Budget Vote Postponed; $400M ‘Found’
Today’s vote on the Corzine/Democrat budget – also known as the Kill The New Jersey Middle Class Act – has been postponed until next week. Miraculously, the tax amnesty program has yielded an ‘unexpected’ $400M windfall. And now, our savior, Governor Jon S. Corzine wants to use it to reinstate cuts to the property tax rebate program. Could Hollywood have scripted it any better?
Gov. Jon Corzine announced a scheduled vote today on the state’s $28.6 billion budget has been postponed after the state got at least a $400 million windfall from its tax amnesty program.
Corzine said he wants the extra money to be used on “much-needed property tax relief.”
Corzine said new figures show the tax amnesty brought in $600 million so far. State officials had anticipated $200 million.
“We expected to pass the budget today,” Corzine said at a Statehouse news conference. “This extraordinary development must be appropriately considered by the Legislature.”
The Democratic governor said both budget committees will vote on a revised spending plan on Monday, with final votes in the Senate and Assembly a week from today.
Corzine was clear on where he wanted the new money spent, saying “in the strongest possible terms,” that it should “provide middle class homeowners with much-needed property tax relief…”
He stressed that as the budget gap widened because of the economy, the last thing he cut from the proposed budget were tax rebates.
“Now that we’ve recovered some lost revenues, the first thing we will restore is some property tax relief,” Corzine said.
