GSI Business Panel: NJ’s High Government Spending and Taxes Are Killing Our Businesses. Special Interests Win; NJ Loses.
March 5, 2021USNews Education Rankings: Good News for NJ but Still No Accounting for NJ’s Excessively High Spending
March 12, 2021Once again, the NJEA spent more on political lobbying than any other special interest. By far. The NJ Election Law Enforcement Commission (ELEC) released its annual lobbying report, and the NJEA was the leading spender in a record year for lobbying, as it was in 2019.
The NJEA spent a total of $6.3 million, 26% more than the next highest spender New Direction New Jersey (NDNJ). Yes, that’s the same NDNJ for which the NJEA provides 70% of the funding; the same NDNJ that runs TV ads with Governor Murphy acting as spokesperson for the NJEA agenda. While the NJEA likes to hide what it spends on NDNJ, it is likely that about $3.5 million of NDNJ’s $5 million came from the NJEA, so the NJEA’s real political lobbying spend is more like $9.8 million, or a whopping 43% of what all the top ten lobbyers spent in 2020.
NDNJ was also the second-highest spender in 2019, so looked at in a more accurate way, the NJEA spent $9 million lobbying in 2019, a massive 54% of the total. That’s called domination.
NJ citizens must understand that they are funding the NJEA’s political lobbying with their own tax dollars. The bottom line is that the NJEA is Number One is spending taxpayer dollars for its own special interests.