Topic Category: Tax and Budget

Ending DACA Would Harm All New Jerseyans

Posted on by Erika J Nava

This op-ed appeared in the August 31, 2017 edition of the Star-Ledger.

Ending the common-sense 2012 immigration initiative that has allowed more than 20,000 young New Jerseyans realize the promise of the American Dream and contribute to the state’s economy would waste the potential of these young striving immigrants – and cause serious harm to the Garden State’s economy. In fact, New Jersey would be one of the hardest hit states – with the fifth largest economic loss – if this successful program is ended.

The Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program allows some undocumented young residents who were brought to the United States as minors to stay in the country and work legally. Since its inception, it has given 800,000 young people across the nation a better shot at success. And its recipients have capitalized on the opportunity, getting better jobs, earning higher wages, increasing their participation in the consumer economy and paying taxes.

But now DACA is under attack and President Trump has only until September 5 to either end the program or fight a lawsuit from 10 state attorneys general; rumors are swirling that he may end the program at any moment. Doing so would disproportionately harm communities across immigrant-rich New Jersey and would be a huge step backward for the country.

To many undocumented youth who were brought to the U.S. as young children, DACA was the first real opportunity to pursue the American Dream and show their potential in ways that had been denied to them solely because of their legal status. DACA permitted many of them to obtain a driver’s license, secure a job that matched their skillset, purchase their first car, travel abroad, attend college and – most importantly – feel less fear that they’d be separated from their families and communities via deportation.

By stifling these young immigrants’ opportunities, ending DACA would also harm New Jersey’s economy.

When more people are able to work legally in higher paying jobs that match their skills, they are less vulnerable to wage theft, workplace exploitation, and less likely to suffer from discrimination due to their legal status. All of these factors help the economy of our state and the nation, as they are translated into higher tax revenue and more economic productivity.

With 22,000 DACA recipients, only eight states have a higher number than New Jersey. Of these young New Jerseyans, 87 percent are working. They contribute $66 million in state and local taxes each year, the seventh highest level of all states. Ending DACA would cause an immediate 32 percent reduction in those tax payments.

But the potential harm to New Jersey’s economy is much broader than the reduction in tax collections. In fact, if DACA is repealed, the Garden State would lose an estimated $1.6 billion each year in state Gross Domestic Product – the fifth largest dollar loss of all states.

Ending DACA would also create economic uncertainty for many families. Many of the young DREAMers – armed with the slightest bit of economic security – have been able to take out loans to buy a car or a home, to pay for college or to open a small business. If the program ends, many of these young immigrants will either lose their job altogether, or be forced back into the shadowy low-wage underground, seriously limiting their ability to keep up with loan repayments and starting a cycle of economic distress.

New Jersey’s Congressional Republicans – who played an outsized role in ensuring that the Trump administration failed to strip health care from millions – must step up again and put the best interests of the state and country ahead of political party. Sitting on the sidelines and watching as the lives of enterprising immigrant youth are turned upside down is not OK. Our state’s moderate voices must join their GOP colleagues from both blue and red states who are voicing their support for DACA and urging President Trump to keep the program intact.

Despite the myths and xenophobic falsehoods spread by some, we know that once young immigrants are given the chance to participate in America’s economy and society, they capitalize on the opportunity. And we all benefit. Lawmakers should be focused on providing these – and other – striving immigrants a real shot at the American Dream, not on stealing their economic futures and dimming ours.

NJPP’s Brandon McKoy on Higher Ed Funding Cuts

Posted on by Brandon McKoy

 

New Jersey Policy Perspective policy analyst Brandon McKoy joined NJTV News’ Michael Aron last week to explain how New Jersey’s investment in public higher education has faded after the Great Recession.

The news segment coincided with a new 50-state report from the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, which found that the funding decline nationwide has contributed to higher tuition and reduced quality as colleges have had to balance budgets by reducing faculty, limiting course offerings and in some cases, closing campuses.

McKoy told NJTV that the study found New Jersey certainly wasn’t alone in cutting back on higher education, and that the Garden State has in fact started to increase funding again – although very, very slightly.

“I think this is one of those news stories that is good just because we’ve stopped cutting, but it’s not where we need to be,” he said.

New Jersey’s Investment in Higher Ed Still Falling Short

Posted on by Brandon McKoy

It has been nearly a decade since the Great Recession hit, yet New Jersey’s spending on higher education remains well below pre-recession levels. While the Garden State likes to tout the fact that we have a high-quality education system that produces some of the best and strongest students and workers nationwide, it is becoming increasingly difficult for the average New Jerseyan to afford the cost of education.

From 2008 to 2017, New Jersey’s investment in higher education fell by $2,113 – or 21.3 percent – per student after adjusting for inflation, according to a new report by the D.C.-based Center on Budget and Policy Priorities. While we are not alone – 44 states spent less per student in 2017 than in 2008 – the cuts here have been deeper than average. 

As the state has pulled back on its investment in higher education, tuition has increased. Since 2008, the average tuition among New Jersey’s public, four-year colleges has increased $2,015 – or 17.5 percent – making it more difficult for low- and middle-income New Jerseyans to afford a college education. High tuition rates lead to more students graduating with dangerously high levels of debt, limiting their ability to move out on their own and start independent lives. In 2004, 57 percent of graduates from public, four-year institutions in New Jersey held debt, and the average amount of debt was $14,539. Ten years later in 2014, 69 percent of students held debt and the average amount was $28,345.

After years of decline, New Jersey finally reversed the trend in 2017 by spending $23 more on higher education per student than the previous year. This bump of 0.29 percent isn’t a significant increase whatsoever, but is better than the alternative of continuing to divest from this important area.

Recent reports from NJPP have shown the severity of this problem. When looking at the average of combined in-state tuition and fees among four-year public institutions, the state ranks 4th highest nationally. And New Jersey is number one nationwide for the share of millennials – 47 percent – who live in their parents’ home.

Ensuring that pursuing higher education and securing a college degree isn’t a guaranteed sentence to economic hardship is one of the most important things New Jersey lawmakers need to address. We all know that our state’s economic future is tied to our high-quality public colleges and universities. But those colleges and universities must be more affordable for striving students and their families – and lawmakers need to be doing more to make college more affordable and more accessible.

House Budget + Trump Tax Cuts = Raw Deal for NJ

Posted on by Jon Whiten

This op-ed appeared in the August 6, 2017 edition of the Sunday Bergen Record.

After spending the last six months trying to take health coverage away from tens of millions of Americans, President Trump and Speaker Paul Ryan are turning their attention to a lower-profile but equally damaging set of policy changes. The House Republicans’ proposed budget unveiled this month, and the accompanying tax cuts outlined by the President, puts millions of New Jersey families at risk while giving huge breaks to the Garden State’s fortunate few.

Much like it did during the failed efforts to roll back the progress we’ve made on health care, New Jersey’s Congressional delegation has an outsized role to play in stopping this madness. The Republicans who put the people in their districts before political party during the health care fight – Reps. Lance, LoBiondo and Smith – should continue to do so as the battle moves to budget and tax policy. After all, the threat these proposals pose to their constituents’ well-being remains incredibly serious.

Their GOP colleagues who supported Trumpcare – Reps. Frelinghuysen and MacArthur – ought to join them this time, and use their considerable influence in D.C. (Frelinghuysen, in particular, as Appropriations Chairman) to ensure New Jersey gets a fair tax and budget deal, not a raw one.

What’s at stake?

The budget plan could result in devastating cuts to programs that expand economic opportunity for all New Jerseyans, including investments in science, technology, job training and education that are proven to grow the economy, with $1.3 trillion in cuts over a decade in so-called “non-discretionary defense” spending (in other words, any domestic and international spending that isn’t an entitlement program and isn’t the military). Under the House GOP plan, by 2027 this spending would 44 percent lower than it was in 2010, while defense spending would grow by $929 billion between now and then.

But the proposal would fall hardest on Garden State residents struggling in the state’s sluggish economy, with a severe $4.4 trillion cut in entitlement programs over 10 years.

Among the carnage is a $150 billion cut to food assistance through a 20 percent reduction in the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP). These cruel cuts put the nearly 900,000 New Jerseyans who are helped with affordable groceries through SNAP at risk. In the state’s districts represented by Republicans, approximately 80 percent of families who received SNAP benefits in 2015 had at least one person who worked during that year – and 51 percent had at least one child in the home.

Meanwhile, as Republicans continue their efforts to sabotage health care by repealing of the Affordable Care Act, the proposed budget also puts health care in the crosshairs, with a whopping $2 trillion in cuts to Medicaid and Medicare over a decade.

The Medicaid cuts alone come in at around $1.5 trillion, a deeper cut than anything that’s been considered in the ACA repeal bills. The budget incorporates the Medicaid cuts in the House-passed ACA repeal legislation, and then adds additional cuts on top. It still permanently cuts and caps Medicaid funding to states, completely changing the entitlement nature of the program and shifting significant costs to states. Most states – like New Jersey, with its deep budget crisis – will not be able to make up the lost funding, which will then result in cuts to health care, restrictions on eligibility, or some combination.

These cuts put about 1.8 million New Jerseyans – including 852,000 kids – at risk. About half a million constituents in New Jersey districts represented by Republican members of Congress rely on Medicaid for health care – and nearly half of them are children.

To make matters even worse, these deep and damaging cuts to key investments, services and programs are merely a vehicle to deliver massive tax breaks to the wealthiest Americans.

In New Jersey, the top 1 percent of the state’s taxpayers – with average incomes of $3.1 million a year – would receive an average tax cut of $130,440, which is more than 250 times larger than the average $510 tax cut the bottom 60 percent of New Jersey taxpayers – with average incomes of $77,800 – would receive. In fact, the average tax cut for the wealthiest New Jerseyans is more than double the average annual income of the state’s middle-class families.

Overall, New Jersey’s top 1 percent would receive 55 percent of the tax cut dollars, while the bottom 60 percent would receive just 21 percent. But the small tax savings received by New Jersey low- and middle-income families would likely be more than offset by the cuts in services and supports included in the proposed budget. In the end, most New Jersey working families would be much worse off if this plan were adopted.

New Jersey is just now beginning to regain its footing after a long stretch of slower-than-average economic growth. The state’s middle-class is shrinking, the gap between the very rich and the rest of us is growing, and poverty remains a pressing problem. The House GOP budget would set the Garden State back, and our Representatives ought to oppose it.

 

McKinsey Confirms: New Jersey Overspends on Tax Subsidies

Posted on by Jon Whiten

Earlier this month, McKinsey & Company released a new report on how to “reseed” New Jersey’s economic growth moving forward. Among other things, it confirms that state policy governing tax subsidies for corporations has gone off the rails.

Taking a look at the chart above, it’s easy to see that New Jersey has become a big-time outlier when it comes to the extravagance of its tax break programs. The deals have gotten larger while corporations receive much richer subsidies for doing less than elsewhere: New Jersey’s average break per newly-created job is 2.3 times higher than across the country, and 20.3 times higher than it is in Virginia. Meanwhile, the average break per job kept in the state is 3.8 times higher in New Jersey than across the country, and 13.1 times higher than it is in Virginia.

While McKinsey’s findings track NJPP’s own analyses, the firm falls short when it comes to fully assessing why New Jersey has become such an outlier. It suggests that the state’s “returns on incentive deals are likely skewed by the large proportion that are done with older firms, which generate lower returns than investments in fast-growing young companies.” While this may not be incorrect, it is certainly incomplete.

In fact, New Jersey policymakers are to blame for the current situation and the out-of-control subsidy programs. Their almost exclusive economic response to the ravages of the Great Recession was to enact  several new lucrative tax break programs. And then they doubled down on these subsidies in a major way with the “Economic Opportunity Act” of 2013, which lifted nearly all financial  controls and ceilings, loosened job-creation and investment standards, and  led to an explosion in subsidies awarded, costs per job and long-term reductions in budgetary revenues. 

McKinsey does rightly note that New Jersey lacks consistent and rigorous oversight of its subsidy programs, and that more accountability would help improve the “investment returns” of these deals. Unfortunately, every attempt to improve in this area in recent years has been vetoed by the governor. What’s more, more reporting and transparency alone will not fix this problem. New Jersey needs to rein in the excesses, revise the programs and impose more financial control; for some concrete ways in which to do so, our May report is a good place to start.

Trump Tax Plan: A Boon for the Wealthiest New Jerseyans

Posted on by Jon Whiten

More than half of the tax cut dollars would go to top 1% of taxpayers, who’d get an average break of $130,000

A federal tax package based on President Trump’s April outline would fail to deliver on its promise of mostly helping the middle class, instead showering most of its help to the richest 1 percent, according to a new 50-state analysis from the Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy released today.

In New Jersey (click here for the state Fact Sheet):

  • The top 1 percent of the state’s taxpayers – with average incomes of $3.1 million a year – would receive an average tax cut of $130,440, which is more than 250 times larger than the average $510 tax cut the bottom 60 percent of New Jersey taxpayers – with average incomes of $77,800 – would receive.
  • The top 1 percent would receive 55 percent of the tax cut dollars, while the bottom 60 percent would receive just 21 percent.
  • The average tax cut received by the top 1 percent would equal approximately 4.2 percent of their average annual income while cut received by the bottom 60 percent would equal 1.3 percent of their average annual income.

Even worse, these tax cuts for those who need the least help would be incredibly expensive, costing the federal government $4.8 trillion in revenue over the next decade. To pay for these huge tax cuts for the wealthy, Republican leaders in Congress and the President propose deep and devastating cuts to major programs like Medicare, Medicaid, food assistance and others to offset the costs. As a result, low- and middle-income families would likely lose far more as a result than they gain from the small tax cuts President Trump’s plan would provide them.

These tax cuts would benefit New Jersey’s multi-millionaires while inevitably stripping health care, food assistance and more from low- and moderate-income residents and decimating investments in science, technology and job training that are proven to grow the economy.

Let’s get real: that is not ‘tax reform,’ and it’s surely not a blueprint for true economic opportunity and shared prosperity. It’s Robin Hood in reverse, and in New Jersey it would lead to more hardship, wider income and wealth gaps and lackluster economic growth.

Don’t Forget to Fix New Jersey’s Shrinking Rainy Day Fund

Posted on by Sheila Reynertson

The tumultuous passage of New Jersey’s 2018 budget may be over, but the horse-trading and the shutdown drama doesn’t hide the simple fact that New Jersey is in serious financial trouble. Big tax cuts and a lackluster economy continue to put a damper on the state’s ability to meet its needs – and save for unexpected ones. Last year New Jersey had to dip into its reserves just to pay its bills, ending the budget cycle with $80 million less in its nearly empty savings account. That doesn’t bode well as a long-term strategy, nor does it signal to credit agencies that the state is on solid footing.

As it stands now, New Jersey is slated to close out the current budget with just $493 million in savings on June 30, 2018. That represents approximately 1.4 percent of the state’s budget, or 5 days of government operation.

That’s about in line with what was recently projected by the credit-rating agency Moody’s, which estimated that the surplus will actually drop to 1.3 percent of operating revenues in the 2018 fiscal year. These reserves have remained at dangerously low levels in the state since they bottomed out at the end of the Great Recession. This pattern is a reflection of a state economy still struggling to bounce back; but it is also a reflection of poor governance grown accustomed to relying on these reserves to cover chronic budget shortfalls.

As of the end of June 2016, New Jersey had a total balance of just $551 million, or 1.6 percent of state spending. This was enough to operate the state for just six days. That ranked 5th lowest in the nation, and far behind the 50-state average of reserves that represented 9.6 percent of spending and kept the government running for 35 days, according to an analysis by the Pew Charitable Trusts.

This is a far cry from New Jersey’s reserves back in 2007 when the state had 31.2 days worth of general funds to operate on. That represented 8.5 percent of state spending at the time. Since 2009, New Jersey has put in on average less than 2 percent of annual spending into the surplus account (1.85 percent).

Rebuilding the reserves to this 2007 level would put New Jersey in line with today’s national median (34.9 days or 9.6 percent of spending). To ensure minimal disruption, this should be done over 5 years, putting 0.2 percent more – or an additional $100 million – into reserves each year, to slowly rebuild New Jersey’s financial cushion. The main point here is that New Jersey should be adding to the reserves each year, not subtracting from them. And, as we noted above, New Jersey’s reserves have only gotten smaller since this Pew analysis, shrinking by 12.5 percent between June 2016 and what is projected for June 2018.

A healthy surplus puts New Jersey in a much better position to weather a year of economic downturn or another super storm but it’s only viable as an option if the state’s finances are stabilized enough – and the state’s leadership is willing enough – to build it. Credit rating agencies are likely to take notice, too, leading to potential upgrades.

After a record 11 credit downgrades during Gov. Christie’s tenure, policies that can responsibly put our financial house back in order – which often come with credit rating boosts – are desperately needed and can help relieve some budget pressures. A state’s credit rating directly influences New Jersey’s cost of repaying bonds sold to investors to finance major capital projects like the construction and renovation of roads, schools and parks. The lower the rating, the more it costs taxpayers to pay off debts, siphoning away dollars the state needs to make ends meet.

Yes, New Jersey has a long list of other urgent needs that must take greater priority. But taking the initiative to also rebuild the reserves sends a message that New Jersey has its eye on the future by planning ahead for lean times. Ignoring this financial responsibility only puts New Jersey in greater trouble down the road. We just can’t afford to take that route.

Five Reasons Christie Should OK Paid Leave Fixes

Posted on by Jon Whiten

This op-ed appeared in the July 16, 2017 edition of the Sunday Star-Ledger.

Last month the New Jersey legislature sent Gov. Christie a landmark bill to boost working caregivers, small businesses and the state’s economy. The legislation would go a long way to ensuring that more workers – who all pay into the funding for paid family leave – are able to take advantage of this vital benefit. After all, while an average of 31,000 New Jerseyans have used paid leave each year since its inception – an impressive number – that’s just a small share of those who are eligible.

There are many clear and compelling reasons the governor should sign these improvements into law. Here are five.

It would help low-paid workers

Today if you take paid leave in New Jersey, you receive a wage replacement that equals two-thirds of your weekly wage. But for low-income working families scraping by in high-cost New Jersey, losing one-third of a week’s take-home pay is often out of the question.

Consider a worker making $600 a week, or about $15 an hour if they are working 40 hours a week. On leave, the two-thirds replacement rate would provide that worker just $400 a week, the equivalent to $10 an hour – a decrease that an already-struggling family could ill afford. Under this bill, that worker’s take-home pay would increase to $540 a week; while he or she would still be losing income, the loss would be much smaller.

It would help middle-class workers

Meanwhile, an artificially low cap on wage replacement of $633 a week means that middle-class workers are faced with the prospect of losing more than a third of their wages, an unrealistic proposition for the many middle-class families who essentially live paycheck to paycheck.

Consider a worker making $1,200 a week, which is slightly above the statewide average. Today, that worker would lose nearly half of his or her income by taking leave, because the cap on wages is set at 53 percent of the statewide average weekly wage. This bill takes a step in the right direction by increasing the cap to 78 percent, which would get the $1,200-a-week worker up to $936, but it would still fall short of what’s required for middle-class workers taking leave.

It would help small businesses compete

While paid leave – and its expansion – have been characterized by lobbyists as being “bad for small businesses,” in fact the opposite is true. Retaining a strong and talented workforce remains the primary concern of most small businesses, and having a state family leave program helps ensure that small firms and mom-and-pop shops can better compete with multinational corporations when it comes to leave benefits.

Perhaps that’s why most small businesses in New Jersey have had no trouble adjusting to the paid leave law, and have found it to either have no effect or a positive effect on their bottom line. After all, this is a robust social insurance program, paid for entirely by workers, that helps businesses attract and retain talent.

It would help many workers at those small businesses

Another big thing keeping eligible New Jersey workers from using paid leave is a lack of job protection. Currently about 1 in 3 New Jersey workers – the 1 million or so who work at businesses with less than 50 employees – are forced to consider taking leave without the peace of mind of knowing their job will be there for them when they get back.

This bill extends job protections to some of those workers by covering those who work at firms with 20 or more workers, which is a positive step. That said, by not making these protections universal the bill leaves out 19 percent of the state’s workforce – the nearly 700,000 workers that work at businesses with fewer than 20 employees.

The costs are tiny compared to the benefits

Workers – not employers – pay for the entire paid leave program through a payroll tax. This year, workers contribute 0.10 percent of their salary up to the first $33,500 they earn. The most anyone can pay in is $33.50 a year – or about 60 cents a week.

By slightly increasing the wage ceiling and the amount of the payroll tax, New Jersey could easily raise enough revenue to accommodate a projected increase in usage – and the benefit would still be a bargain for workers.

For example, if paid leave usage soared, we estimate that the cost to workers could rise to a maximum of $2.45 a week. Even with these higher contributions, New Jersey workers would still be paying far less than workers in other states with paid leave.

Setting the Record Straight on New Jersey ‘Outmigration’

Posted on by Sheila Reynertson

“The only way to stem our tide of outmigration is to bring our economic policies in line with our direct regional competitors — Pennsylvania and New York.”

And so the latest wolf cry from business lobbyists about New Jersey’s supposed crisis of “outmigration” begins. The only problem: there is no “tide of outmigration” to Pennsylvania and New York. In fact, there is a very small ripple in the reverse direction.

On the whole, despite what anti-tax forces would have you believe, New Jersey’s population and total income are growing, not shrinking.

These recycled claims about state income losses and migration patterns are part of a long-term strategy to cut taxes for businesses and New Jersey’s wealthiest households. Not only are they misleading and inaccurate, they are an unnecessary distraction at a time when a clear-eyed and pragmatic approach to New Jersey’s financial and economic crises is needed more than ever.

It is disingenuous to assert that the tax policies of Pennsylvania and New York are challenging the state’s competitiveness and robbing New Jersey of people and dollars. Highlighting only those who leave makes it seem as though New Jersey is the ever-shrinking state – a falsehood that becomes clear when one sensibly includes those who move here.

In other words: context matters. A lot.

While it is true that New York and Pennsylvania continue to be the top two destination states for New Jerseyans moving away, it is also true that they are the top two origin states for people moving to New Jersey.

In fact, more people move to New Jersey from New York than from the other way around. And for every 10 Jerseyans who move to Pennsylvania, 8 Pennsylvanians move to New Jersey. There is nothing new about these patterns, and they are relatively constant through various tax and economic policy changes.

That is the nature of bordering states. People tend to come and go relatively frequently – and there is simply no evidence that New Jersey’s or our neighbors’ tax policies drive their relocation decisions.

It is also incorrect to imply that New Jersey’s state income plummets when people leave the state. In fact, this is a misrepresentation of IRS income data, as we pointed out last year.

Nonetheless, business lobbyist are back at it again – making the grossly misleading claim that New Jersey “lost” over $20 billion in adjusted gross income in the last decade. And once again they are doing so without putting that number into context. Shine a light on the whole $3 trillion enchilada and that “loss” ends up being less than 1 percent (.71 percent) of the state’s total household income generated during that time – a tiny sliver, at best.

But the bigger issue is that the IRS has explicitly cautioned against using adjusted gross income in this way – an inconvenient matter that business lobbyists would rather ignore just as they would rather ignore the fact that state-to-state moving patterns are about more than taxes.

This “exodus” storyline is being promoted as a canary in the coal mine, when, in reality, it is merely a distracting non-issue designed to scare the public and discourage legislators from enacting pragmatic tax policies.

Enough with the scare tactics. It’s time to get serious about rebuilding New Jersey’s prosperity.

Governor’s Modest Budget Vetoes Fall on Most Vulnerable

Posted on by Jon Whiten

While the three-day shutdown, the Horizon bill and “Beachgate” have dominated attention as this year’s budget season came to a dramatic close, there are several modest but important line-item vetoes Gov. Christie made to the final budget that fall on the most vulnerable in the state.

The governor agreed to most of the legislature’s changes to his spending plan, but aimed his red veto pen squarely at some of New Jersey’s most vulnerable residents. It’s a fitting final fiscal act from a governor who through eight budgets has prioritized tax cuts for the state’s wealthiest families and biggest businesses over helping struggling families climb the ladder into the middle class.

Among other things, Gov. Christie axed:

 

Food assistance for struggling families

The governor vetoed language that would’ve restored so-called “Heat and Eat” benefits that tie important federal nutritional benefits to state heating assistance. In 2014 when the federal government changed rules governing this program, most eligible states changed their rules as well to ensure the continuation of crucial benefits. New Jersey chose not to, and as a result an estimated 160,000 New Jersey households that include seniors, people with disabilities and children have had their Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) benefits cut by an approximate average of $90 per month.

(Background: https://www.njpp.org/blog/op-ed-four-reasons-new-jersey-should-maintain-its-heat-and-eat-program)

Basic assistance for some of New Jersey’s poorest kids

The governor vetoed language that would’ve repealed the so-called “family cap” for Work First NJ. This cap denies basic assistance to children who, through no fault of their own, are born while their mothers are on Work First NJ (also known as Temporary Assistance to Needy Families). This cap has denied essential assistance to over 20,000 babies since its inception and punishes kids for being born poor.

(Background: https://www.njpp.org/blog/repealing-tanfs-family-cap-makes-moral-and-economic-sense)

Paid leave processing & awareness improvements

The governor vetoed language that would’ve directed the state to spend $2 million from the paid family leave program’s fund to improve the timeliness of paid leave claims processing, and $1 million on education and community outreach.

(Background: https://www.njpp.org/reports/boosting-families-boosting-the-economy-how-to-improve-new-jerseys-paid-family-leave-program)

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