the staff of the Ridgewood blog
Trenton NJ, “Increasing the tax on gas and diesel by 4.3¢ a gallon is simply too much, too fast. While we understand and are accepting of the need for some type of increase in order to keep the Transportation Trust Fund solvent, this dramatic of a tax increase will hurt small businesses, families, and ultimately drive fuel sales even lower, creating the need for further excessive tax increases over the next several years” said NJGCA Executive Director Sal Risalvato.
Risalvato continued, “The reason why there has been such a dramatic drop in the number of gallons sold in the last two years is due almost entirely to the large increase from the November 2016 gas tax increase. Station owners near the borders and in the corridor counties have seen dramatic decreases in business as out-of-state motorists who used to make a point of stopping at NJ stations now no longer bother. This increase will virtually wipe out our advantage. The gap between NJ and NY is cut in half to just 4¢ a gallon. The tax situation with diesel is even worse. Our rate will now be higher than New York and Connecticut, and trucks fueling up in Delaware will now save a whopping 26.5¢ a gallon. Furthermore, stations in other states are not mandated to pay someone to pump all the gas they sell; a cost which NJ station owners are forced by law to pass on to their customers. New Jersey is now unable to compete with New York.”
NJGCA Associate Director Eric Blomgren stated “We feel confident that the State could have fully met its funding plan and eliminated this shortfall with a more reasonable, phased-in increase of about one cent per year for the next six years. Doing so would have better protected our competitive position and been easier for business and motorists to absorb. While we met with Treasury officials to provide them this option, and while we are still confident that the Treasurer has the legal discretion to phase-in this increase, we are disappointed they have decided to go in a different direction.”
The New Jersey Gasoline, Convenience Store, Automotive Association (NJGCA) is an eighty year old nonprofit trade association which represents nearly one thousand independent small businesses across the state.
1-NY’s gas tax is still higher than the tax in NJ
2-Here is an explanation of the reason for the increase: ‘In its announcement Thursday, the Treasury Department said the gas tax missed its revenue target by $43 million in the 2017 fiscal year.
Then, last August, rather than bumping up the gas tax for the coming year, the Christie administration ambitiously projected fuel consumption would grow 2 percent over the historical norm, according to the department. That led to an even larger, $125 million shortfall.
The department estimated that the cost of not increasing the rate in August 2017 contributed an additional 1.7 cents to the current rate hike. In other words, the gas tax would have stayed closer to 40 cents come October had the Christie administration acted sooner, it said.”
absent the laws of “supply and demand ” it make sense
Chasing the ogre of increasing pension benefits and other costs by continually raising taxes is a losing battle. Until NJ establishes realistic salary grids for newly hired public employees, and modifies work rules to make infrastructure build and repair and more economic and competitive, no amount of tax increases will satisfy the monster that the state’s public unions have become.