Activists protested budget cuts proposed by New Jersey Governor Chris Christie May 22 outside the statehouse in Trenton. There were 35,000 people in attendance.
Ethan Ellis, President of Next Step, said he is most concerned about a pay cut of $2 per hour for personal assistance services, cuts to state education and other measures that he says will disproportionately impact people with low incomes. He said increases in public transit fares will make travel to work, school and doctors’ appointments more burdensome.
“Governor Christie is plugging New Jersey budget gaps with increased fees and cuts in services at the expense of the poor and near poor, while extending tax breaks to his rich friends,” Ellis said.
“While we may not like to admit it, most people with disabilities are poor, averaging less than $18,000 a year. We’ll by hurt by his budget as much or more than anyone else who’s poor.”
Although the Fiscal Year 2011 budget has not been signed yet, some cuts have already been made.
Ellis said the educational cuts, which consist of withholding $475 million in funding for public schools, will impact students in special education and standard educational programs, and the impacts will “fall most heavily on the communities where most poor people live and where most kids with disabilities also live.”
Ellis estimated that the personal assistance wage cuts will impact 30,000 people with disabilities, including seniors.
“These will hurt them by making competent help harder to find. Some will lie in bed all day without food or medicine and some will die because of Christie’s enforced neglect, but the dedicated people who do serve them will become poorer, too, working at close to the minimum wage with no health care or other benefits,” Ellis said.
In his remarks to the New Jersey Legislature when he announced the budget cuts, Christie said, “Today, we are taking necessary and decisive action to reduce state spending and reform state government. The problems we have hidden for twenty years are evident for all to see. The day of reckoning has arrived.”
“The distance between New Jersey's projected revenues for next year and the state's spending obligations under current law, if nothing is changed, is $10.7 billion. As a percentage of the prior fiscal year's $29 billion budget, it is a massive deficit - the largest deficit of any state in America, and the largest in our own history - by far.”
He continued, “The watchwords of this budget are shared sacrifice and fairness. Individuals contribute, businesses sacrifice, local governments tighten their belts, and we end our addiction to spending.”
This article was published in the September 2010 issue of Able News.
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