Smashing the State—of New Jersey

Denvir: Smashing New Jersey

ON APRIL 27, thousands of students walked out of New Jersey schools. Holding signs that read “Stop Education Cuts” and “Dream Killers,” they were out to protest Republican Governor Chris Christie’s proposal to sharply cut education spending. An eighteen-year-old recent graduate organized the walkout on Facebook; the event she posted had 18,082 confirmed guests and 15,021 “maybe attending.” A lot of people showed up.

Christie was elected on a no-new-taxes, get-tough-on-public-employees platform, so the policies he has implemented since taking office in January should come as no surprise. But will voters like Republican political rhetoric as much once they’ve experienced it as policy that affects their lives?

New Jersey is a laboratory for politics in the age of Obama and the Tea Party. After nearly two years of Republican obstructionism in Congress, Christie is saying “yes” to a vast patchwork of service and tax cuts. In doing so, he is putting Republican policy into practice and on display—GOP governance is no longer hypothetical in Great Recession America. And just as our last painful national experience in Republican rule demonstrated, talking tough on taxes is often merely a cover for redistributing wealth upward, to the wealthy. While Christie makes noises about “shared sacrifice,” localities hit by budget cuts will be forced to further raise property taxes, and public transit fares are going up an unprecedented 25 percent—a “turnstile tax” that will fall largely on the working and middle classes.

New Jersey is, like most states, confronting a debilitating fiscal crisis. Revenues are down, and the stimulus dollars that cushioned last year’s fall have now run out. The budget shortfall provides the perfect political cover for the attack on social services that conservatives have long advocated, but which was politically untenable in more flush times. (Although Christie, who says Jersey is “careening [its] way toward becoming Greece,” may be a touch hyperbolic.) Public employee pay and pensions, extra funding for poorer school districts, domestic violence shelters, and medical insurance for the poor are all up against the ropes nation-wide. In New Jersey, Christie relishes the fight against unions and a sometimes pliant Democratic-controlled legislature.

The governor still retains significant public support. In April, New Jerseyans rejected 260 of 479 local school budgets after Christie called for a “no” vote in any county where teachers refused a pay freeze. Over the past two months, he has won an $820 million cut in state aid to local schools and another $446 million to municipalities, cut insurance for poor children along with school breakfast and lunch programs, eliminated the Department of the Public Advocate, capped property tax increases at 2 percent, and vetoed proposed spending on women’s health.

THE GARDEN State is fertile soil for a tax revolt. It has long boasted some of the nation’s highest property tax rates, in large part fueled by the dizzying subdivision of local government, with most every miniature township fielding its own police and fire department and running a separate school system. This has fostered a popular provincialism, akin to the property rights libertarianism of the American West. Jersey has an astounding 605 school districts and 566 municipalities in all, nearly a third of which are less than two square miles in size. For many in the suburbanite state, New York or Philadelphia are more of a reference point than Trenton; with their municipalities the ultimate refuges, state government is often seen as a meddlesome outsider. New Jersey did not implement an income tax until 1976.

But Jersey is also a state of great and proximate inequality. One of the country’s richest states, it is also home to impoverished cities like Camden and Newark. White flight has defined Jersey politics, prompting the wealthier and white to organize against sharing their wealth with poorer people, especially blacks and Latinos. School funding has been a political crucible for decades, and proposals for equitable statewide funding were met with accusations of creeping socialism decades before Glenn Beck arrived on the scene. Keeping low-income housing out of rich communities and thus maintaining de facto segregation has been another idée fixe. Christie proposes eliminating requirements for affordable housing, freezing a segregated geography in place. And he plans to remake the state supreme court, which has long encouraged equality in housing and education funding, to get the job done.

A careful perusal of the Philadelphia Inquirer, which covers both Pennsylvania and New Jersey, makes for a head-to-head clinical trial of sorts: two policy interventions compared against one another. Across the Delaware River in the Keystone State, Democratic Governor Ed Rendell has steered a more progressive course through two years of fiscal crisis. In 2009, he defended increased spending on education. But the revenue came at a price. Rendell ushered along legalized gambling, which united progressive urban social movements and rural social conservatives in opposition. He also sold out state forests under the politically potent banner of “job creation,” auctioning off a huge chunk of state land to natural gas drillers and until recently opposing a severance tax on the industry.

These ill-gotten funds notwithstanding, the state still struggles to maintain funding for social programs in the face of weak federal support, including a stimulus package in senescence. Worse yet, a congress gripped by deficit hysteria has yet to approve billions of dollars in Medicaid funds, including $850 million for Pennsylvania. This year, Rendell proposed closing the “Delaware loophole,” which allows businesses to avoid paying taxes in the state; broadening the sales tax to cover certain undeservedly exempt items; and, finally, taxing natural gas extraction. The Republican senate blocked all tax increases save for the one on natural gas, forcing cuts that could lead to 1,000 state employees losing their jobs. Rendell did, however, succeed in boosting education spending.

The bi-state comparison isn’t merely academic. Conservative Philadelphia Inquirer columnist Kevin Ferris hopes that Pennsylvania’s Republican Attorney General and candidate for governor Tom Corbett will follow in Christie’s footsteps. In a haunting echo of Jersey past, Corbett has, like Christie, made his name as an attorney general prosecuting corrupt politicians—many of them Democrats.

“So is there a Chris Christie in Pennsylvania’s future, a governor who won’t whine about how hard his job is, who will pass pension reform, who will refrain from hitting the taxpayer ATM, and who will fight special interests?” asks Ferris.

The non-ideological issue of fighting corruption is the perfect cover for libertarianism’s technocratic politics of fiscal “restraint.” And the state budget crises are, perversely, a breeding ground for Republican resurgence. Democratic half-measures at the national level have saddled the party with all the stigma of big government with few of the results.

Rendell’s approval rating now stands at 42 percent, while his disapproval rating has risen to 50 percent. Too few defenders of the social safety net get angry until it’s too late. Aside from the organized ranks of unions and some advocacy groups, most people don’t wake up to the cuts until their school or program is on the chopping block. And even then, there is no guarantee that voters will mount a progressive response to cutbacks or lost jobs—witness the Tea Party. But even the Tea Party demonstrates that organizations matter. Organizations are, for good or for ill, crucial mediators between people’s day-to-day experience and the less concrete world of policy and elections.

In May, over thirty thousand public employees and progressives rallied in Trenton to protest Christie’s proposed veto of a “millionaire’s tax,” marking the second mass action against the governor, who had yet to complete six months in office. The unions and other organizations fighting Christie’s budget cuts helped politicize what voters experience as isolated, individual burdens. But could they actually deny Christie reelection in 2013? A July poll shows the state evenly divided on the governor, with 44 percent approving of his performance and 44 percent disapproving. Half of New Jerseyans say the budget cuts are “unfair.” But Christie has also successfully vilified public employee unions as greedy, self-interested cartels, so it’s hard to say which message will win out in two year’s time. In today’s stylized political world, Christie’s brutish attitude (see: accusing teachers of treating their students like “drug mules” for pro-teacher messages and declining to reappoint the state’s only black supreme court justice) could sour on voters more than any policy failing. Indeed, polls still show majority support for tax and spending cuts, while disapproval of the New Jersey Education Association has risen. The relationship between voters’ stated preferences and their reactions to the actual implementation of policy couldn’t be more uncertain.

The budget crises are very real, and given the paltry level of federal assistance, states are in no position to dig themselves out. It will be interesting to see what the public learns. Christie could just meet his political death by a thousand cuts, and Pennsylvania voters could wake up to the painful austerity a Republican governor would bring. But if the states continue to starve, the promise of Democratic governance goes unrealized. And the Right is ready to rule, hatchet in hand.

Daniel Denvir observes New Jersey politics from across the river, in Philadelphia.

Photo: Governor of New Jersey Chris Christie (Walter Burns / Wikimedia Commons)