Kearny Town Hall, 03-19-2012.
(Transcript Below)
Morning. Thank you. Thanks for coming inside on a day like today. Nobody wants to be inside today. Maybe we should run government outside today. Thank you all for being here. We appreciate it very much, and appreciate being in Kearny. It's one of our great, great places in New Jersey. I appreciate all of you taking the time to be here this morning and share it with me and talk to each other about the issues that are really important in our state right now. There are some really important issues going on and things we should be talking about but before we talk about what's going on today, let's remember for a second about what had been happening in this state over the last number of years. We all felt it; we know it, but I want to remind you. Think about when I became Governor, the condition our state was in. We had $13 billion in budget deficits on $29 billion worth of budgets. We had higher debt than we've had in our history. Unemployment was over 10%. Mortgages were being foreclosed on all across the state, and people were hurting, and we were left with a situation where we had had taxes and fees at the state level increased over the eight years before I became Governor 115 times. 115 times in eight years. It was an awful situation to try to fix. And so when I came into office I thought to myself the only thing to do is to do something unusual for New Jersey standards and that was to tell you the truth, to tell you the truth about how bad things were and how hard the solutions were going to be to get there.
So in that first year we had to cut our budget. We had to balance that budget and we weren't going to do it by raising taxes again. Taxes had been raised over and over again in New Jersey when I came into office. It was the most highly-taxed state in America. We couldn't do it anymore. So we had to make painful cuts and we did, billions of dollars worth of cuts. We cut that first budget over 9% from what we had spent the year before and the next budget another 1% from what we had spent the year before that, and that's not easy to do. But it was necessary to do because we had had enough, enough of us just going to you and putting our hand in your pocket and taking more of your money. For many of you there was not much left in that pocket. And if it wasn't happening to you it was happening to your family or your friends or your neighbors. So we needed to do those things. You'll remember after I did some of this stuff in my first six months in office our opponents said, well, this is awful. New Jersey is going to go down the drain. He's heartless, and look at all the terrible things that are happening. Well, after that first six months the summer came. No great tragedies occurred, and we had to do it again the next year, just this past year. You'll remember that folks said once again. You'll remember heartless, bloodless, cold. Balancing the budget is not a warm and fuzzy thing. When you try to do it in your own house, when you tell your children or your grandchildren that what you were spending before isn't what you can spend now. Nobody likes to hear that, but you have a responsibility and I feel like I had the same responsibility here. You'll remember some of the people in the Legislature called me all kinds of names, names that I thought you weren't allowed to print in the newspaper but found out later on I guess you are, and they got printed about me. But they told you then too this past July that, you know, if he makes these cuts all these terrible things are going to happen. Here we are. The sun came up, and what's happening in our state now, now that we've vetoed two income tax increases in a row, now that we haven't increased taxes at the state level for nearly two and a half years? What's happening? Well, nearly 70,000 new private sector jobs have been created in the state. We've had five months in a row now of private sector job growth. People are getting back to work. Not as many as we want to but a lot more than before we did the things that we've done. What else is happening? You see tax revenues going up. Of course, because more people are working. They're getting to pay their taxes. That's allowing us to do things like we're doing in the budget this year, which is investing $8.8 billion in K-to-12 education in New Jersey, the highest amount ever spent by the state, the highest amount ever spent by the state in my budget this year on K-to-12 education because we know that we have to invest in our kids' education. We have a lot of things to do to reform it and make it better too that has nothing to do with money, but we have to spend the money too that we need to be able to have our kids have a great education. To make sure we protect our hospitals, so that people who don't have health insurance can go someplace to get their health care and not have to worry about it...
(...)
