Never On Sunday

New Jersey is suffering some painful budget woes in 2010. This is no special misfortune; almost every state in the Union is suffering painful budget woes in the wake of the panic of 2008. New Jersey is unfortunate, however, to have in place Republican Governor Chris Christie, elected on a wave of revulsion for his Democratic predecessor.

Christie is a Reagan-era conservative, the kind who considers government the problem and the kind who never met a tax cut he didn’t like. Unsurprisingly, then, he is looking to balance the budget by slashing state functions, and especially by slashing education. It was in studying school budget problems for class that I ended up reading a transcript of Christie’s budget presentation. And the man is a turd.

He talks a lot about sacrifice. Shared sacrifice. A sacrifice by all New Jerseyans. We are all to collect in the middle and jump off the cliff together. (Kids, don’t try mixing these metaphors at home.) Every department is to be cut. Despite election promises, taxes will rise—certain taxes, at least. We’re all going to need to suffer in order to preserve hope for a better tomorrow.

Oops! Almost forgot to mention one very important exception: the wealthy cannot be asked to sacrifice. In Christie’s words, “Ladies and gentlemen, if you tax them, they will leave.” Christie is so dead set against asking the rich to join with the rest of New Jersey in cleaning up our mess that he refuses to maintain a surcharge on incomes over $400,000, a tax which last year netted around one billion dollars, a close match to the nearly one billion dollars he wants cut from the education budget in addition to the half billion already cut.

Nor does he feel his hands are exactly tied by campaign promises to keep taxes down. Not exactly. Christie wants to limit property taxes, long a powder keg of resentment in a state with the highest property taxes in the country, to 2.5%, and wants a constitutional amendment to make sure those pesky courts have nothing to say about it. But he’s not exactly fighting taxes, as such. Even as he resorts to extraordinary measures to cut property taxes, he also asks the legislature to cut property tax rebates, making sure that the middle class cover the shortfall of his proposed amendment designed to protect the wealthy from the burden of taxes. He’s also prepared to tax medical benefits. And to raise taxes on pensions. And grocery taxes. Any tax that will be borne by the middle and lower classes—that’s all right. So, too, is spending public money on private enterprises: even as Christie insists there is no money for public schools, he refuses to cut the public subsidy for private charter schools, those miracles of free market efficiency.

And then he turns to demonizing unions as the privileged and pampered obstacles to fiscal health.

I could feel sorry for a governor of either party facing this fiscal mess. Christie makes good points about the mismanagement that came before he arrived. He is certainly correct to say that fixing the problem will be ugly and painful, and probably correct to say no public service is safe, however well-intentioned its political support, until the debt and deficit are brought to heel. No governor could provide a happy solution, but merely the least bad. I would be willing to join in the sacrifices for a governor making such terrible choices in good faith, even knowing that the axe will probably fall heavily on education even in good faith, because that’s where much of the state budget goes. But Christie isn’t operating in good faith. He isn’t aiming to balance the budget. He’s not even aiming to hold down taxes. He’s aiming to destroy unions, destroy public education, and destroy government generally, just like any good little neoconservative dreams of doing. And like any good little neoconservative, if (when) the state collapses around him, he’ll stand in the smoking crater and shout, “See! Government can’t work!”

And ladies and gentlemen, when that happens, THEY will leave anyway.