How about a 25% CUT in the salaries of everyone whose salary comes, IN ANY FORM, from the state taxpayer? If only a small portion of salary, less than 25%, comes from the state coffers, than that portion will be eliminated entirely.

If you look at thriftyT's breakdown of expenditures try to imagine how much of each category is going to salaries...the only exempt category seems to be DEBT SERVICE.

Budget will balance instantly...probably provide a surplus to bring down debt principal.

If cities, towns, townships and counties want to pay their employees and politicians and their brothers-in-law exorbitantly, then let them pay for it with local taxes...but NOT with state money.

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It's true, plus there are more home owners that have a vested interest in their town's school system. I see parents "draging" their kids to school and saying to their children "come on let's f...in go". Most of these parents have negative feelings toward school themselves.

I think the smart thing to do would be to raise taxes and SLOW spending until the economy recovers. As we know once the economy recovers, people will be asking for more tax cuts

Quote:

Well, no that's NOT the rationale.

Cost structure is currently such that the relatively wealthy suburbs already pay for the majority of their school funding, so the state aid, which was a relatively small portion of their funding, will be largely eliminated.

Urban school aid is being cut too, but much of the aid will remain in place.

So the net effect is:
Suburban state aid goes from 'a little' to 'nil'
urban state aid goes from 'a whole lot' to 'a lot'

"The plan largely preserves urban aid at the expense of the suburbs."

Because they know that suburban kids will do well in school regardless of the budget cuts...because their parents actually give a damn about how well they do in school.

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I know. I don't see what the fuss is about. If you don't have funds, you gotta cut.

http://www.state.nj.us/treasury/omb/p ... ensguide/pdf/citguide.pdf

Last year's NJ Budget: $29 Billion
Broad breakdown:

41% State Aid
32% Grants-In-Aid
12% Operations Executive
3% Operations ,Legislature and Judiciary
7% Debt Service
5% Employee Benefits, Rent, Utilities

State Aid:includes Education Aid programs, Municipal Aid, Property Tax Relief programs,
General Assistance, and Aid to County Colleges.

Grant-In-Aid:includes Property Tax Relief programs, Medicaid, Pharmaceutical
Assistance to the Aged and Disabled, Nursing Home and long-term care alternative
programs, and support for Higher Education.

Operations Executive:includes funding for adult prisons and juvenile facilities, State
Policeandotherlawenforcementprograms HumanServicesinstitutions veteranshomes
Police and other law enforcement programs, Human Services institutions, veterans homes,
Children and Families and the Public Advocate Departments.


NB: on page 34, a more specific budget breakdown is offered. Ironically, the more specific breakdown is almost as neat as the broad breakdown because a few specific items make up a majority of the total budget:
School Aid by itself is 35% of the NJ state's budget (!)
Property tax relief accounts for 9%
Medicaid 10%
Other Health/Welfare 11%

Relax. It's just a plan. There are so many vested interests in the People's Republic of New Jersey that we won't recognize Christie's budget after the Dems and Repubs finish with it.

Thank God somebody, anybody, is cutting government spending.

Gov. Chris Christie to suburbs: Drop dead

By Paul Mulshine/The Star Ledger
March 16, 2010, 6:57AM

If you are a harried homeowner in the suburbs struggling to pay your property taxes, I have some good news for you. You are finally going to hear Chris Christie?s property tax plan.

I also have some bad news: It stinks. Many suburban towns would lose half of their state aid and some could lose all of it.

As for the cities ? you know, those places full of people who voted for Jon Corzine? ? they?ll think their man won the election after all. The plan largely preserves urban aid at the expense of the suburbs.

If Christie had aired this plan last year during the Republican primary, his candidacy never would have made it past St. Paddy?s Day. His two opponents promised plans that would have finally given suburban towns a share of state school aid equal to the cities. As for Christie, he said he would address the problem, but he never said how.

Today we?ll find out how: He?s going to make it worse. I hadn?t thought that possible. Schools in suburban counties get so little aid that it just didn?t seem they could be hurt much. And Christie had promised he was going to cut the state budget by so much that he would have the money to give even more aid to the suburbs.

Then he got elected. And all of a sudden he decided not to cut the state budget but to cut school aid instead, by close to a billion bucks. That?s about 15 percent of state aid. Since cities get the most aid, they would face the biggest cuts if the reductions were done across the board.

But the education commissioner, Bret Schundler, comes from one of the cities that gets those outsized aid amounts, Jersey City. So Schundler came up with an ingenious formula. Instead of cutting aid as a percentage of total aid received by a district, he would cut it as a percentage of the total amount spent, said state Sen. Mike Doherty, a Warren County Republican who was briefed on the budget yesterday.

Total spending is a much bigger pie, so now the state needs a smaller slice, a mere 5 percent. That doesn?t sound like much ? until you realize that many suburban districts get only a bit more than 5 percent of their budgets in state aid.
A good example is the school district of the Chathams. That district produces excellent results with per-pupil spending that is below the state average. As for its state aid, it is a mere 6 percent of the budget, about $3 million a year.

A 15 percent cut in aid would be a mere $450,000. But under the Christie/Schundler plan, the district would lose $2.5 million, or almost its entire state aid amount. Who will make up the difference? Homeowners will.

The Christie crowd is also pushing a state constitutional amendment that would cap property taxes at 2.5 percent annually. But that wouldn?t take effect until the following year. In the meantime, state law allows the district to raise taxes by an amount equal to any state aid reduction, said Chatham schools superintendent Jim O?Neill.

O?Neill also noted that residents of the two Chathams pay an astounding $54 million annually in income taxes, supposedly to provide property tax relief. Under the Christie plan, they?d get back less than a penny on the dollar.

?I think it?s unfortunate that people in communities like Chatham that pay such a disproportionate cost to operate their local schools have the double hit of their income tax funding all the other schools,? O?Neill said.

That?s a polite way of putting it. I imagine most Morris residents will be a lot less reserved when they discover that the Mendham resident who runs the state has cut their school aid to little or nothing. As for the residents of Monmouth, Ocean, Somerset, Sussex and the other counties who gave Christie his victory margin, I suspect they?ll be equally angry.

But the plan wasn?t put together to please them. It was put together to please the court. Doherty told me that at yesterday?s briefing of GOP legislative leaders, administration officials argued that this plan was more likely to win state Supreme Court approval than an across-the-board aid cut.

But Doherty pointed out that as long as we?re going to amend the Constitution, it would be a simple matter to include on the November ballot a new school funding formula that would take the entire matter out of the court?s hands.

Some day a governor may do exactly that. But as for this governor, now that we know his property tax plan, we also know why he kept it a secret for so long.