- Hi, everyone.

Steve Adubato.

Way more importantly, we are honored to once again be joined by the honorable State Assemblywoman Eliana Pintor Marin, who is the chair of the State Assembly Budget Committee.

Assemblywoman, great to have you with us.

- Thank you for having me, Steve.

- Right outta the box, let's talk about this.

We're taping this toward the back end of July 2023.

Two great things from your perspective about the Murphy budget that was approved by the state legislature, both houses, please.

- Listen, the all time, once again consecutive full payment of the pension and more school aid.

- Okay, now, I know you're not gonna say this, but I have to ask you.

The Murphy budget, the state budget under Governor Murphy has gone up exponentially, dramatically.

It's incredible and record-setting.

A good thing?

- Look, there's always yes and nos to everything, right?

Especially when you talk, you know, about budgets, it's not that clear.

You know, we've been very lucky, very fortunate and had a large surplus.

We've also been able to, whatever money that we've been really receiving, put out a lot of money when you talk about property tax relief, school funding, the pension payment.

I mean, you name it.

So a lot of what we've received, we've been able to put out, and that's really been very helpful in the economy overall for the state of New Jersey.

- One of your colleagues in the Senate who knows a lot about fiscal issues, Declan O'Scanlon, Senator O'Scanlon has said, "This is an irresponsible budget for many reasons, but one of them is it anticipates money that's no longer coming in, that the federal government will no longer be sending to New Jersey COVID money and that the budget is just too big to sustain, spending too much, and we should be more fiscally prudent."

You say?

- So I think we have been fiscally prudent.

That's why we've been able to spend what we have.

That's why we've been able to put forth, you know, some of the tax relief that we've talked about, some of the K to 12 funding that we've been wanting to do for so many years, right?

And really, we've, the last year, had really tapped into that structural deficit, right, in trying to fix some of it.

These are issues that prolonged, you know, under many different administrations, right?

It's not to blame one over the other, but during the last administration when you cut to the bare bones, the economy just can't run if you're not putting money back in.

- Can we talk about Stay NJ, the Stay NJ initiative advocated by your colleague, Speaker Coughlin, Assembly Speaker Craig Coughlin?

Governor originally not for it.

Then whatever compromise took place.

Who really knows what goes on behind closed doors in Trenton?

There's an agreement.

Here's the question.

If in fact the Stay NJ program is a tax credit program for people who earn less than a $500,000 a year, correct?

- Yes.

- It goes up to $6,500 a year to help reduce your overall property tax burden.

If it's such a great idea, why the heck are we waiting till January, 2026 to implement it?

- So there is an implementation issue, Steve.

All the current programs that we do have, they're based on different tax years.

They're based on a different threshold of how much you make.

So in order to have treasury... Oh, and the other issue is two-thirds of the municipalities do not have live tax data, right?

So the state receives it after the fact.

So there is some implementation time in helping the municipalities get live data and then transmit that to the state.

And then the application process, right?

That's why there's a panel set up in order to coordinate the dates because if you're doing the senior tax freeze, you're doing it based on one date.

If you're doing the Homestead rebate, which is now the ANCHOR program, you're doing that on another tax date.

So it's really to have a coordination of benefits.

- But the bill will come due for the next governor and that administration, to be clear, because Governor Murphy will no longer be in office by then.

Correct?

- Correct, and that's why we've been trying to put money away.

We have been putting money away.

- We've had you on so many times in the past, and one of the issues we have talked about, Assemblywoman, and I want you to touch on this again, our Reimagine Child Care initiative.

The graphic will come up right now.

In the Murphy budget, what exactly is the status of the so-called Child Tax Credit?

What is it?

Why does it matter?

Please.

- So the tax credit is if you are making a certain amount of money and there's the threshold, then you receive a credit based on that and how much your child care is for.

So there's an offset there.

Does it help 100%?

No.

To be quite honest with you, Steve, I do budget, but I'm not the sole one that's in charge of this.

I think you know that from my perspective, we should've put in a lot more.

And we can always criticize everything, right?

There's never enough to go around.

But that is super important because without the Child Tax Credit, you cannot have moms or working families go to work and pay their bills.

- Hmm.

One more quick follow up on economics.

Your former colleague, the former State Senate President Steve Sweeney has an institute down at the Sweeney Institute at Rowan University.

He has argued that there's a, "Looming fiscal crisis, that we are about to fall off the fiscal cliff."

Hyperbole or reality?

- I think it depends on where the economy goes in the next year and a half to two years.

- Meaning what?

Help us understand that.

- Meaning because we've been fortunate.

Our unemployment rate is still down.

I mean, you go to any downtown area, especially mine, there's a help wanted signed on every window pretty much.

- Right.

- There's more need for different types of workers, not just highly educated, but just all thresholds of workers.

And I think that we've seen a slight adjustment in the inflation, a slight steady.

But if there's a real downturn, meaning that if people stop working, I think we're gonna be in trouble.

- State Assemblywoman Eliana Pintor Marin, not just representing the 29th Legislative District, but the chair of the Assembly Budget Committee, an incredibly important and some would argued the most powerful committee in the lower house or the upper house because it involves real money.

Assemblywoman, thank you so much for joining us once again.

- Thank you for having me, Steve.

- You got it.

Stay with us, we'll be right back.

- [Narrator] Think Tank with Steve Adubato has been a production of the Caucus Educational Corporation.

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