New Jersey municipalities and small businesses have received almost $14 billion so far in federal funds to help cope with the coronavirus pandemic

the staff of the Ridgewood blog

Trenton NJ,President Donald Trump, who announced guidelines Thursday for states to start opening their economies, cited a handful of states taking steps toward a “safe, gradual and phased opening,” including Texas, Vermont and Ohio. He is pushing to relax the U.S. lockdown by May 1, a plan that hinges partly on more coronavirus testing. Governors in Georgia, Tennessee and South Carolina have announced plans to ease their coronavirus lockdowns.

Meanwhile New Jersey continues to deprive most residents of earning a living and thereby depriving itself of much needed tax revenue . NJ lawmakers has started talking about dealing with the economic fallout from record unemployment and the loss of tax revenue. The Murphy administration has already frozen $1 billion in spending in the current fiscal year.

Murphy has already suggested the state may need to borrow as much as $9 billion to cover operating expenses. New Jersey, its municipalities and its small businesses have received almost $14 billion so far in federal funds to help cope with the coronavirus pandemic, along with almost a thousand ventilators and close to 700,000 surgical masks, the Trump administration disclosed.

The numbers were released Friday at a time when Gov. Phil Murphy has criticized Trump administration restrictions on $1.8 billion in federal aid and has joined other governors in calling for more money from Washington.

NJGOP Chairman Doug Steinhardt released the following statement in response to Governor Murphy pointing fingers at the federal government for New Jersey’s poor economic outlook:

“The NJGOP joins Governor Phil Murphy in seeking the dollars New Jersey needs to recover from the COVID19 crisis. New Jersey businesses and families are struggling in one of the hardest hit states in the country, and we are facing some hard truths as a result.

“There is no truth, however, in the Governor’s attempts to lay blame for the consequences of the State’s economic crisis at the feet of the federal government. If it happens that New Jersey is forced to lay-off teachers, cops, firefighters and paramedics, the very people who are on the front lines fighting this pandemic, those consequences were facilitated over decades by a Democrat controlled legislature and for the last two and half years by a Governor whose spending was unrestrained.
“New Jerseyans have been paying more than their fair share of taxes for a long time, and it’s right that those dollars come back home. But, they need to be used responsibly, to prop up failing businesses and hungry families, not to justify or prop up a bloated spending system that was broken long before the COVID19 crisis came along and exposed it.”