By The Staff | The Save Jersey Blog
PARSIPPANY, N.J. — Assemblyman Jay Webber (R-Morris, Essex, Passaic) doesn’t believe New Jersey’s path to prosperity is aided by Trenton’s obsession with corporate welfare.
The reliably conservative legislator cried foul this week after the revelation of a particularly shady arrangement.
It went down like this: Jaguar, the famed luxury car manufacturer with $29 billion in annual sales, is trading places with Sharp, the $2.4 billion in sales per year electronics company that’s moving one town over from Mahwah to Montvale. Jaguar is leasing the Mahwah site.
Sharp is moving a total distance of only a few miles.
Why? Due to a ridiculous legal loophole in New Jersey’s legislative-constructed corporate welfare culture, New Jersey’s Economic Development Authority is gifting $6.9 million to Sharp in tax credits, as well as a 10-year, $28 million deal for Jaguar, consisting of ‘state incentives’ (including tax breaks).
The goal is purportedly to keep jobs in New Jersey.
But won’t those same New Jersey workers pay a high price — in higher taxes — for all of these abatement?
Assemblyman Webber says it’s an obvious scam.
If you want to know why regular residents are disgusted with Trenton and believe they are being financially forced to leave our great Garden State, look no farther than this corrupt bargain of corporate cronyism backed up by bureaucrats.”
“This state-sponsored switcheroo is the worst of corporate cronyism, coming at the expense of New Jersey’s everyday citizens and Main Street small businesses that are the lifeblood of our economy. There is no ‘economic development’ here. What you have is a corporate giveaway engineered by government officials, economic development’ bureaucrats, and Learjet corporate executives who together rig the game to get a few favored Fortune 500 corporations their government-sponsored incentives – in a behind-closed-doors choreography of deal-making, winks, nods, and helpful cues to corporatists like: ‘make sure you say publicly that you’ll leave New Jersey unless you get this money.’
“That backscratching triangle handpicks the state’s economic winners and losers, making sure the winners are the ones with the best connections, and the losers are the ordinary taxpayers who never see any relief out of Trenton.
“Since 2010 alone, more than $5 billion in such economy-distorting incentives have been doled out to a few privileged, connected corporations. And yet, we are told that New Jersey can’t afford to give even a pittance of tax relief to our overtaxed regular residents, or that taxes on working New Jerseyans must get hiked again and again for more Trenton spending. If politicians had put even half of that $5 billion aside for property tax relief over the next five years, our state would be on the road to affordability once again.”
Cumulatively, corporate tax breaks may cost New Jersey approximately $2.8 billion through fiscal year 2020.
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