie’s critics is not that he spends or borrows too much but that he refuses to rely on the classic New Jersey “fix”: raise the state’s high taxes even higher.