Corzine Creates Facebook Page To Solicit Budget Advice

You just know that this isn't going to end well for the financial guru Gov. Jon Corzine. He's run out of his own ideas on how to fix the state budget other than to raise taxes and redistribute a shrinking pot of money between municipalities. He'll oversee nearly 80% of Bergen County towns go over the supposed 4% property tax cap because they've lost state funds in the process while struggling to contain their own costs and the Governor's prescription to balance the budget includes forgoing pension payment contributions in the hundreds of millions of dollars - which will only serve to increase the problem down the line (like next year when it is all too possible that he will be voted out of office).

His latest solution? He's going on Facebook to solicit ideas.

He would have a much better chance of success if he merely read my blog or listened to the state GOP for the past few years - cut state spending instead of raising it at every turn (and ignore the shell game he's playing with the new budget). Cut the state workforce instead of growing it. End the redistribution caused by the Abbott school districts rather than expanding that failed program even further.

Demand that the unions shift away from defined benefit plans to defined contribution plans for new state workers.

None of this will come to pass, because Corzine considers such things sacrosanct. Instead, he views the taxpayers as his personal piggy bank to solve the state's revenue woes.

He's severely limiting the property tax deduction and property tax relief programs on people making over $75,000 (which is just over the median income level in the state of $67,000) because he claims that the money can't be found. He and his fellow Democrats are all too willing to take federal funds to pay for police and firefighters, even though that money comes with strings attached and is a one-shot deal that will result in the state having to find the money to continue paying for those people the following year - money the state does not have.

Corzine wants solutions, but wants to ignore the fiscal realities of his own creation (and created by his predecessors who did much the same thing for years on end).