Murphy’s Second Budget Address: At Least “More Than 80,000 STD Tests Were Provided Free-of-Charge.”

Phil Murphy

Much like his State of the State address earlier this year, Governor Phil Murphy’s Budget Address today sounded more like a campaign speech.

He stuck with his familiar BS line, “Stronger and fairer,” saying it four times in today’s speech.

In a nutshell, the Governor wants to spend more money. He claimed he wants to spend more money by taxing millionaires. Unfortunately, it doesn’t take a rocket scientist to figure out that isn’t going to work, so let’s see who else he tries to tax.

Then there was all of the Governor’s talk of a budget surplus:

We are building a stronger fiscal house for New Jersey. We are replacing gimmicks with stability. 

For example, the projected surplus of the budget I signed last year was $765 million – a vast improvement over prior budgets. But, through careful management and keeping an eye on every dollar, we have grown our surplus by one-third over the year and are now set to close Fiscal 2019 with a surplus of over $1 billion.

This budget will grow our surplus even more in Fiscal 2020, to nearly $1.2 billion.

I ask you to find the last time we had consecutive years of billion-dollar-plus surpluses.

Here’s the thing. Surpluses are nice, but surpluses also mean that the government took more of your money than it needed. I’m thinking if the Governor really wanted to make New Jersey “stronger and fairer” he might use some of that surplus for a little tax relief for someone, maybe seniors.

But, no matter what, I guess Murphy can be proud that, “More than 80,000 STD tests were provided free-of-charge.” He must be proud of it, he worked it into the speech.