Pallone Applauds Treasury Department Funds to Prevent Foreclosures and Stabilize NJ Housing Market

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
April 20, 2016


WASHINGTON, DC – Today, Congressman Frank Pallone, Jr. (NJ-06) applauded the allocation of more than $45 million through the Hardest Hit Fund to the state of New Jersey to help stabilize the housing market and prevent foreclosures. The Hardest Hit Fund was created in 2010 to provide targeted assistance to 18 states and the District of Columbia deemed hardest hit by the economic and housing market downturn. The resources will be given to the New Jersey Housing and Mortgage Finance Agency’s New Jersey HomeSaver Program, which offers counseling and financial assistance to bring down monthly mortgage payments or allow for refinancing.

In data released last year, New Jersey had the highest rate of Zombie foreclosures in the nation. Zombie foreclosures take place when homeowners vacate a residence prior to a bank repossessing the property. With the home unoccupied the property often falls into disrepair and becomes a targets for criminals, endangering home values throughout the neighborhood.

“I was proud to support the Hardest Hit Fund in Congress and am pleased that these funds are contributing to New Jersey’s economy recover,” said Pallone. “Thousands of New Jersey families suffered greatly during the great recession through no fault of their own and the Hardest Hit Fund will help ensure that more New Jerseyans can stay in their homes. A stable housing market is essential to the American Dream and we need to continue to work to make sure that home ownership is within reach for working families.”

The latest funding brings the Hardest Hit Fund total assistance to $9.6 billion for 18 states and the District of Columbia. New Jersey has received more than $400 million in total as part of the program. For more information on the latest round of HHF funding information please refer to the Treasury HHF page.

President Obama's Weekly Address 10/4/14: We Do Better When the Middle Class Does Better

WASHINGTON, DC — In this week’s address, the President highlighted that six years after the Great Recession, thanks to the hard work of the American people and the President’s policies, our economy has come back further and faster than any other nation on Earth. With 10.3 million private sector jobs added over 55 straight months, America’s businesses have extended the longest streak of private-sector job gains on record. But even with this progress, too many Americans have yet to feel the benefits. The President reiterated the vision he set out earlier this week for steps that can lay a new foundation for stronger growth, rising wages, and expanded economic opportunity for middle class families.

NJPP: What Recovery? Poverty in NJ Continues to Rise

As the rest of the country marches out of the Great Recession, New Jersey is almost alone in watching its condition worsen. While some gains have been made over the past several years, the "Jersey Comeback" announced years ago has stalled out, stunting the opportunities for the vast majority of working New Jerseyans.

That's the key finding in NJPP's new Issue Brief on the 2013 American Community Survey data released last week by the US Census Bureau.

The data clearly show that New Jersey still suffers from rising levels of deep poverty, increasing income inequality and a struggling economy even as these metrics are improving for most of the nation.

New Jersey saw the largest increase in poverty and child poverty in the nation in 2013, with the number of New Jerseyans living in poverty increasing by 63,606 and the number of New Jersey children living in poverty increasing by 21,707.

The Garden State was also one of only three states (along with New Mexico and Washington) to experience a rise in both the total number of residents in poverty and the poverty rate. Meanwhile, median household income is down, the middle class continues to shrink and income inequality continues to rise.

So what should New Jersey policymakers do?

To begin to turn the tide, New Jersey needs to start experiencing a robust and broadly shared economic recovery. The way to build a strong recovery is not simple, but it is clear that the strategies employed by New Jersey policymakers in the post-recession era - cutting taxes for businesses and the state's wealthiest residents while attempting to grow jobs with $4.6 billion in tax-incentive awards - are not working.

But lawmakers would also be well-advised to follow the creed of "first, do no harm" and do what they can to ensure the situation does not continue to worsen even more for those at the bottom. That includes policy solutions like restoring the Earned Income Tax Credit to its pre-2010 level, extending earned sick leave to all New Jersey workers and reversing the decision to end the "Heat and Eat" program, which has resulted in the loss of nutritional benefits to thousands of struggling New Jerseyans.

For a full list of recommendations, and to read the full Issue Brief, click here.

38 % Of N.J. Households Live In Poverty

I was asked about this the other day and couldn't believe it what I was hearing. N.J. is one of the wealthiest states in the country, how is it possible that 38% of our population (1.2 million households) fall below the poverty line? It's obvious that poverty affects more than just the stereotypical lazy, shiftless black or Latino welfare Kings and Queens. It affects many of our friends and neighbors as well!

From NJ.com:

...A new study conducted by the United Way of Northern New Jersey shows an alarming number of New Jersey residents are in Ticehurst’s position. Data compiled by the group show that 38 percent of New Jersey households are struggling to meet basic needs. These households are just scraping by, one lost job or medical emergency away from potential fiscal ruin.

The report, called ALICE (Asset Limited, Income Constrained, Employed), paints a stark picture of how widespread financial hardship like Ticehurst’s is in New Jersey.

While 11 percent of state residents fall below the Federal Poverty Line, which stands at an annual income of $22,811 for a family of four, the report found that when adjusted for cost of living the same family needs nearly triple that -- $61,200 – just to meet a basic survival budget.

In one of the wealthiest states in the country, 1.2 million households fall below this threshold. And while the state’s economy has shown signs of recovery in the wake of the Great Recession, the number of households struggling by the United Way measure increased by about 24 percent from 2007 to 2012, the most recent data available....

Read the full story

Chris Christie 2012 RNC: There is no ‘New Jersey comeback’

Before tuning in to  Governor Chris Christie's keynote address at the Republican National Convention, here is a little something that you should keep in while watching. 

The follow op-ed was written by State Senator Barbara Buono and appears online at Politico.com

By Barbara Buono

Many tennis buffs probably remember the early ‘90s Andre Agassi camera ads, with the slogan “Image is everything.”

It’s not hard to compare this to New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie, who has let it be known that he hopes to “change people’s image of our state” when he delivers the keynote address at the Republican National Convention in Tampa, Fla. If he can do that, he maintains, he’ll “have accomplished a heck of a lot.”

(Barbara Buono)

Unfortunately for New Jersey residents, image won’t address ballooning unemployment, an anemic economy and a stagnant revenue outlook.

Tuesday night, many Americans are due to get their first taste of the carefully constructed Christie image — a brash, tough-talking fiscal conservative who thinks his leadership, economic policies and tax cuts should serve as a model for the rest of the nation.

As always, he will be entertaining – he isn’t called “Gov. YouTube” for nothing. The problem is that this carefully constructed image is based on exaggerations, at best, and falsehoods, at worst.

Christie claims to have put New Jersey on a sound fiscal path — cutting spending, holding the line on property taxes, fighting off tax increases, investing in education and laying the foundation for the “Jersey Comeback.”

That is the image you can expect to see brandished on televisions Tuesday night.

Here is the reality:

New Jersey ranked 47th in economic growth in 2010 and 2011, and our economy shrink by 0.5 percent last year. There are 175,000 fewer jobs in New Jersey today than in December 2007, before the recession started. New Jersey lost 12,000 jobs in July alone, the highest job loss of any state in the nation.

Meanwhile, property taxes for the average New Jersey family were at a 20 percent net increase during his first two years in office, up from $6,244 to $7,519.

To be fair, Christie, like President Barack Obama and all the governors elected from 2008 to 2010, inherited an economy crippled by the Great Recession.

The question to ask however, is: What has Christie done as governor to fix it? And are his policies a model for “America’s Comeback Team,” as the presumed GOP nominee Mitt Romney seems to think? Or a prescription to avoid?

On taking office, Christie cut state aid for education by $1.1 billion, slashed property tax relief for senior citizens and cut government worker pensions — breaking campaign promises in all three cases, as The Star-Ledger, the state’s largest newspaper, recently reported.

In addition, Christie’s personal and political ideology has cost New Jersey billions of dollars in federal aid for education, transportation and women’s health funding.

It gets worse.

Poll after poll shows that New Jersey’s highest-in-the-nation property taxes are residents’ No. 1 concern. So what does Christie propose? Offering a 10 percent across-the-board income tax cut that would give millionaires a $7,625 break, while a family making $50,000 a year would save just $80.

Sound familiar?

To prove that New Jersey can afford a big tax cut, Christie put out a budget that projects that the state will take in 7.3 percent more revenue this fiscal year – a wildly optimistic figure that represents the nation’s highest anticipated growth rate.

When a highly-respected, veteran budget expert for the nonpartisan Office of Legislative Services questioned those numbers, Christie did what he always does: He went on YouTube and attacked Legislative Budget and Finance Officer David Rosen as the “Dr. Kevorkian of the numbers.”

Meanwhile, state tax collections came in below Christie’s rosy-colored predictions in March, April, May and July. We know the June numbers were down anywhere from $250 million to $540 million. But we can’t be sure how much because Christie is violating his own executive order on “fiscal transparency” by refusing to release the June numbers.

So far, unfortunately, it’s “Dr. Kevorkian” and not “Gov. YouTube” who has been right about the revenues. Being honest about the numbers would undermine the “Endless Summer” tour that Christie has embarked on to demand that New Jersey’s Democratic legislature approve an immediate tax cut that would disproportionately benefit the wealthiest – regardless of whether the state can afford it.

You won’t hear about any of this Tuesday night, when Christie joyously proclaims that his policies should serve as a model for the Mitt Romney-Paul Ryan ticket — and the nation.

But an interesting thing happened on the way to Tampa – Christie admitted there won’t be any mention of the “Jersey Comeback” in his keynote.

Perhaps he’s finally reached a moment of enlightenment? Perhaps, like Agassi, he’s finally realized that to truly achieve greatness, you have to let go of the notion that image is everything and accept reality.

Sincerely,


Barbara Buono
Senator, 18th Legislative District

The Dangers of the ‘Jersey Comeback’ Fantasy

July 16th, 2012  |  by Gordon MacInnes  |  Published in Editorials & Op-Eds, NJPP Blog: As a Matter of Fact ...

The Christie narrative goes like this: I inherited a Democratic-manufactured mess. I set to work to make tough choices, cut spending, reform pensions and reduce property tax burdens. It worked, so now it’s time to reward everyone with a cut in tax rates and to declare New Jersey the national model for fiscal integrity and effective bipartisanship. I call it the “New Jersey comeback.”

But the “comeback” is a slogan without substance or documentation. Instead, the evidence is overwhelming that New Jersey is still crawling out of the Great Recession:

• New Jersey’s jobless rate is fifth-highest in the country, down from 19th-highest when Gov. Chris Christie took office;

• In 2011, New Jersey was one of only six states with an economy that did not grow, ranking us 47th in the country;

• The rating agencies give New Jersey the third-lowest credit rating. It it weren’t for California and Illinois, we’d be dead last;

• The governor’s proposed budget included the largest spending increase and the most optimistic revenue forecast of any state. In just four months, the differences between forecast and actual tax collections have opened a gap in the 2013 budget of no less than $700 million (the administration’s hope) maybe as much as $1.5 billion (the Office of Legislative Services projection) and, possibly, $2 billion-plus (Moody’s warning); and

• More New Jersey families are sliding out of the middle class with almost 40 percent of households barely holding on.

This onslaught of bad news is not the stuff of partisan attacks or manipulation of a few negative numbers. The news comes from independent, trusted, dry statistical reports.
“Okay,” you say, “politicians are known to exaggerate and simplify, so what’s the big deal?”

The big deal is that the mythical “comeback” is being used to frame the agenda for New Jersey’s future, but it is an agenda that shrinks our future and blocks the path to restored prosperity.

Let’s be clear: The governor arrived just as the Great Recession hit New Jersey head-on. With Democratic support, he cut spending, passed pension and benefit reforms, imposed ceilings on property taxes and spoke out against gimmicks such as one-shot revenues and borrowing from our kids to pay this year’s bills. Then, he forgot his own sermon.

Like his predecessors, the governor finds it much easier to fall back on precisely the one-shot revenues and borrowing that put New Jersey in such a perilous state. His budget for 2013 is a replay of the practices he condemned and claimed to have conquered. In this, he is joined by the legislative majority, which accepted the Christie revenue projections.

The problem for New Jersey goes far beyond next year’s budget. “Comeback” deceives. It tells us that everything is pretty much taken care of and it’s time to invoke the panacea of tax cuts.

“Comeback” focuses our attention on the wrong problems and wrong solutions:

Distributing relatively small amounts to millions of households will not restore the state’s competitiveness or attract the kinds of jobs that made New Jersey a perennial leader in income and wealth.

“Comeback” ignores New Jersey’s strongest advantages. Talented, well-educated, enterprising people want to raise their families in pleasant, vibrant communities that enjoy good transit to New York in the north or Philadelphia in the south. And, that have excellent public schools. Instead of headlining the excellent performance of New Jersey’s students — second only to students in Massachusetts — the Christie administration has spent its time lambasting our schools, using the failure in the poorest neighborhood schools to condemn teachers in schools that are among the best in the nation.

“Comeback” and the tax-cut hysteria combine to divert attention from the economic and intellectual engines represented by New Jersey’s two great research universities, Princeton and Rutgers. While competitor states such as Maryland, Virginia, North Carolina and Texas have regularly invested in creating centers of research, engineering and innovation, New Jersey has stepped away and encouraged an “every-institution-on-its-own” mentality. The prospect of a modest bond issue for higher education this year is only a belated gesture — welcomed to be sure — at starting to play catch up.

“Comeback” pretends that all is well for most New Jersey families when, in fact, the proportion now struggling to provide bare necessities is growing dramatically. The recent theatrics around tax cuts dealt a cruel blow to poor working families with the governor’s veto of a bill to rescind the tax increase imposed on them alone just two years ago when he scaled back the earned income tax credit.

“Comeback?” We wish it were so.

If our leaders continue to blind us with unsupportable and fictional descriptions of New Jersey’s status and aim their policies at the wrong targets, we will continue to fall further behind.

This op-ed appeared in the July 15, 2012 edition of the Star-Ledger

Rush Holt:" Made in America" is Making A Comeback

Nearly two-thirds of Americans say that job creation should be Washington’s top priority. Yet the new majority in the House has spent months on phony debates that are more about gaining political advantage than about helping our economy.

The good news is that, even as Washington has taken its eye off the ball, manufacturers have shown a path toward an economic renewal. Although U.S. manufacturing was in decline during the run-up to the Great Recession, it has bounced back noticeably. Last year alone, manufacturers added 152,000 new jobs, and the sector has now seen 21 straight months of growth. Let’s not write any obituaries for manufacturing in our country or our state.

On Tuesday, I toured MICRO Stamping Corporation in Somerset, which employs about 250 New Jerseyans.

This month, I am visiting manufacturers across central New Jersey. These companies employ our neighbors in the manufacture of a wide range of products: everything from medical devices to specialty inks.

My hope is to hear ideas for concrete, actionable steps that Congress can take to build upon the recent resurgence in manufacturing and put more Americans back to work: things like supporting new infrastructure investment, closing tax loopholes for outsourcers, expanding science education, and providing businesses with incentives for new hiring. I hope you’ll share your ideas, too, either by sending an e-mail at holt.house.gov or calling me at 1-87-RUSH-HOLT.

America’s middle class was founded on the strength of our manufacturers. It’s time to rebuild that foundation and renew our manufacturing sector.

Sincerely,

Rush Holt
Member of Congress

On income taxes and job creation, history debunks GOP views

By Star-Ledger Editorial Board
Sunday, July 17, 2011

We’re used to politicians stretching the truth, but this is getting ridiculous. For months now, congressional Republicans have refused to support any debt ceiling and budget deal that would raise taxes on the wealthy because, these economic wizards tell us, the rich are “job creators.”

Tax increases would discourage these job genies from expanding their businesses. Unemployment, already at 9.2 percent (which says something about the job-creation myth, doesn’t it?), would get even worse, they insist. The problem with this economic philosophy? It’s garbage.

Even Warren Buffett, one of the richest men in the world, knows that: “The rich are always going to say, ‘Just give us more money and we’ll go out and spend more and then it will all trickle down to the rest of you.’ But that has not worked the last 10 years, and I hope the American public is catching on.”

The American public, it seems, is catching on, even if Republicans want to twist the truth about that, too. Speaker of the House John Boehner keeps insisting, “The American people don’t want us to raise taxes.” House Majority Leader Eric Cantor says, “This economy is ailing and we don’t believe, nor do the American people believe, raising taxes is the answer.”

Think again. Americans believe Congress should raise taxes on the wealthy.

A new Quinnipiac survey asked voters if they support a budget deal with only budget cuts or a blend of cuts and taxes on corporations and the rich. Only 25 percent said cuts only. Sixty-seven percent want cuts and a tax increase on the wealthy.

Republican leaders are not only misrepresenting what the American people want, they’re covering up Republican numbers, too. In a recent Gallup poll, only 26 percent of Republicans favored lowering the debt with cuts alone. In just about every poll — ABC News, Washington Post, Bloomberg, Reuters — Americans want spending cuts and they want the wealthy to pay a larger share.

But maybe the American people are wrong. Let’s check the history. Did giving the wealthy a break with the Bush tax cuts of 2001 and 2003 help create jobs? Uh, no. From the end of the 2000-01 recession, just when the first Bush tax cuts took effect, until the beginning of the Great Recession, the economy grew at a slower pace than in any postrecession recovery period since World War II. Pay, adjusted for inflation, fell. And it took 39 months to get the number of jobs back to where it was before the 2000-01 recession.

Despite the same promises of jobs, the economy limped along. And the additional tax cut in 2003 didn’t rev it up, either.

President Bill Clinton faced vociferous opposition to his 1993 budget plan, which raised the top tax rates from 31 percent to 39.6 percent. Republicans called it the “Kevorkian Plan.”

So, what happened? Unparalleled economic growth. The nation’s unemployment dropped from 6.9 percent to 4 percent. The deficit shrank, and in 1998, the federal government boasted a surplus for the first time since 1969.

It seems the economy can survive a tax hike on the wealthy after all. And the tax hike did wonders to reduce the deficit as well, as designed.

More evidence: During the 1950s and early 1960s, when America experienced sustained growth, marginal tax rates on the rich were the highest they’ve ever been — 91 percent for the top bracket. (Even President Ronald Reagan, the Republican economic poster boy, raised taxes after he cut them.)

But Republicans keep chanting the same nonsense — without offering historical evidence to back it up. Instead, they want to bring the nation to the brink of default while protecting corporations (who are sitting on billions in profits) and fat cats — while everyday Americans are squeezed by high gas and food prices, plunging home prices and lower wages.

Let’s call the job-creator stuff what it is: a myth.

Want to avoid another Depression? Try understanding the first one.

By Robert S. McElvaine -
the Washington Post /published July 10th,2011

“I have seen the future, and it works,” journalist Lincoln Steffens famously said of his 1919 visit to Bolshevik Russia. Guided by his economic faith, Steffens saw the future as he wanted it to be, not as it would be.

What excuse do we have when we follow people who, guided by a different economic faith, see the past as they want it to have been, not as it was? Today, under the influence of leaders blinded to facts by certain faith, we are careening toward a repetition of mistakes that led to catastrophe.

A CNN poll conducted in June found that almost half of Americans now think that another Great Depression is “very likely” or “somewhat likely” to occur within the next 12 months.

There is a genuine danger that the already weak economy could turn into a second coming of the hard times of the 1930s. The focus of many politicians today on cutting spending and avoiding tax increases on the wealthy is based on a misunderstanding of what led to and extended the Great Depression — and it is setting us up for a new collapse.

Most people realize that a failure to raise the debt ceiling could be catastrophic. But the drastic cuts in federal spending that some Republicans are demanding in exchange for an increase in the debt ceiling would be a repeat of the mistakes that prevented a full recovery in the 1930s and then caused a secondary collapse in 1937.

With the economy in a precarious position, slashing spending, concentrating ever more wealth and income at the top, and blocking effective regulation is a
prescription for disaster.

In fact, the first part of this prescription is very similar to one written by Dr. New Deal himself. Fearful of massive budget deficits, President Franklin Roosevelt cut back on spending as soon as his 1936 re-election was secured, plunging the economy into a renewed free fall that introduced the word “recession” into our lexicon so as to avoid calling the collapse a renewed depression.

Yet that is the course upon which a unified Republican Party is insisting. For their part, President Barack Obama and many Democrats have ceded the battlefield and are just trying to reduce the number of casualties.

Conservatives appear to be united behind a set of beliefs that are dangerously wrong. Theirs is a faith-based economics that contrasts with fact-based economics; their god is named the Market. Their economics is as immune to facts as its opposite, Marxism. Call it Marketism. A devout Marketist believes that the Market is always right and any government intervention is, well, sinful.

For more than two generations, the Great Depression discredited this religion. But beginning around 1980, with the election of Ronald Reagan, the Marketists staged a revival.

One of my students brilliantly, if accidentally, captured the essence of this economic fundamentalism in a journal entry a few years ago: “During his presidency, Reagan implemented sloppy-side economics.” It is that sloppy-side economics that conservatives have been pushing ever since, and the more it fails, the harder they push it.

During the Great Depression, Roosevelt called for “bold, persistent experimentation” and said: “It is common sense to take a method and try it; if it fails, admit it frankly and try another. But above all, try something.”

But the position of faithful Marketists, then and now, is this: Take their method and try it. If it fails, deny its failure and try it again, and again, and again. But above all, keep trying the same thing.

Since the beginning of the Obama administration, Republicans have been working unstintingly to misread the history of the Depression and implement policies similar to those that led to the collapses of 1929 and 2008. “One of the good things about reading history is you learn a good deal,” Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., declared early in 2009. “And we know for sure that the big spending programs of the New Deal did not work. In 1940, unemployment was still 15 percent. And it’s widely agreed among economists that what got us out of the doldrums that we were in during the Depression was the beginning of World War II.”

Well, yes — but that fact demonstrates just the opposite of what Marketist fundamentalists argue.

It is plain that the reason the New Deal failed to end the Depression is not that Roosevelt and Congress overspent, but that they underspent. The New Deal was not too reckless in its spending; it was too cautious. The war ended the Depression precisely because it obliged Roosevelt and Congress to spend greater and greater amounts without worrying about where the money was coming from.

The basic reason that the Obama administration has not yet ended the economic disaster it inherited is the same reason that prevented the New Deal from ending the Depression FDR inherited: It hasn’t spent enough. The 2009 stimulus staved off a
second Great Depression, but it should have been much larger to produce a genuine recovery. Subsequently, even with majorities in both houses, the Democrats let the GOP define the argument and failed to force through needed programs to get the economy back on its feet.

It has been the alleged “socialism” of the New Deal that has prevented another Depression for seven decades. While a market-based economy is clearly the best system, it carries serious risks. Government intervention minimizes those risks for businesses and for people — just a spoonful of “socialism” helps the capitalism go up.

“History doesn’t repeat itself, but it rhymes,” Mark Twain is said to have remarked. To the extent that our current history sounds like the 1930s, it is because of the lack of sense on the part of politicians. We know better than to slash spending and allow the rich to become even richer in a weak economy, but we’re set on doing it anyway.

If there is a new Great Depression, it won’t be without rhyme, but it will be without reason.

Robert S. McElvaine, a professor of history at Millsaps College, is the author of “The Great Depression: America, 1929-1941.”

The crisis of middle-class America

Hat Tip to Facebook friend Rocca Mazza for pointing out this article from the Financial Times "The crisis of middle-class America".

Rocca writes:

"Outstanding reporting published in the Financial Times on the crisis of middle class America. This is real, a must-read story. The story looks deeply into a few typical middle class families being financially suffocated by the economy with stagnated wages and increasing bills to pay. At some point, somethings got to give.

One family has an autistic son whose future they fear in such an uncertain landscape.

"....in the past few years the Freemans have been running low on optimism. 'I guess the penny dropped in the last 18 months when we finally realised that it’s always going to be like this – we are never going to be able to retire on our savings,' says Connie. 'As for Andy,' she says, referring to her painfully shy but acutely observant son, 'the future really frightens me. If you’re young, it’s bad enough nowadays. But for a kid with autism?'"

This story also illustrates that while the wealthy become wealthier the poor are becoming poorer: ".....the annual incomes of the bottom 90..."

Here is a video link that accompanied the article, it is well worth the watch.