Springsteen and Bon Jovi can start paying their fair share.
Via Politico:
New Jersey averted its second state shutdown in two years on Saturday when Gov. Phil Murphy and legislative leaders struck a deal just hours before the state budget deadline, putting an end to a bitter fight that had divided Democrats and drawn the attention of national party leaders.
After an intense negotiating session that lasted for more than four hours, Murphy joined state Senate President Steve Sweeney and Assembly Speaker Craig Coughlin at a press conference early Saturday evening to announce they had settled their months-long feud over who had the best plan to raise new taxes.
In the end, they agreed to a $37.4 billion budget that raises taxes on millionaires earning $5 million or more and on some corporations, merging their concepts into one plan. Murphy also agreed to drop his proposal to restore the state sales tax to 7 percent.
The three men chalked up their sharp words in recent weeks to a family feud.
“This is not a win for any of us individually,” Murphy said from the podium in his office, surrounded by the lawmakers he’d been at war with for weeks. “This is a win for the middle class and working families and those who look up and dream to be in the middle class all across New Jersey. There is so much we agree upon. There was never a disagreement over our values or our principals, just over how to get there.”[…]
The kumbaya moment offered a stark contrast to the tough-guy positions the lawmakers had staked out just hours earlier. Murphy and the legislative leaders found themselves so angry with each other that they took to public name calling.
Murphy, a former Goldman Sachs executive and former U.S. Ambassador to Germany, and Sweeney, a top official in an ironworkers union who’s led the Senate for eight years, both accused each other of acting like Christie, the wildly unpopular former governor who left office in January.
On Saturday morning, Sweeney said he thought Murphy, a liberal who campaigned on a promise to address income inequality, was blocking his effort to raise taxes on companies for his own personal gain.
“We think he’s under-taxing corporations, and I’m starting to understand why: Because he makes his livelihood from corporate dividends,” Sweeney said in an interview with POLITICO.
A day earlier, Murphy and his lieutenant governor, former Assembly Speaker Sheila Oliver, said Sweeney and Coughlin had offered merely “symbolic” proposals that failed to address the very issues they campaigned on last year.
“I have never seen the level of obstructionism come from the legislative leadership as I am seeing in this cycle,” Oliver, who has worked on 15 budgets, said Friday night. “They do not want to work with Governor Murphy.”