CIANJ President Examines Out-Migration and Path to Progress

Steve Adubato speaks with Anthony Russo, President, Commerce & Industry Association of New Jersey about the millionaire’s tax leading to out-migration in New Jersey, the pension crisis and the Path for Progress report.

5/11/19 #309

 

 

 

 

Excerpt:

"State of Affairs welcomes back Anthony Russo, President of Commerce and Industry Association in New Jersey, and also CEO and Publisher of Commerce Magazine. Here it is, right here. Thank you for having me back. Tell folks how often this comes out? Every month we print the magazine. It's also available online and the issue out in front of you is our special one where we highlight the charitable good works our companies do for their communities. Who is it for? This magazine? It's for the businesses. It's a business-to-business magazine that goes out to about 30,000 people. So, very proud of it. And we have a cross promotional relationship with your publication. You just said to me it's all about the budget before we got on the air. It's all about what? The governor's budget? The governor's budget. Every... What's in it that matters to the business community? Yeah, I... so, just... Let's just take a step back. Everything that happens in Trenton, we believe, when you represent all the businesses that we do, 900 companies, that politics is woven into the fabric of business. How dare you. [laughter] And so what we tell our members is you have to pay attention to what's going on in Trenton. Especially during the budget season, because that's when they either propose taxes, cut spending, you know, initiate new programs. So this is an important time of the year. And I told them to be vigilant between now and June 30th. Okay, so the millionaire's tax. The governor says we need that money. You and I've talked about this for years. Right. It went up a little bit last time, for five million and up. Right. The governor now says for every penny, or a dollar, over a million dollars, we need to take a little more to create tax fairness. You say? Well I say that he should do a deeper dive and I'm using his words, when he says his agencies went back and looked for some savings and they came out with 200 million dollars worth of savings. We're telling them go deeper because we think that the cost of government's too high. So before you even initiate a millionaire's tax or any kind of tax, you really have to go back and check your own numbers and see if you could find those savings there. You think there's some savings there, in fact, the Senate President Steve Sweeney will be joining us. We have an in-depth interview, we're taping next week, as we're doing this program. The Path to Progress report, it talks about finding savings, looking for ways to be more cost effective, the pension crisis, etc. Why is this report Path to Progress..."