OPINION: Assembly Republicans should pay for their own gas tax hike

By Scott St. Clair | The Save Jersey Blog

At least Judas got 30 pieces of silver for selling out his master.

The 10 Assembly Republicans, however, who voted to crucify New Jersey taxpayers with a new 23-cent-per-gallon hike in the gas tax will get the well-deserved and fierce anger of the motoring public who will, as of July 1 – now it’s on hold until whenever there’s a vote in the Senate – pony up more at the pump in return for promises of better transportation infrastructure somewhere down the pike.

Typical of pig-in-a-poke legislative deals, the gas-tax hike would take effect immediately, while the “trade off” – a one-cent reduction in the state sales tax plus some sort of income-tax relief for retired taxpayers – would be phased in over nearly 18 months with the first half of the sales tax cut not effective until January 1, 2017 and the second half a year later.

State Senator Jen Beck (R-Monmouth) rallies LD11 residents against the gas tax hike.
State Senator Jen Beck (R-Monmouth) rallies LD11 residents against the gas tax hike.

Swell – we’ll all be screwed again on Christmas and Hanukkah shopping while it will cost us nearly two-bits more per gallon straight away for vacation motoring. That jaunt to the shore just got a damn sight more expensive.

Read the entire Assembly-passed bill here.

And who are these offending Republicans? Here’s the Rogue’s Gallery – read it and make them weep:

Jon Bramnick, LD 21 (Union, Somerset and Morris); Chris Brown, LD 2 (Atlantic):  Rob Clifton, LD 12 (Monmouth, Ocean, Burlington and Middlesex);  BettyLou DeCroce,  LD 26 (Morris, Essex and Passaic); Joe Howarth, LD 8 (Burlington, Atlantic and Camden);  Sean Kean,  LD 30 (Monmouth and Ocean); Nancy Munoz,  LD 21 (Union, Morris and Somerset); David Rible,  LD 30 (Monmouth); Maria Rodriguez-Gregg, LD 8 (Burlington, Atlantic and Camden) and Scott Rumana, LD 40 (Passaic, Bergen, Essex and Morris).

Note that many of this exceedingly motley crew are in the GOP leadership in the Assembly, including Assemblyman Bramnick, the putative leader of the caucus.

That the Gang of 10 got snookered into letting seriously vulnerable Assembly Democrats take a flyer on having to go on the record favoring the tax hike has already been covered on these electronic pages, so there’s that, too.

Now, there’s an excellent chance that this backroom deal won’t survive the state Senate – we can only hope, and we’ll know shortly.  But the fact remains that the Gang of 10 were willing to go along with it, which says that the wallets of New Jersey taxpayers remain ripe for the plucking by a greedy and avaricious Legislature.

And shame on Gov. Chris Christie for going along with this devil’s bargain instead of holding the line, something he’s been willing to do in the past when it suited his purpose.

Angry? You bet I’m angry, and, should the damn thing pass, I’ll be angry every time I pull in to the pump to gas up the Subaru. And I’ll remember who sold me out.

At least Republican Assemblyman Jay Webber,  LD 26 (Morris, Essex and Passaic), had the cojones to buck the governor and his caucus leadership by condemning the proposal in a statement as “a raw deal for New Jersey.”

Webber said the deal was “an instant $850 million tax hike on overtaxed Main Street New Jerseyans,” with a back-end tax load of nearly $5 billion waiting in the wings. Isn’t that special!

Already burdened with the highest costs per mile for road construction in the United States at $2 million per mile, which is 12 times the national average,  New Jersey’s highways are akin to the classic definition of boats: Holes in the water down which you throw money. Only here, it’s holes in the land and ruts and potholes and construction that never seems to build anything and more.

I routinely drive Highway 21 just north of Newark to get to the airport, and it’s been “under construction” for close on to forever without any discernible progress being made. But you sure do see idle heavy equipment and shovels being leaned on by union crews paid the prevailing wage.

It’s not like there’s any shortage of ideas on how to actually REDUCE the cost of road construction – there are plenty – it’s that there’s a serious shortage of the political will and courage to draw hard lines in the sand and refuse to play the Democrats’ game of spending here, there and everywhere running up debt instead of deciding what’s important versus what’s not.

Again from Assemblyman Webber:

We have a serious problem and have to fix the Transportation Trust Fund. But New Jersey’s biggest problem is our crushing tax burden, and any ‘deal’, like this one, that makes the tax burden worse, is just a raw deal for New Jersey.”

In other words, prioritize, Prioritize, PRIORITIZE!

This should be an article of faith in the Republican mantra, but by this vote GOP leadership in the Assembly shows that it’s not.

Behind all of it, but unspoken because a very ugly cat thus gets let out of the bag, is an underlying assumption that has been made by the offending Republicans that the current OVERALL level of taxation is acceptable to state taxpayers. Rather than cut the OVERALL amount of taxes paid, legislators are content to rearrange the taxation deck chairs on the fiscal Titanic and then fob off the deal to the folks back home as a win for them. But since when has a “win” been defined as a net nothing, which is how these legislative shell games really work?

gasIf you want to deliver a win for your constituents, give them a substantive reduction in the total amount they pay and cut overall state spending even more by eliminating outright wasteful programs and policies and cutting personnel.  Clearly, this includes bloated road construction and other transportation costs.

Is there any wonder that another category in which New Jersey leads the nation is the number of residents who flee the state in order to avoid paying its punitive tax assessments? On social media, the most common theme I hear from New Jerseyans is how they’re counting down the days until they can flee the state for one that shows them respect. Assembly Republicans, you helped build this flop house.

With craven politicians, the only way to get them off the dime and into the game is to motivate them by lighting a fire under their behinds. Since the number one priority of every politician is self-preservation, that means ordinary people back in legislative districts must take control of matters with no ifs, ands or buts about it.

For their support of the gas tax-hike abomination, the Gang of 10 need to be primaried, hounded, called out, denounced, condemned and run to ground as traitors to the state’s already oppressed taxpayers.

There needs to be an expression of popular public outrage on the local level that mirrors what our British cousins just did in voting to bolt from the European Union via Brexit. There needs to be a grassroots-based revolt against the prevailing political establishment in this state to rival that of Donald Trump.

Some might say it’s already under way with GOP up-and-comers who loathe the idea of a gas-tax hike. But unless and until it encompasses ordinary taxpayers willing to take to the streets to express, in a loud and raucous manner, their anger and fury over stunts like the gas-tax hike, then don’t count on anything changing.

I’m not talking a couple-dozen protesters at the Statehouse, but rather thousands of them massed in front of the building and making so much noise that the Legislature can’t hear itself conduct business. In other words, an expression of Thomas Jefferson’s famous dictum that, “a little rebellion now and then is a good thing.”

In the meantime and without that “little rebellion,” continue to expect our “friends” in the Assembly to sell us out.

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Scott St Clair
About Scott St Clair 127 Articles
SCOTT ST. CLAIR: Earning a J.D. from the University of Puget Sound in 1975, Scott is a communications professional who has worked as a freelance journalist/writer as well as a political operative.