By David Cruz
Correspondent
“Is it Thursday?” You’ll have to excuse Gov. Chris Christie for not knowing what day of the week it is, what with a whirl-wind tour of New Hampshire last week, a fundraising trip to Boston today and the Tonight Show appearance last night, it’s a wonder Christie can concentrate on his day job, which he insists he is still doing.
“Working on my day job at the moment,” is his usual line. “I’ve got a budget to finish between now and June 30.”
But, the reality is that the heavy lifting on budget issues right now is being done by the legislature, which is in the middle of its annual hearing process. The governor, who won’t be in the room where the decisions are made until much later in the process, held another of what he promises will be weekly town hall meetings to reiterate his contention that public employees are killing his budget.
“We pay one billion dollars, just for retired teacher health benefits in New Jersey,” he told a crowd in Cedar Grove. “Remember we pay these health benefits from the day they’re hired, until the day they die.”
The governor, who is proposing the end of defined benefit pensions for new public employees, a downgrade of healthcare packages across the board and turning management of the pensions over to the unions, says he can’t find any partners to deal with now.
“We have the teacher’s union walking away and saying we don’t even want to talk any more and we have the legislative leaders, the Senate president and the speaker, joining in a lawsuit to force the state to make the full pension payment,” he said. “Now, I wanna stop here for a second so that you understand exactly what happened on Monday when they joined the lawsuit. They’re now suing to force the court to force them to do what they didn’t do. They’re essentially suing themselves. It’s extraordinary.”
Not exactly the rhetoric of compromise, but the governor’s message continues to resonate with taxpayers who want someone to blame for some of the nation’s highest taxes. In that regard, he repeated his often-used worst-case scenario.
“29 percent increase in the income tax or an increase of seven percent to 10 percent in the sales tax to just pay for public sector pensions,” he threatened.
The governor says the alternative is massive spending cuts to hospitals, municipalities, senior programs or schools, none of which he says the Democrats are willing to do. In the meantime, the governor continues to do what he’s been doing for the last two years, at least — entertaining questions about his future while professing to be focused like a laser beam on his present.
The governor says pension and health benefit reform is the last big thing he has to fix before he moves on as governor. What he does after he moves on as governor is still — technically — a mystery.