The governor’s rightly taking aim at New Jersey’s tax incentive “black hole,” in which we promise companies big tax breaks even though they don’t always produce the promised jobs, losing our state untold potential tax revenue.

This program, expanded wildly under former Gov. Chris Christie – happily abetted by the Democrat-led Legislature – needs to be fixed and scaled back, no question. A fresh audit has left us all feeling scammed. Apparently, nobody’s been minding the store.

Yet at the same time, we can’t just pretend that this reform is a solution to New Jersey’s fiscal crisis, allowing us to avoid significant budget cuts and tax increases. That’s a scam, too. And that’s exactly what Gov. Phil Murphy’s people keep doing.

The governor did it in his State of the State speech, when he implied that fixing tax incentives would lead to massive savings to address our fiscal crisis: “For the same price as these tax breaks,” he asserted, “New Jersey could have funded our public schools, funded NJ Transit, met our pension obligations, provided more property tax relief, or all of the above.”

And a top Murphy aide, Deborah Cornavaca – formerly with the New Jersey Education Association – made the same misleading argument on a conference call with grassroots liberal groups last week. She singled out the audit as a way to push back against Senate President Steve Sweeney’s demand to scale back pension and health benefits.

“These tax incentives,” she said, “are one of the places we can look to say, ‘Senate President Sweeney, this is a false narrative you’re taking.’”

But it’s just not true. The total cost of these tax discounts – some of which are going to companies that didn’t meet their end of the bargain – will come to $1 billion next year. This is less than one-third of this single year’s pension payments; to say nothing of NJ Transit, public school funding or property tax relief.

Is an extra $1 billion a year in potential saving a significant sum? Of course. Should improvements be made to the incentives program? Absolutely. But the question is one of magnitude. Any revenue to be gained from such reform pales in comparison to the larger financial crisis we are facing.

Consider the numbers: Pensions are costing the state about $3.2 billion in fiscal year 2019 alone, and will rise to $6.7 billion by 2023, according to state actuaries. Health benefits will cost roughly $3.4 billion in 2019, and rise to about $4.1 billion by 2023, an economic and fiscal policy work group estimated.

So in total, our state will owe more than $10 billion just for pension and health benefits over the next four years. An extra $1 billion a year won’t solve that problem – and this is from eliminating tax incentives entirely. Even Murphy hasn’t called for that.

It’s also worth noting that the number he’s been blasting – $11 billion in total tax credits promised over a span of more than a decade – has not all actually been used by the companies. Of that, about $3.4 billion in credits have been spent. The rest could arguably be clawed back.

And of course, we don’t know how much of that $3.4 billion discount was wasted on companies that were bluffing us, and would have created the same jobs without any tax break. We’d get zero revenue if they decided not to locate here at all.

One thing, however, is indisputable: While reforming tax incentives is crucial, we still need to make real, painful sacrifices to get our fiscal house in order. And the governor has proposed no plan to do that.

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