RUMANA TO ROUSSEAU: A 10TH HIGHEST TAX RATE RANKING NOTHING TO BE PROUD OF

Assemblyman Scott Rumana today said an opinion editorial in today’s Record by  state Treasurer David Rousseau in which he attempts to refute data by The Tax Foundation showing New Jersey has the worst business climate and the highest property taxes in the nation, confirms that the Corzine administration continues to govern in denial.

In the article, Rousseau attempts to refute The Tax Foundation’s 2010 findings by pointing to a Federation of Tax Administrators 2006 report which found New Jersey had the 10th highest state and local taxes in the country. He also claims The Tax Foundation last year said the Garden State never ranked higher than 10th.

“Governor Corzine and his staff just don’t get it,” stated Rumana, R- Passaic, Bergen and Essex.. “Whether we have the worst business climate in the U.S. or the 10th, neither is a desirable ranking. Governor Corzine and those who do his bidding are desperate to deflect blame for the tremendous role they have played for the past four years in making our state unaffordable for middle class families and unattractive for businesses.

Rumana noted that in addition to the recent Tax Foundation data, leading state economists have repeatedly pointed to a vast array of surveys, polls and reports that all arrive at the same conclusion – New Jersey has been shedding jobs, residents and businesses for nearly a decade. Examples include:

• Rutgers Economist James Seneca last month, in commenting on the state’s continued rise in its unemployment rate, said New Jersey will have fewer private sector jobs today than in December 1999, making it “a lost decade.” He called the rise in unemployment "worrisome" while pointing out that since December 2007, New Jersey has lost 155,700 jobs, wiping out the gains during the economy's expansion from March 2003 to December 2007.
• Rutgers Economist James Hughes, responding to a September state Department of Labor and Workforce Development report on unemployment and job growth, said,  “There’s nothing positive” about the labor report, adding, “Most of the individual components are moving in the wrong direction.”
• In April, Seneca said, the deterioration of the state’s business climate over the past decade “was long in the making., it had many, many components that took a long time for both the perception and reality of that business climate to become so negative...it’s unfortunate that it’s taken a deep national recession to get significant attention to it.” His comments came on the heels of comes on the heels of a Millennium Radio report which showed New Jersey once again had the least business-friendly state in the U.S., according to the Small Business and Entrepreneurship Council’s 2009 Business Tax Index.
• In December 2008, Hughes and Seneca wrote, “Weak job markets in the state throughout the decade have significantly detracted from employment opportunities in New Jersey. Thus, the loss of 124,100 above-average paying manufacturing jobs and 29,100 high-paying jobs in the information sector during this time eliminated many highly skilled New Jerseyans from the labor market. For these people, there were few equivalent employment opportunities in New Jersey and strong incentives to relocate to other states with faster-growing knowledge-based employment. Other out-migrants...kept their jobs in New Jersey but moved to nearby states, especially Pennsylvania, with its lower housing costs and taxes.”

Rumana also pointed to another Hughes and Seneca September report in which they noted New Jersey’s potential to emerge from its recession as a business leader, but the two economists said, “...the state must regain a competitive business-cost position. This will require enormous political will to restore fiscal discipline, eliminate structural budgetary deficits, revive business competitiveness in all its complex dimensions (taxation, regulation, land-use controls, and other publicly imposed costs) and re-balance the use of its resource between income distribution.”

“For four years, Republicans have recommended the same,” said Rumana of the economists’ conclusions. People follow jobs and New Jersey just isn’t attracting businesses because of its onerous tax burden and regulations. The bottom line is Governor Corzine sorely lacks the political will to make the structural changes necessary to put our state back on track to fiscal health. We’ve petitioned the governor and Democrat leaders to abandon their destructive tax, spend and borrow policies and to reform government. They refused and now the administration is trying to spin the data.”

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