New Jersey has amassed a huge, and possibly dangerous, level of debt, according to a new report that reviews the financial health of state governments across the country.
Each Garden State taxpayer owes tens of thousands of dollars and the state is a tax “sinkhole,” according to the nonprofit organization Truth in Accounting (TIA), because state lawmakers of both parties have overspent and used accounting “gimmicks” for decades. The organization defines “sinkholes” as states that lack the necessary funds to pay their bills.
“New Jersey receives an F in finances,” Bill Bergman, TIA’s director of research, told The Epoch Times.
The state “had $31.7 billion available to pay $216.9 billion worth of bills,“ and ”the outcome was a $185.2 billion shortfall,” the TIA report said. As a result, taxpayers in the state are “on the hook for $58,300 as of fiscal year 2020.”
New Jersey, the report concludes, “remains in abysmal fiscal health and had no money set aside to weather the current or any future crisis.”
Meanwhile, New Jersey officials claim the state has a balanced budget.
“If this is true,” Bergman said, “then how is it the state has this massive debt problem?”
The offices of New Jersey Gov. Phil Murphy and acting State Comptroller Kevin D. Walsh didn’t respond to requests from The Epoch Times for comment. Assembly Speaker Craig J. Coughlin declined to comment.
A spokesman for the Republican minority in the New Jersey legislature praised the report. To not accept the conclusions of the report “would be crazy,” state Assemblyman Hal Wirths said.
Wirths noted that TIA “points to pension and health benefit costs as New Jersey’s No. 1 financial problem, and they are.”
