governor – Page 4 – Hank Kalet

More polling evidence: The governor is unpopular

For Gov. Jon Corzine, there is little positive that can be found in today’s Quinnipiac Poll, one that has Republican Chris Christie leading 50-40 against the incumbent. Consider:

Gov. Corzine leads 73 – 19 percent among Democratic likely voters, while Christie leads 88 – 7 percent among Republicans and 56 – 32 percent among independent voters. Men back Christie 55 – 38 percent, while women give the Republican a 46 – 43 percent edge.

All New Jersey registered voters disapprove 56 – 36 percent of the job Corzine is doing, his lowest grade ever and down from a 53 – 38 percent disapproval rating May 20.

Voters say 55 – 37 percent that Corzine does not deserve to be reelected. Democrats say four more years 66 – 25 percent, while he gets an 84 – 9 percent thumbs down from Republicans and a 64 – 28 percent boot from independent voters.

Things have gotten worse in New Jersey since Corzine became Governor, 52 percent of voters say, the highest measure for this grim outlook.

None of this is good news for the governor, though I suspect it isn’t fatal for him — there is about five months to go before voters actually have to touch their screens in the voting booth and there are aspects of the poll that Christie should take as showing some level of his own vulnerability:

Two-thirds of New Jerseyans are dissaitisfied with the state of the state, but 40 percent still back Corzine and 10 percent have not made up their mind.
About 40 percent of respondents could not judge Christie’s leadership qualities or his honest and trustworthiness (in fact, the 42 percent who view him as “honest and trustworthy” is the same number as view Corzine the same way, though Corzine’s negatives on this — 44 percent — are more than double Christie’s — 20 percent).
Christie is given a higher mark on budgetary matters than Corzine — 45-36 — but nearly half of the state’s voters still know little about him and he has yet to offer a plan. The question is what will happen to the numbers if/when he does so (Remember Byrne-Batemen 1977).

If I were a betting man, I would still put my money on Christie winning (this is not an endorsement), but I wouldn’t give odds or points. And I’d keep the bet small — don’t want to lose your house on a bet that is as far from a sure thing as anything can be.

And the race begins

What we knew a few months ago is now official: Gov. Jon Corzine will be challenged in November by former U.S. Attorney Chris Christie.

Polls in recent weeks show Christie with a lead and Corzine with low approval ratings. But it’s unclear how deep Christie’s support is and whether, when push comes to shove, the Democrat-leaning independents and Democrats angry with Corzine will vote for Christie, stay home or come back into the Democratic fold.

Remember the way statewide races tend to go — polls show a close race or a Republican win, and then the first Tuesday in November comes along and the Democrat wins by a good 8 points of more.

Consider what Peter Woolley, a political scientist at Fairleigh Dickinson University who runs their Public Mind polling, said Monday:

At the state level, Republicans agree overwhelmingly on just one thing: They don’t like the job Jon Corzine has done as governor (91%). “But,” says Peter Woolley, a political scientist and director of the poll, “their disapproval of Corzine will not be enough to carry them. They will need significant allies and votes outside the party.

“More than nine of 10 Republicans are white in a state with sizable ethnic minorities,” Woolley noted. “Whoever leads the Republicans in the general election campaign will have to reach well beyond regular Republicans and beyond leafy suburbs.”

My sense — at I don’t have numbers to back me up — is that Christie will have a low support ceiling, similar to the one Christie Whitman dealt with in her two narrow wins.

And there is the cautionary tale of Raymond Bateman and Brendan “One-term” Byrne. Bateman, the Republican candidate in 1977, was expected to know Byrne out of office because of public anger over the new income tax. Bateman, however, lost when he offered a tax and budget plan that lacked credibility and Byrne made those who tagged him with his nickname look pretty foolish.

So, I make no predictions.

No surprise: Flat tax is a bad tax

Republican gubernatorial candidate Steve Lonegan is just being honest. And that’s the problem. Lonegan, a hardened conservative who is running well behind front-runner Chris Christie, is pushing a 2.9 percent flat tax as a replacement for what he calls “the state’s destructive and progressive income tax.”

He contends that the current system drives high-earners from the state and that

his plan will keep those top income earners in New Jersey, while creating jobs and better salaries for everyone else.

That is debatable, of course. What is not debatable, however, is this:

it’s the lower-income earners, many of whom are counted as strong Democratic voters, who would do worse immediately under Lonegan’s plan, according to state tax data.

A couple earning the state’s median income of $67,000 would pay $1,943 in income taxes under Lonegan’s plan, nearly 60 percent more than the $1,221.50 charged under the state’s current income tax system.

At $23,000, Lonegan’s income tax bill of $667 doubles the current $332.50 bill for both singles and married couples.

These lower-income tax brackets made up the majority of the income taxpayers in 2006, with more than 2.3 million tax filers making under the median income of $67,000.

Upper-income folks, on the other hand, would make out like bandits.

A review of tax data compiled by the New Jersey Department of Treasury indicates the state’s highest income earners — in many cases traditionally strong Republican supporters — would fare best under Lonegan’s flat tax.

Right now, married couples earning more than $150,000 pay at least $5,512 in income taxes and a rate of 6.37 percent on every dollar they make from $150,000 to $500,000, where the next tax bracket begins.

Under Lonegan’s plan, the couple earning $150,000 would pay just $4,350. That would be the same for a single tax filer, who now pays $7,428.

And the tax cuts that could come under Lonegan’s plan are even more dramatic as incomes increase. A family earning $1 million would have a $73,657 income tax bill drop to $29,000 under Lonegan’s plan.

The margins are even wider when compared with Corzine’s recent proposal to hike the tax on incomes of $1 million or more to 10.75 percent, which would be among the highest in the nation.

In 2006, the last year for which the state has complete tax data, taxpayers in New Jersey’s two highest-income tax brackets provided more than $5 billion of the total $9 billion collected by the income tax.

Lonegan doesn’t dispute this. In fact, he told The Star-Ledger that “lower-income residents can afford to pay a few hundred dollars more to foster an economic climate that would improve their chances of landing a high-paying job.”

“There will be consequences,” he said, but “in this current economy, there’s no opportunity.”

Christie, the former federal prosecutor, is promising his own across-the-board tax cut, but is offering no details — a strategy he hopes will allow him to take advantage of dissatisfaction with Gov. Jon Corzine’s fiscal policies. Promising a tax cut without offering even the vaguest details on how he plans to pay for the tax cut is irresponsible and dangerous to the state’s long-term fiscal health.

Christie may be offering a plan that can address the state’s faltering economy and heal its failing fiscal health (my sense is that it is not). We just don’t know — and we can’t judge it fairly until he puts the hard numbers on the table, something he has been unwilling to do so far.

The state’s fiscal situation must be treated as the No. 1 issue in this gubernatorial campaign. We know what Corzine would do because we’ve watched him do it for going on four years with mix results. But he has been honest about what we face and the kinds of sacrifices that we all will need to make to put our house back in order.

The state’s budget remains a mess and he deserves as much blame as anyone, though we also should acknowledge that he much of the mess was inherited, created by a bipartisan group of governors and legislators who opted to avoid confrontation.

It remains to be seen, at this point, whether any of Corzine’s potential opponents are willing to address the budget question honestly, whether they understand that cutting revenue — which is what happens when you cut taxes — can only be accomplished by slashing programs that are popular to some piece of the electorate. It is not enough to talk about waste — cutting waste and corruption should always be a goal, but does anyone really believe that it will yield enough savings to keep from inflicting pain elsewhere?

Their public statements to date indicate — to me, at least — that they are offering more of the same pie-in-the-sky promises that got us into this mess in the first place.

A conspiracy of neglect and self-deception

Today’s tax-revenue report is just another example of how New Jersey is being hammered by the perfect budgetary storm — years of neglect and/or deception, selfishness on the part of Trenton politicians, contractors and taxpayers, a lack of leadership in the Statehouse from governors of both parties and a national economic meltdown — leaving in an ever-expanding hole.

It would be easy to blame the current governor, but this goes well beyond anything Jon Corzine has done or not done in his nearly four years in office. And it is something that will require some difficult choices as we go forward, regardless of who may win the gubernatorial race in November.

The first cut — and all the cuts — are the deepest

I don’t envy Jon Corzine. He inherited a disastrous budget situation created by a decade and a half of neglect and self-deception (on the parts of lawmakers, governors of both parties and taxpayers), began the process of reform and then gets smacked in the face by the worst recession in years.

So balancing the budget has been nearly impossible.

That’s not to say that he hasn’t made things worse by seeking to avoid confrontation. He has. Armed with a set of powerful tools — the governor of New Jersey is among the most powerful executives in the country — and faced with a Trenton culture that has allowed entrenched politicians to amass far more power than they are entitled to have, he too often has folded his hand, giving in to the legislative power-brokers.

That said, we need to be honest. He has done more budget cutting than any governor in years, slashing programs that cut across a host of constituencies that should be Democratic power centers. The cuts are problematic — aid to the state’s colleges and municipal governments, to its arts programs, to the DEP — and some may have been avoided with a) earlier and more aggressive budget and government reform during his first two years in office and b) targeted increases in taxes.

But the alternatives being put on the table right now — and this could change — by his chief rivals (Chris Christie and Steve Lonegan) are unlikely to address the deep-rooted budgetary problems we face.