While progressives protested outside the State House — demanding more tax revenues to benefit working families — lawmakers inside heard budget experts predict New Jersey’s going to take a revenue hit. The state will collect almost $2 billion less in taxes over the next couple of years than they originally forecast. The nonpartisan Office of Legislative Services explained that a slowing economy dragged down April tax filings. “Yet this is not the cataclysmic event it would’ve been 10 or 20 years ago,” said OLS Budget and Finance Officer Thomas Koenig. “Today’s news of a $2 billion projected decline relative to our last forecast does not automatically require hard budgetary choices through the end of June … Our downward revision today might therefore signal the end of the period of exuberance, but it does not herald a round of doom and gloom.”
Both OLS and State Treasurer Elizabeth Maher Muoio say New Jersey’s hefty surplus can absorb the revenue losses and still provide a cushion against possible economic downturns. “It’s not great news — the April returns — but we can all sleep at night knowing we have done our job and built in enough of a surplus so we could weather it,” Muoio said.
Meanwhile, a coalition of lobbyists demanded Gov. Phil Murphy should not allow a 2.5% surcharge on the corporate-business tax to expire as scheduled on Dec. 31. They unrolled a 534-foot scroll showing $25 billion in corporate profits. “To end the surcharge is to give major corporations a mega tax cut, said Make the Road youth organizer Nedia Morsy. “This is a line in the sand moment, right? Are they going to stand with Amazon? Or are they going to stand with New Jersey working families, right?… And in this moment where people have lost breadwinners to COVID, the rent is at an all-time high, groceries at an all-time high, the state’s taking this massive risk to forfeit more revenue.”
