Millionaire's tax veto should stand

Gov. Chris Christie did something entirely out of character last week. He blinked, in the face of the increasingly vocal opposition to $58 million in proposed cuts to prescription drug benefits for seniors and the disabled.

Will he blink again on the millionaire's tax, which both chambers of the Legislature approved Thursday and Christie, making good on his promise, promptly vetoed?

He won't and he shouldn't.

"We'll be back, governor," state Senate President Stephen Sweeney, D-Gloucester, promised before the ink was dry on the veto.

"We'll see," said Christie, seemingly secure in the knowledge that it takes a two-thirds vote of the Legislature to override it.

The vote on the millionaire's tax, which would increase the rate on income above $1 million from 8.97 percent to 10.75 percent — making it the third highest top rate in the nation — was strictly along party lines. It will take four Republican senators and seven GOP assemblymen to override the veto. It won't happen.

Christie's restoration of the prescription drug cuts, announced a day before the vote on the millionaire's tax, undercut one of the Democrats' two main arguments for reimposing a one-year tax surcharge on the state's wealthiest residents. And it was far and away its best argument. We were thrilled to see those cuts restored.

The Democrats will continue to push for the restoration of property tax rebates, which are eliminated under Christie's budget proposal, to 600,000 senior citizens and disabled residents.

We have long opposed property tax rebates, not because it isn't nice to get a check around election time every year, but because it is tax money being returned to us that shouldn't have been taken in the first place. And the bureaucracy needed to process the checks is expensive.

Nonetheless, the Democrats, who themselves passed on the opportunity to extend the millionaire's tax before Christie took office earlier this year, will continue to insist that his refusal to impose it shows he puts the interests of the rich ahead of those of the poor and middle class.

The tax fairness issue deserves a full airing in the Legislature. If it does, we believe the Republicans' arguments that taxing the wealthy, who already contribute a disproportionately high share of taxes in this state, will end up locating elsewhere, costing the treasury more than it stands to gain from confiscatory taxation.

Every effort should be made to assist those who need it the most. But New Jersey has spent beyond its means for years. It cannot continue to do so.

Christie has time and again invited the Democrats to find other cuts in the budget that would enable them to restore some of those he has made. To date, we have yet to hear any suggestions other than raising taxes on the rich.

"This is something we're not going away on," said Sweeney of the millionaire's tax. "This isn't theater, this isn't a gimmick."

That's debatable. What isn't is that the state is in a deep financial hole — one it will never dig its way out of by raising taxes — on the poor, the middle class or the rich.