Home -> Law Blog Directory -> Federal Judiciary Blogs -> Bench Memos - National Review Online

Federal Judiciary

: Bench Memos - National Review Online

Viva Christie -- By: Daniel Foster

You haven?t made it in New Jersey until organized labor wants you dead. By that measure, Chris Christie is already one of the most influential governors in the Garden State?s -- shall we say, colorful history. Just a few months into his term, Christie has taken the fight to the blood-engorged leech of a public sector so quickly and so hard that one teacher-union apparatchik sent an e-mail to thousands praying for his untimely demise.

But Chris Christie lives. And nearly two-thirds of the state?s bloated school budgets are not so lucky, having perished at the polls -- the local tax levy proposed by each school district in New Jersey is subject to voter approval -- in greater proportion than in any year since 1976. This is undoubtedly a win for New Jersey taxpayers, who recognize the necessity, if not the palatability, of Christie?s strong fiscal medicine in a state that teeters on the brink of bankruptcy even as it pays the highest tax burden in the nation.

Faced with an $11 billion hole in a $30 billion budget, Christie used his broad constitutional discretion (New Jersey?s is arguably the most powerful governorship in the Union) to wield not a scalpel or an axe, but a scalpel the size of an axe against a Trenton machine rivaled only by Chicago and Albany in sheer size and scope.

As part of his efforts, he cut state aid to school districts by about 5 percent of their total budgets. Predictably, as school boards across the state pondered cutting programs like music and athletics to make up for the shortfall, the powerful New Jersey Education Association and its affiliates raged at the prospect of layoffs, even though new teacher hires in the state have grown far faster than enrollment, and have continued to grow even as the rest of the economy shed jobs.

?Think of the children!? the unions cried. But Christie called the bluff, promising to restore aid for districts whose staffs agreed to one-year pay freezes (not even cuts mind you, much less permanent ones) and to pay 1.5 percent of their salary into their exorbitant benefits packages (the vast majority currently pay 0 percent). Of the state?s 591 active school districts, fewer than two dozen have so far agreed to the concessions.

What the unions did do is deploy a multi-million-dollar media apparatus to argue that their salaries -- which are well above the national median and don?t include the significant chunk of total compensation they receive in the form of benefits, or generous state-subsidized pension plans -- are sacrosanct, while taxpayer wallets are bottomless. New Jerseyans, who showed up to vote in numbers that rivaled turnout for presidential elections, showed them what they could do with that argument.

The reckoning has been a long time coming. For years the state?s fiscal structure locked it in a death spiral, as spending increases bred tax hikes and drove residents and businesses out of state, thus shrinking the tax base and reducing revenue.

Teacher salaries, and especially teacher benefits, have been a prime driver of this dynamic. When I was a cub reporter covering school budgets for a small New Jersey paper, I listened with an open mind to union reps who told me that teachers only wanted a fair wage and to keep the benefits they already had. Then I learned that in many cases, they were asking for raises well in excess of cost-of-living increases and that ?keeping? their lavish benefits entailed massive year-over-year increases in premiums borne entirely by the taxpayers.

In my own North Jersey hamlet, the teacher?s union spent the years leading up to the financial crisis in a bitter contract standoff, including a protracted work slowdown in which teachers declined to staff field trips, graded papers only during ?planning periods,? and even refused to write letters of recommendation. At its height I remember walking past the town?s high school and seeing a glistening Mercedes CL500 coupe sitting in the teacher?s lot with a ?SETTLE NOW? sign in its windshield.

Then the recession hit in earnest and state unemployment began to climb toward the double digits, and conditions appeared ripe for a return to fiscal sanity. Instead Washington passed a massive stimulus bill with billions in bailout bucks for New Jersey?s school districts, difficult decisions were put off another year, and my hometown conceded to a collective-bargaining agreement that will see a 24 percent increase in the cost of teacher benefits next year alone.

Decades of big, bad government and a rare red mandate in a blue state have left Chris Christie with the daunting task of convincing the beneficiaries of the status quo that the party is over and that they?ll have to help clean up. The school-budget battle was the first real test of the feasibility of that program. In winning that battle by, in his words, treating voters like adults and ?governing like a one-termer,? Christie may have drawn the union?s death wishes, but he just might have saved New Jersey?s life.

-- Daniel Foster is news editor of National Review Online.

 

---

Full post as published by Bench Memos - National Review Online on April 23, 2010 (boomark / email).