Senate Pres. Sweeney on Gov. Murphy, Vaping and Marijuana

Steve Adubato sits down with Senate President Steve Sweeney (D) – NJ to discuss the top issues facing New Jersey, including: the Path to Progress; the fiscal state of NJ; public employee pensions and the push to ban vaping across the state.

9/28/2019 #320

 

 

 

 

Excerpt:

"Welcome to State of Affairs. I'm Steve Adubato. We're coming to you from the Agnes Varis NJTV Studio in Newark. We're pleased to, once again, welcome the Senate President in the great state of New Jersey, Senator Steve Sweeney. Good to see you Senator. It's good to see you Steve. Let's jump right into this. Path to Progress is a report that has been researched, submitted, and now says, what are the keys to fiscal health in New Jersey? Well, look. There are several. But you started this whole thing? Well, yeah I just asked a bunch of experts. Basically, the best New Jersey has. Not partisan. In any way at all. Just experts. How do we fix what's wrong? And they came up with, you know, 200 recommendations. We whittled it down to, I think it's 36 or 27. I forget the number now. It's been a little while. But it's hitting at the things that we all know need to be done. But they're the hard things. Top of the list? Pension reform. Healthcare reform. School consolidation. Things that we've talked about for years, that is now to a point, these are the big things that have to get done in order to save billions of dollars for taxpayers. Because New Jersey's biggest problem is cost. And without addressing the problems, we're never gonna... we're just gonna just keep pouring money in it, and looking for new taxes to raise, without fixing the structural problems doesn't work. By the way, if you're listening to us on the audio side, Senator Steve Sweeney, Senate President Steve Sweeney, is with us on State of Affairs. I'm Steve Adubato. The question is this. New Jersey's fiscal health. One of the issues that you and the governor disagree on, is that he believes strongly that in order to strengthen the fiscal health of the state, we need to, in fact, increase taxes on those who earn the most money. After a million dollars, every dollar is taxed more. He says, "If we don't do that, we're not gonna have money for a lot of the programs that people want." He's wrong, because those are the people that can leave, and after the federal SALT... you know, the stuff that Trump... State and local tax deduction with President Trump? The federal law? Yeah. Cap at ten grand. That's it? Yeah. State income tax, property tax, is more than that? You're on your own. Exactly. Can't write it off. Go ahead. So now you have a population that just got hit with another tax, because people didn't mind paying them as much, because they wrote 'em off. Now they can't. And my point is, if you want to talk about revenue raisers..."