Measuring Misery
Posted June 12 2009

Is it possible to measure misery? When it comes to New Jersey's fiscal health - or lack thereof - it seems the answer is "Yes."

This week, the New Jersey Taxpayers Association (NJTA), a grassroots organization whose mission is to "achiev[e] real and sustainable tax reform in New Jersey," revealed its Misery Index, a new tool that measures the tax, debt, spending, and unemployment load shouldered by New Jerseyan taxpayers. And the picture is grim.

According to the index, our state's "misery" has grown by almost 25 percent since 2005 and by almost 50 percent since 1999. 

"We can't continue to operate like this," notes NJTA President Jerry Cantrell, "and whether it's democratic or republican leadership they have to understand the party's over.. We'd like to see a plan. What's the plan? We've just got this knee-jerk reaction. Okay, we've got this problem so we'll pass another fee or another tax."

Indeed, as Joshua Culling of the non-partisan National Taxpayers Union (NTU) wrote last fall:

Put succinctly, New Jersey's situation is self-evident. You have the worst tax climate for business in the country. You have the worst tax load in the country for private citizens. Thus, not only are people avoiding a move to New Jersey, but natives are leaving in droves. Perhaps the only thing keeping this disaster from becoming a total doomsday is that New Jersey's neighbors, such as New York and Connecticut, impose above-average burdens on their citizens too. But this situation can't last with New Jersey at or among the worst in just about every bad fiscal indicator. The necessity of tax reform is no longer a partisan issue in New Jersey. It is a fact of life..

Indeed, both Cantrell and Culling are correct. New Jersey is in crisis, and solving this crisis should not be a partisan issue.

We've parsed the numbers before, but Culling notes that between 1997 and 2006, New Jersey lost 409,409 people - representing the fourth highest population loss in the country. The cliché may be that misery loves company, but when it comes to the financial burden of living in New Jersey, these numbers prove New Jersey taxpayers would much rather have relief than company. 

Both the NTU and the NJTA are members of the New Jersey Taxpayers Alliance, a group of a dozen organizations that this week took Governor Corzine to task for "the spending, debt and tax increases included in the proposed state budget."

A final vote on the FY 2010 state budget could come as early as next week, but the proposed budget, which Governor Corzine presented in March, turns a deaf ear to New Jerseyans' misery by cutting property tax rebates for many homeowners and hiking income taxes for the so-called wealthy. Of course, as anyone who lives in New Jersey and pays New Jersey property taxes can attest, "wealthy" in our state is a relative term.

While it's one thing to want to ease the financial burden on taxpayers but feel powerless to do so, it's quite another to have at one's fingertips the ability to alleviate misery but choose not to use it.

Unfortunately, for too long, many of our legislators have fallen into this latter category, and squarely at their feet lies much of the blame for New Jersey's skyrocketing "misery index."

Now the question is, what are they going to do about it.

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