Thanks to the Garden State Initiative and Fairleigh-Dickinson for their recent polling, which serves to confirm what SPCNJ detailed in its recent report “Beware the Downward Spiral.”

For decades, New Jersey’s most powerful special interest, the New Jersey Education Association, has pushed for higher government spending and the higher taxes to pay for it.  The result is that New Jersey has the highest taxes in the Mid-Atlantic region and an overall cost of living to match.  As might be expected, the poll found property taxes and the overall cost of living were citizens’ two biggest concerns.  The causal relationship is clear.

This is the downward spiral that SPCNJ and others have warned of: high taxes lead to outmigration of businesses and people, which leads to lower tax revenues, which leads to higher taxes and more outmigration.

And yet Governor Murphy, supported by the NJEA, is trying to raise taxes on millionaires.  How many more of them will leave the state if Murphy and the NJEA get their way?

Do they even care?

See the GSI poll here.