From the Star Ledger:
Are N.J. property taxes actually going down in many towns?
Are many New Jersey residents actually paying less in property taxes than they were five years ago?
The state’s sky-high property taxes crossed the $8,300 threshold in 2015 as New Jersey residents continue to get smacked with the highest real estate rates in the nation.
However, a NJ Advance Media analysis of statewide property tax data has found that property taxes in 42 percent of municipalities increased at less than the rate of inflation from 2010 to 2015.
During that time, the average statewide property tax bill rose about 10 percent, from $7,576 to $8,353. When accounting for inflation, which rose about 9 percent, the property tax bills rose slightly more than 1 percent.
But 237 municipalities, that are home to nearly 46 percent of the state’s population, kept their tax increases below the rate of inflation.
NJ Advance Media analyzed municipal tax figures going back 15 years and found that, when adjusted for inflation, the impact of property tax relief relief measures enacted during Gov. Chris Christie’s first term — including strict caps on local spending and public worker arbitration rewards — is clear.
Property taxes rose 1 percent when adjusted for inflation from 2010 to 2015 after soaring 35 percent, after inflation was taken into account, from 2000 to 2010, the analysis found.
Data show only five municipalities — Teterboro, Pemberton, Woodbine, Lebanon and Union City — kept tax bills lower in 2015 than in 2000, after inflation.
Christie spokeswoman Joelle Farrell noted that during Christie’s first six years, property tax growth “has slowed to an annual average of 1.97 percent, dramatically lower than the 7 percent yearly average in the 10 years before the Christie administration.”
“You have to ask yourself, where would New Jersey’s property taxes be if not for the governor’s reforms,” Farrell said. “If annual average increases continued at a rate of 7 percent for the past six years?”
Michael Darcy, executive director of the New Jersey League of Municipalities said the 2 percent spending cap enacted by Christie helped, but reforms to public worker benefits and the arbitration cap made it possible for local officials to rein in some costs.
“I think it is safe to say that overall the escalation of property taxes has been significantly curtailed compared to historic trends,” said Darcy.
First.
LOL, you can slow cash disbursements by not paying your bills. Not that I disagree with it though…..
“Michael Darcy, executive director of the New Jersey League of Municipalities said the 2 percent spending cap enacted by Christie helped, **but reforms to public worker benefits….**”
LOLOL. And pundits scratch their heads trying to figure out a blowhard buffoon like Trump has popular appeal while these shenanigans occur.
http://www.nj.com/opinion/index.ssf/2016/02/supreme_court_nominations_new_jersey_is_setting_a.html#incart_most-commented_politics_article
Never really read the court ruling on Abbot and formula funding. But the entire lawsuit was originally based on the notion of fair education and equal funding. I’m not quite sure how that translates into Abbotts getting to spend twice as much per pupil than the wealthiest suburbs. Realistically, it all goes to construction firms, fake consultants, and top heavy admin. Abbotts always have the nicest buildings. The richest schools have the crappiest buildings.
3. Don’t forget the multimedia equipment.
ChiFi:
Disrespect, begets disrespect. That is why you are nice and are disrespectful.
Remember “You lied” during the State of the Union speech. You remember the Arizona post menopausal Governor wagging fingers.
So don’t complain.
chicagofinance says:
February 20, 2016 at 7:11 pm
Obama blew off Scalia’s funeral? Are you fcuking kidding?
“The list of Abbott districts is based on poverty in 1984, not 2015. Alas, even though a lot has changed in New Jersey and the world since 1984, the Abbott list has been almost totally constant. Since the big Abbott II decision came out in 1990, the only change to the Abbott list was the addition of 1400-student Salem City in 2004. ”
http://njeducationaid.blogspot.com/2015/10/updating-abbott-list.html
Map:
http://www.edlawcenter.org/assets/images/map_8_5.gif
Not being cynical, BUT.
Union City got a lot of grants from the State and the Port Authority vis a vis Fat Bastard as quid pro quo for political support. Teterboro is basically the Port Authority plus a few warehouses and strip malls.
Data show only five municipalities — Teterboro, Pemberton, Woodbine, Lebanon and Union City — kept tax bills lower in 2015 than in 2000, after inflation.
Yes, can we now stop with the damn faux statement that our taxes are out of control.
Let’s not give too much credit to Christie and instead acknowledge the laws of avgs. I alluded to this on this blog I think last year. I stated that people leaving for lower cost areas will see their taxes rise much faster than nj, because nj could not go much higher due to its already high price. These people will then wish they had never left jersey. Yes, I was dead on. Those people on this blog who blasted me on this subject, should say sorry for the crap they gave me. Did you really think taxes could increase at rates of 7% in a down economy (thanks to those wall st crooks who then blamed teachers and poor people for the problem they created with their mortgage fiasco)?
Remember, it’s all about what a market will support. It’s not rocket science. Property taxes were rising so fast from 1999 to 2009 because of how much money people were making in nj. It was raining money everywhere. What did you expect to happen with property taxes? Lol God, if people only think instead of parroting bs, then they will understand the situation.
Yes, agree, but I don’t have expectations for any nj town to have lower taxes in 2015 than they did in 2000, after inflation. That’s pretty crazy and can only result from a political payback as you allude to.
ChiFiNot says:
February 21, 2016 at 10:16 am
Not being cynical, BUT.
Union City got a lot of grants from the State and the Port Authority vis a vis Fat Bastard as quid pro quo for political support. Teterboro is basically the Port Authority plus a few warehouses and strip malls.
Data show only five municipalities — Teterboro, Pemberton, Woodbine, Lebanon and Union City — kept tax bills lower in 2015 than in 2000, after inflation.
Well said.
Ben says:
February 21, 2016 at 9:03 am
Never really read the court ruling on Abbot and formula funding. But the entire lawsuit was originally based on the notion of fair education and equal funding. I’m not quite sure how that translates into Abbotts getting to spend twice as much per pupil than the wealthiest suburbs. Realistically, it all goes to construction firms, fake consultants, and top heavy admin. Abbotts always have the nicest buildings. The richest schools have the crappiest buildings.
8. Taxes are very high.
Created people. When one says that the dramatist (and the artist in general) creates real characters, this is a beautiful illusion and exaggeration, in whose existence and dissemination art celebrates one of its unintentional, almost superfluous triumphs. In fact, we don’t understand much about real, living people, and generalize very superficially when we attribute to them this character or that; the poet is reflecting this, our very incomplete view of man, when he turns into people (in this sense “creates”) those sketches which are just as superficial as our knowledge of people. There is much deception in these characters created by artists; they are by no means examples of nature incarnate, but rather, like painted people, rather too thin; they cannot stand up to close examination. Moreover, it is quite false to say that whereas the character of the average living man often contradicts itself, that created by a dramatist is the original model which nature had in mind. A real man is something completely necessary (even in those so-called contradictions), but we do not always recognize this necessity. The invented man, the phantasm, claims to signify something necessary, but only for those who would also understand a real person only in terms of a rough, unnatural simplification, so that a few prominent, often recurring traits, with a great deal of light on them and a great deal of shadow and semidarkness about, completely satisfy their demands. They are ready to treat the phantasm as a real, necessary person, because in the case of a real person they are accustomed to taking a phantasm, a silhouette, a deliberate abbreviation as the whole. Friedrich Nietzsche
Of course missing from this discussion is the slashing of the homeowners tax rebate which, if included, would show property taxes actually went up more under Christie than during the bubble.
Great article in Time this week. Couldn’t find it online yet, so typed up a piece of it. Def try to find the article and read it if you have some time. This was the same drum I was beating on this blog in the past 2 years. I spoke of hoarding, too much money at the top, and not enough creation of jobs by focusing on long term investments(growth). I was told that I was an idiot and a hater of the rich. I was told that there is no such thing as hoarding and was complete idiot for thinking so. I guess it’s a good thing to be an idiot, because you have a better grasp than 90% of the people out there about how our economy works.
Btw, it’s along article, and in another section, they talk about some good info about Americans and their change in consumption patters due to the Great Recession. Screw it, I will type it up and share that with you in the next post.
“The situation was even more stark last year. FactSet Research calculates that in the 12 months ending with September 2015, S&P 500 companies spent 64.6% of net income on buybacks, with 130 companies spending more than 100%–both record numbers since the 2008-09 financial crisis. These buybacks helped boost stock prices, but there’s no evidence they’ve created many jobs.
This recipe is problematic because it encourages the cycle of inequality. When the rich get richer, there are only so many more cars and pairs of jeans and houses they’ll buy. But when wealth is more broadly shared, the economy grows more robustly. Laurence Fink, CEO of BlackRock, the world’s largest asset manager, put it this way in an open letter to corporate America in 2014: “Too many companies have cut capital expenditure and even increased debt to boost dividends and increase share buybacks.” (On Feb. 2, Fink chided CEOs for focusing on quarterly targets instead of long term investment.)
This trend of cash hoarding and debt financed investor payouts doesn’t just stymie growth; corporate debt can also create major risk in the markets. That’s an alarm that some of the savviest investors, like Carl Icahn, have been sounding for some time now. “The average investor [has ended up in risky debt markets], and he doesn’t know what he’s buying because he’s got a wealth-management guy telling him, Oh, here’s a good deal,” he says.
Usually, it’s not so easy for lower grade corporations to issue bonds and raise debt. But the Fed’s monetary policies (which themselves were a reaction to an absence of more fiscal stimulus or other solutions from a gridlocked Congress) left investors looking for bigger payoffs, including junk bonds and other risky assets. Indeed, there’s a good chance that your own retirement money could be in such risky securities, given that pension funds and many asset managers have piled into such investments en masse in recent years. A recent study by the American Federation of Teachers looked at 11 major pension funds with $638 billion in assets and found that about $43 billion of that money was in hedge funds and other sorts of funds that invest in riskier assets.”
I have no doubt in my mind that 2020’s will be boom years. It’s all lining up.
“Americans cut their personal debt by 3.5% from 2007 to 2014. Not all of it has been intentional–housing foreclosures wiped a lot of consumer debt off the books, and debt is now rising once again in some areas, like subprime auto loans and student loans. But on the whole, U.S. consumers are less in the red than they were pre-2008. Household balance sheets are much stronger.
Personal-savings rates have also remained higher than many economists would have predicted. That’s very unusual: normally, as soon as the prices of assets like stocks and homes begin to rise, people feel more secure, reduce their savings and start spending again. But in the wake of the Great Recession, something changed. Since 2012, U.S. net wealth increased by $20 trillion, thanks to gains in both stock markets and housing, but the personal-savings rate still hovers around 5%. That’s about double what it should be given such gains, according to research by JPMorgan.
The cause, say economists, could in part be America’s aging population, since people spend less as they get older. But it is also true that most of that stock and housing wealth is accruing to a small subset of the population. (The richest 20% of the population owns roughly 80% of all stocks.) “The surge in household net worth during the most recent expansion has not been accompanied by equally impressive gains in income or income expectations,” notes a December 2015 JPMORGAN report on the topic. That disconnect between income and the “wealth effect,” which in the past has been driving spending, goes a long way toward explaining why American consumers are much less willing to go into debt than they used to be.
Already, this has been a drag on the U.S. recovery, and it may be a permanent one. History shows that when consumers go through a seismic economic event, it changes their behavior over the long term–think about Depression-era grandparents who learned in the 1930s to save their used tea bags. They never changed. Now it may be that the financial crisis of 2008 and the recovery that followed have bred a new type of American consumer, one simply less willing to consume.”
Are you talking about the program used to steal money, I mean divert, from the teacher’s pension fund? Let’s not let this thievery of a program be used as basis for what they were paying in taxes. Their property tax is what it is, the price of taxes after the rebate program can not be used for your argument. That was a giveaway for votes on the backs of the teachers pension fund.
Ottoman says:
February 21, 2016 at 11:23 am
Of course missing from this discussion is the slashing of the homeowners tax rebate which, if included, would show property taxes actually went up more under Christie than during the bubble.
Same can be said for any place with a similar level of wealth and opportunity as nj.
Essex says:
February 21, 2016 at 11:08 am
8. Taxes are very high.
You know what is comical, the argument that private is better and more efficient. Guess who’s debt is more worrisome, corporate or public? You got it, corporate. These people suck! All about short term gains at the expense of long term. We prob wouldn’t have to wait till the 2020’s if they knew how to run a company. Greed is a bi!ch.
“Thanks to low interest rates, it has been cheaper for firms to borrow than to tap cash reserves. Companies spent more of this borrowed money on stock buybacks, dividend payouts and acquisitions than on wages.”
Hey dill weed, njpumkinreport.com is an available domain. Why not have at it?
I’m an introvert by nature. Guess, I’m better off going there and let you carry on discussions with no substance.
The Original NJ ExPat says:
February 21, 2016 at 12:24 pm
Hey dill weed, njpumkinreport.com is an available domain. Why not have at it?
Ottto. Before Christie I didn’t get a rebate and my property taxes went up 8% a year on average in Montclair. After Christie, about 3%. Still, with no rebate. I am not a big fan of the fat man, but the cap has made a dramatic difference.
I might not like it, but I have to agree with how both parties are playing this. You need to have balance in the court. Can’t have a biased supreme court, meaning all power to the conservative side, or all power to liberal side. Have balance, and let them fight it out among themselves. If you are a honest individual, you will vote with what’s right, now what your party is telling you to do.
leftwing says:
February 21, 2016 at 8:15 am
First.
LOL, you can slow cash disbursements by not paying your bills. Not that I disagree with it though…..
“Michael Darcy, executive director of the New Jersey League of Municipalities said the 2 percent spending cap enacted by Christie helped, **but reforms to public worker benefits….**”
[21] libturd.
Many decades ago, democrat Boss Tweed of Tamany Hall complained about the newspapers’ treatment of him. He was especially incensed about editorial cartoons, which are, by definition, designed to appeal to the low information voter.
He said (And I’m paraphrasing here) “I don’t mind what you write in the paper; my constituents can’t read. But they can see them damn pictures.”
Otto kind of reminds me of this whenever I read his stuff. I swear he gets all his information from editorial cartoons and Internet memes.
Yes, it’s about taking responsibility for your life, not making excuses.
“What makes you middle class? It starts with you.
Some of what determines the size of our middle class isn’t in my power or yours to change. We can’t fix politics, the employment outlook or the economy, except to vote for those who best represent our economic interests.
Yet many of the decisions that improve your odds of a good financial life are yours alone, and they are independent of the next election or the price of gasoline.
No one will step in to prevent you from taking actions that ultimately sabotage your financial security.
No one can make you buy the house you can afford rather than the house you want. No one can force you to contribute to your 401(k) or tuck $20 out of every paycheck into a savings account. No one can require that you shop around for car insurance or that you pay off the balance on your credit card every month.
But if you want to move up to, or stay in, the middle class, those are the kinds of decisions you’ll need to make. Every dime you put away is an act of faith that you can change your financial destiny. (A good example: “5 Ways to Build Your First $1 Million.”)
We’re here to help. I don’t believe the American Dream is the impossible dream, and neither should you.”
Are you middle class?
http://usat.ly/1TxUqSX
22. Pumps, my point on the article is that if you stiff someone (public pensions) out of $1.0B to $2.0B annually it’s a heck of a lot easier to keep taxes down.
Remember, government does no productive activity to create value (money). It simply redistributes by taking it (through taxes, fees, surcharges, lottery, etc) and giving it to a different constituent (schools, the poor, corporate tax breaks to not relocate, etc).
Smaller pension payment this year by a billion or two? Hey, honey, I shrunk the taxes!!
Damn it, I copied the wrong post. I really should proofread what I post. My post was expressing my opinion on this post. As much as I would want to put in a conservative supreme court to get rid of abbott funding, our society will suffer.
Here is the article I was focusing on. Sorry for the screw up. And I totally agree with your post about the govt below. That TIME article I talked about earlier spoke on this issue too, maybe I’ll try to type it up so you can read it. Focuses on the backwards tax breaks that do nothing to grow the economy.
leftwing says:
February 21, 2016 at 8:28 am
LOLOL. And pundits scratch their heads trying to figure out a blowhard buffoon like Trump has popular appeal while these shenanigans occur.
http://www.nj.com/opinion/index.ssf/2016/02/supreme_court_nominations_new_jersey_is_setting_a.html#incart_most-commented_politics_article
leftwing says:
February 21, 2016 at 5:57 pm
22. Pumps, my point on the article is that if you stiff someone (public pensions) out of $1.0B to $2.0B annually it’s a heck of a lot easier to keep taxes down.
Remember, government does no productive activity to create value (money). It simply redistributes by taking it (through taxes, fees, surcharges, lottery, etc) and giving it to a different constituent (schools, the poor, corporate tax breaks to not relocate, etc).
Smaller pension payment this year by a billion or two? Hey, honey, I shrunk the taxes!!
The article I have been typing up from TIME today is prob the best article I have read from them in a long time. It’s truly a fabulous read. Hope people on this blog actually read it and I didn’t waste my time typing it up.
“Why does our tax code reward borrowing so much? In large part because it’s a way to mitigate the pain of larger structural changes in the economy. Stagnating wages can’t fuel spending, so debt-fueled consumer finance becomes a saccharine substitute for the real thing, an addiction that just gets worse as it becomes less satisfying. India’s central banker Raghuram Rajan, a former University of Chicago economist and on the most prescient seers of the 2008 financial crisis, has argued that rising credit levels have become palliative to address the deeper anxieties of downward mobility in the middle class. As Rajan puts it, “Let them eat credit” has become our collective answer to globalization and technology-driven job displacement.
Yet the U.S.’s existing tax code rewards exactly the kind of behavior the economy doesn’t need. The rich can get second-mortgage tax credits on their yachts, for instance, provided they stay on them more than 14 days a year. (Congress tried and failed to close this loophole in 2014.) There are tax breaks for the use of personal-travel and corporate jets for “security reasons.” Tax dollars help underwrite federal flood insurance in some of the richest waterfront property areas in the country, a subsidy that mostly benefits wealthy landowners.
The most appalling fact: people make money from making money are taxes at lower rates than those who work for it. Income from labor is taxed at a much higher rate than investment income. Warren Buffett famously took this issue in 2011, noting that he paid a smaller share in taxes than his secretary since he made money from things like carried interest on investments, capital gains from selling stocks and so on. The next President needs to work with Congress to fix these pieces of the tax code.
He or she should also look closely at reducing corporate tax subsidies for debt and closing loopholes that allow corporations to write off compensation awarded in stock options, which as fueled the corporate borrowing boom and encouraged much of the destructive, short-term boardroom behavior.
But housing is where the real debt–and the potential solutions for it–lie. Consider the mortgage-interest deduction, which was the first put into effect in 1894, mostly as a way to help farms keep their family homesteads and make a decent living. Today it’s become a boon for the middle and upper classes. Anyone who buys a house (or two) can deduct the interest payments as long as the mortgage (for one or both) doesn’t add up to more than $1 million. That’s a lot of subsidy. Even if someone needed that much house, does it follow that taxpayers should help him or her afford it? One suspects that without the full home mortgage-interest deduction, some home prices might fall to where more unsubsidized folks might be able to buy them.
This is a crucial point: subsidized debt creates inflation in asset prices. That’s great for the wealthy, who own a lot of assets, and even better for their banks. But it’s a strain on the Treasury and not so good for poorer, more indebted people who can be hit very hard when bubbles burst, as they inevitably do. This system subsidizes the wealthy. Nearly 90% of the value of the mortgage-interest tax subsidy goes to households making more than $75,000 a year. But even more, it rewards the financial industry itself. Financial institutions are big beneficiaries of jumbo and superjumbo loans on home mortgages, just as they are of corporate bond deals. But they are also at risk of going under when those deals go bad.
Buffett once told me something quite relevant to our debt issues: ” If you can fix housing, you can fix the economy.” No wonder, then, that real estate has been at the epicenter of most financial crises over the past several decades. America still doesn’t have a well-functioning real estate market. Most of the real estate recovery has been enjoyed by the rich and by investors (private-equity firm Blackstone, the largest investor landlord in the country, bought up many properties during the crisis). Politicians and the financial lobby are pushing to privatize Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. Yet these sorts of government institutions still underwrite at least 80% of American mortgages, and it’s unclear how private institutions would guarantee home loans to the vast majority of people who can’t put 30% cash down on a home.
Policies that encourage people to take on more housing debt not only to drive asset prices up but also create more risk in the financial system, as the subprime crisis so painfully proved. Fixing that will require changing the way Americans think about housing policy and urban development. “The biggest source of wealth in the modern economy is location-specific urban land,” says Adair Turner, chairman of the Institute for New Economic Thinking and former financial regulator in the U.K. His new book, Between Debt and the Devil, makes a compelling case for why debt fueled real estate consumption is at the root of many economic problems.
Turner and others, like Nobel laureates Robert Shiller and Joseph Stiglitz, have laid out a variety of policy solutions that could help shift the dynamic, including urban-planning policies that encourage more regional development, flexible mortgage contracts in which loan payments are reduced when property prices drop and community-run housing developments that allow people to move between renting and owning as their circumstances change.
None of this will be easy, as there are deep-pocketed lobby groups that will fight to maintain the status quo. But moving from an economy fueled by debt to one powered by investment is necessary to move beyond the sluggish 2% growth of our current economy. Major financial crises happen about once every 20 years. That, at least, gives the next President some time to try to set things right before the next one hits.”
26- Actually proofread this post and just wanted to make sure it is clear. Our society (nj) will not suffer due to the elimination of Abbott funding, but I meant our society will suffer from having the supreme court being totally liberal or totally conservative. Just wanted to clear that up.
Pumpkin – succinctly stating something he knows to be true while verbosely blathering everything he doesn’t.
The Great Pumpkin says:
February 21, 2016 at 12:53 pm
I’m an introvert by nature.
[23] Nom – Re:Boss Tweed
The Original NJ ExPat says:
February 10, 2016 at 4:59 pm
The way to have power is to take it.
I don’t care who does the electing, so long as I get to do the nominating.
-Boss Tweed
or maybe by court order?
The Great Pumpkin says:
February 21, 2016 at 12:53 pm
I’m an introvert by nature.
Turner and others, like Nobel laureates Robert Shiller and Joseph Stiglitz, have laid out a variety of policy solutions that could help shift the dynamic, including urban-planning policies that encourage more regional development, flexible mortgage contracts in which loan payments are reduced when property prices drop and community-run housing developments that allow people to move between renting and owning as their circumstances change.
Ahhh Stiglitz…the same Nobel Laureate that claimed there is no danger in Greece defaulting.
No one is perfect, but he is a pretty intelligent guy.
Ben says:
February 21, 2016 at 7:56 pm
Turner and others, like Nobel laureates Robert Shiller and Joseph Stiglitz, have laid out a variety of policy solutions that could help shift the dynamic, including urban-planning policies that encourage more regional development, flexible mortgage contracts in which loan payments are reduced when property prices drop and community-run housing developments that allow people to move between renting and owning as their circumstances change.
Ahhh Stiglitz…the same Nobel Laureate that claimed there is no danger in Greece defaulting.
I’m taking the high road, you can attack me, but I will not do the same back. This board helped me learn a lot and grow tremendously in my philosophies. If you can help me to become a better writer, any advice/critiques would be great and appreciated. All you can do is keep striving for self-improvement and that’s why I hang around here.
The Original NJ ExPat says:
February 21, 2016 at 7:47 pm
Pumpkin – succinctly stating something he knows to be true while verbosely blathering everything he doesn’t.
The Great Pumpkin says:
February 21, 2016 at 12:53 pm
I’m an introvert by nature.
[31] expat
No, the court order just keeps him away from schools and playgrounds.
[5] not chi
Yes, disrespect begets disrespect. You are correct. And why should I respect a president who refers to me and those with similar views as “the enemy”?
War is a continuation of politics by other means. That is where a race to the bottom usually ends up.
How about go hang out someplace where people are working on their writing? College, maybe?
The Great Pumpkin says:
February 21, 2016 at 8:19 pm
I’m taking the high road, you can attack me, but I will not do the same back. This board helped me learn a lot and grow tremendously in my philosophies. If you can help me to become a better writer, any advice/critiques would be great and appreciated