Steve Sweeney's sneaky plan for hijacking the gas tax into bailing out NJ's public pensions

Last month when you voted to dedicate the newly raised gas tax to the Transportation Trust Fund I'll bet you thought that meant the gas tax revenue would be going into the Transportation Trust Fund.

Suckers!

State Senate President Steve Sweeney wants to divert it to, drum roll please, bailing out the public employee pension fund!

How? Easy! Just have the pension fund buy the TTF bonds. As in, New Jersey will borrow money from itself and then pay itself all the interest.

Nice obfuscation there Steve. The interest doesn't go to "Wall Street." It goes to mom and pop investors like me who buy government bonds. "Wall Street" is just the middle man, because New Jersey doesn't have a system like Treasury Direct that would allow individual investors to buy those bonds from the state, and "avoid paying bond underwriting fees."

Why not?, you might ask. Because then guys like Jon Corzine and Phil Murphy wouldn't get their cut, except it turns out, when the vig goes to the public employee unions instead. Then cutting off "Wall Street" is A-OK.

So there you have it. When they sold us on the gas tax they told us it was for important stuff like roads and bridges. But when they spend the gas tax it'll be going to some guy sitting on a beach.

Posted at 10:13 by Chris Wysocki   [/nj_politics]   Comments | Perm Link |
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