A misguided budget strategy

I have never considered Governor Jim McGreevey to be a particularly astute politician. When he spoke at my high school five years ago, he made fun of the sweater I was wearing, somehow failing to realize that insulting an 11th grader before an all-school assembly might not be a wise thing for a gubernatorial candidate to do.

Things haven't changed much since then. Today, our governor sorely needs to develop a bit more discretion and common sense, and his administration completely misinterprets the dismal poll numbers that have resulted from his mistakes. Spokesmen have repeatedly stated that McGreevey's low approval ratings are not the governor's fault, that the state's budget crisis is enough to make any governor unpopular. It seems the administration fails to realize that it's not the budget shortfall per se that voters are angry about, but the way in which the administration has handled it.

Perhaps the governor can draw insight from a poll released last week by Farleigh Dickinson University. Fifty-six percent of New Jersey voters believe McGreevey should not be reelected in 2005, and 65 percent of voters rate his job performance as "fair" or "poor." Meanwhile, only 10 percent of voters blame the budget crisis on him; by comparison, 28 percent blame the crisis on former Governor Whitman. Clearly, voters understand that McGreevey had some tough choices to make. Their displeasure comes from their belief that the governor has not made these choices very well.

When he took office last year, McGreevey was extremely conscious of what happened to the state's last Democratic governor, Jim Florio, whose infamous tax hikes were tantamount to political suicide. The Florio experience provides a brilliant tutorial on what a governor should not do, but McGreevey seems to have drawn all the wrong lessons from it.

Florio was unpopular not because he had a tough budget to balance, but because he went about doing it in all the wrong ways. Voters are never happy to see their taxes go up, but they can be understanding. A good executive will make sure that voters understand that taxes are increasing because other options have been exhausted, and he or she will demonstrate a very real sensitivity to the hardships that the increased burden places on voters. And a good executive will never, ever try to make ends meet by putting a tax on toilet paper. These are the lessons we should take from Jim Florio's four years in the statehouse.

Instead, Mc-Greevey has approached the current budget crisis with the maxim that if any Democratic governor wants to be reelected in New Jersey, taxes can't go up. So he has sought other ways to balance the budget, no matter how absurd they may be. Ironically, his ill-conceived attempts to preserve the tax rate are precisely what have been keeping his poll numbers low.

First, McGreevey spoke of the need to eliminate waste in Trenton. The government itself, he said, had grown too fat for the lean times ahead. Trimming off excess in governmental operations would be a bold move, and by my estimation, a successful one. But early in his term, McGreevey destroyed any credibility he may have had on the issue.

Last summer, McGreevey, his wife, and staff flew to Ireland on a trade mission he said would cost the state only $20,000. Months later, the Newark Star-Ledger reported that the trip had actually cost the state $105,000, including $16,000 in cell phone charges, a stay in a $720-a-night hotel suite, and a $3,178.48 McGreevey family reunion at a Northern Ireland steak house. And the one person absent from this "trade mission": the state commerce secretary. The red-faced McGreevey had to ask the state Democratic Party to pay back most of the charges, having established early in his term that he was no true opponent to governmental excess.

Since then, the governor proposed a 2004 budget that is intolerable to even those groups that have supported him most. McGreevey's budget would slash state funding for higher education by 10 percent, eliminate state funding for arts and cultural programs, and cut health insurance for many low-income adults. These are drastic measures, and it seems the only reason they are being pushed is that the governor is afraid of raise taxes and unable (or unwilling) to significantly reduce government waste.

Even most Republicans in the state believe that modest tax hikes are preferable to McGreevey's reckless budget cuts. Eliminating state arts councils should be a measure of last resort, and even then, a repugnant one. The move is even more heartless than taxing toilet paper, and it's just as avoidable, too. In trying to avoid the fate of Florio, McGreevey has sealed his own political doom. Maybe he can recover some ground, but judging by his record, I doubt it.

Lowell Schiller is a Wilson School major from Warren, N.J.