NJ Governor Chris Christie, whose $29.4 billion state budget is being voted on by the NJ Legislature, is taking shots at NY's politicians for failing to pass a budget for three months. Christie told the Post, "My advice to New York is: Get serious about your problems and step up and let's deal with them. And people in New Jersey are doing that."
Christie said, "Our financial situation was even worse than New York's,"—(referring to NJ's extremely high property taxes)—"It was worse, but it's on its way to getting better." He noted that gubernatorial candidate Attorney General Andrew Cuomo is proposing what Christie did, "a cap on property taxes and cutting government spending."
Of course, while there are cuts—including slashing school spending— in Christie's budget, the Star-Ledger says those cuts "only partially offset the sizable, and almost regular, increases in state spending," thanks to the work of previous governors who used "a series of tax increases, fee hikes, bonding, one-shot gimmicks and, more recently, a boost of federal stimulus aid has [to] add well over $10 billion to the state budget over the last decade — far above the increase in the rate of inflation since 2000."
