this is an election year budget and we were talking earlier we asked well whose budget is this going to be is it going to be the administration's budget or is it going to be the budget of the democratic majority the governor said several times during his speech today we did this together so the answer I guess is that it's their budget Republicans on the other hand thought it was full of bloat and irresponsible we talked to Senate budget officer Declan oscanlin let's hear a little bit of that so the governor says 18 tax cuts the most in the history of New Jersey this sounds like a fiscally sound budget no uh look if you if you offset the the supposed tax cuts with the tax increases that are still happening by the way despite his saying there aren't any in this budget and last year's budget uh there's there's very very little tax relief for the taxpayers of New Jersey under this Administration uh you don't get credit for cutting attacks to yourself raise the corporate business tax that it doesn't work that way just as the president doesn't credit for for cutting gas prices that he's responsible for having increased beforehand not how it works there are tax increases in this budget significant ones probably close to a billion in dollars uh if you look at just bracket creep just by virtue of people getting salary increases they will pay higher taxes a lot of times those salary increases don't even keep up with inflation so they're paying higher taxes and not even keep up keeping up with inflation that's a half billion dollars right there there's also another increase in in taxes on our workers and our employers that we could stop with money that we have and we're not so plenty of tax increases in this budget there's a 10 billion dollar Surplus he said he boasted about that doesn't that show some fiscal responsibility oh no if you look at these surpluses in others 10 billion dollars does not well if you look at surpluses in other states with the infusion of federal money with the the rebound after the pandemic the average Surplus I think in and this was according to the governor this morning is like 25 so we're on the low end there here's the thing the question is what do you do with that money where do you invest that money how much of that money do you give back this is money you need a you need a cushion for a downturn and you know the average should be about 20 excuse me they have to be about 10 this is 20 of our budget that's more money the government should be hoarding we should come up with a way to effectively give back a substantial portion of that Republicans have have plans to do exactly that a number of billion dollars more than the governor the anchor program will give back about net one and a half billion dollars to people the Republican plan would have given almost 4 billion and given to them last year by sitting on this money and hoarding this money whatever is given back is worth 10 percent less now because of inflation I got about 15 seconds tell me what you thought about the tone of this speech oh look the governor's always upbeat and I like the tone uh and look and I'm getting some signs from the the administration that they're willing to work with us so I'm encouraged by that there's a lot of work to do though and there's a lot of transparency that needs to happen so too much fat in the budget taxes are too high and even the Surplus is too high so that's going to be the framing of this debate as we go forward we'll start to see some numbers in April and then things really begin to intensify budget season is upon us [Music]