>Sports costs are a flea on the property tax elephant.
Bill
It is not the quest for sports fame that is driving taxes up. The drivers of our property taxes are less or level state revenue while the costs continue to grow. Property taxes are the only place to get the money. The majority of the school budget goes to pay teachers, the health benefits and pensions (which are underfunded).
Sports costs are a flea on the elephant.
“The problem is magnified in states where officials skipped billions of dollars of contributions.
New Jersey Governor Chris Christie, 48, a Republican who took office in January, withheld $3.1 billion of payments in his first budget to cope with a record $10.7 billion deficit. Since 2004, the state has made only $2.7 billion of the $11.9 billion in scheduled contributions, according to bond-sale documents.
New Jersey’s $68 billion retirement system had a funded ratio of 66.1 percent in the Bloomberg data, the 11th-lowest. The state in August settled Securities and Exchange Commission claims that it failed to disclose the extent of its underfunding in documents for $26 billion in bond sales from 2001 to 2007.
Benefit payments are projected at 11.4 percent of available pension assets during this budget year, even after a 14 percent investment gain in the fiscal period that ended June 30, New Jersey records show.
Teachers Pension
Payouts by the New Jersey Teachers Pension and Annuity Fund, which serves about 236,000 working and retired educators, grew to $2.8 billion from $1 billion in the 10 years through 2009, an average annual increase of about 10.4 percent, its yearly reports show. Over the period, holdings returned an annualized 2.3 percent, according to the state”
Also
“New Jersey’s 31 Abbott districts received 59 percent, or $4.5 billion, of state education aid to schools in the current fiscal year, up from 36 percent in 1988, Christie said. Per- pupil spending in those districts averaged $16,138, compared to $2,895 in the other districts, which number about 550.
“We are paying for the failed legal theory of a bunch of lawyers in black robes,” he said yesterday.”
also www.njslom.org
