For the past few years, Gov. Christie has been bold and straightforward with his push for reform, tax cuts and hope during his annual state budget address.
Last week, he was anything but.
Instead of painting a rosy picture of a bright future for New Jersey, Christie stuck to “reality” and seemed to cast a potential dark cloud. If we don’t do something about pensions soon, we’ll all be paying for it dearly later, is what he said.
Christie’s proposed $34.4 billion budget includes a full payment of $2.25 billion for state workers pensions. But he said that changes he made to the pension plan a few years ago aren’t doing enough, and said that too much of New Jersey’s spending goes toward what he called “entitlements,” a phrase his opponents, and union leaders, obviously took exception to.
“With our long-term obligations only set to increase in the coming years, the problem will not go away by itself,” he said. “We cannot wish it away. We cannot make it go away by magic. What we must do is what we were sent here to do by the people — to lead and to act decisively again.”
Democrats responded by saying that the pension reforms are working just fine, and time will prove that everything is A-OK.
We’re not so sure that the system will simply fix itself, but we also don’t necessarily agree with Christie that more major changes are needed right now.
What we do agree with is that more spending cuts need to be made somewhere. The state needs to get out of debt — or at least move closer back to even — and it needs to do so soon. Local county governments, municipalities and school districts need to share more services to cut spending without cutting quality of services — and the state needs to provide these entities with the ability to do so.
So what to do? Who really knows? While making more major changes might be the answer, sitting back and doing nothing isn’t either.
