New Jersey's Next Governor with Steve Adubato Pt. 2 - Murphy

“New Jersey’s Next Governor with Steve Adubato” is a two-part special featuring in-depth interviews with gubernatorial candidates, Ambassador Phil Murphy (D), now Governor of New Jersey, and Lt. Governor Kim Guadagno (R). In Part 2, Steve Adubato will presses Phil Murphy on issues such as soaring property taxes, the pension crisis, funding NJ’s schools, and more. Who will lead New Jersey after Chris Christie? This program will help voters decide.

10/21/17 #120

 

 

 

 

Excerpt:

"Welcome to State of Affairs. I'm Steve Adubato. Recently I sat down with Democratic candidate for governor, Ambassador Phil Murphy. And we discussed the issues that matter most to New Jersey voters. Here now is that conversation. Ambassador, let's get right to the issue of taxes. This 1.3 billion dollars in new taxes. Break that down for us, but particularly, the part that helps property tax payers... homeowners. So the... we have to understand what the state of state is. And this is among the weakest economies in the United States. We've been downgraded eleven straight times. We lead the nation in home foreclosures. House income has not only lagged other states, it's actually down during the Christie Guadagno years. That's the frame. We need a stronger and fairer economy that works not just for some, but for all. Part of that is making sure the folks who can afford it step up and have a tax fairness. So that's the wealthiest among us. We have some blatant corporate open loopholes that we can close. We can legalize, we think responsibly, marijuana, and generate a significant amount of money. But far more importantly, we need to reprioritize what we're already spending. For example? So for instance, we put out over eight billion dollars in corporate tax breaks for large corporations. And at the same time, we've underfunded public education by nine billion dollars. We've cancelled big infrastructure projects, and underfunded others, with reduced NJ Transit state stipend by 90%. So it's not just a question of where can we get more revenue? It's a question of how do we reprioritize what we're spending? And by the way, in addition to that, let's grow this economy again. We've left billions of dollars of economic activity on the table over the past seven and a half years. There's no reason we can't reboot some of those economies that we used to dominate. Ambassador, let me try this. We... as you know, and your team knows, we've been asking questions for the last month getting ready for this interview, so these questions came from AM 970, from NJTV, the Facebook page, from WNET, from FiOS as well, but the marijuana question? Yes. Why are you so confident that we can legalize it, control it, manage it, and not promote any new problem as it relates to drug abuse? Yeah. So let me tell you Steve, the first lens and the most important one I look at this through is the social justice lens. We have the widest white-nonwhite..."