ROI-NJ: ‘Other states are taking notice of N.J.’s lousy business climate and are trying to pilfer our businesses and jobs’

By BettyLou DeCroce and Patrick Delle Cava

New Jersey Assemblyman John McKeon (D-West Orange), chair of the Financial Institutions Committee, recently proposed a financial transaction tax that will kill jobs and revenue across New Jersey and test the state’s ability to overcome its history of bad economic decisions.

This new tax proposal comes despite the latest fiscal year 2021 economic analysis by the Tax Foundation, which shows New Jersey once again has the worst business tax climate in the nation.

Common sense would dictate that being last in a financial indicator that influences where business executives invest their money would be alarming enough to require action to cut taxes, not create new ones.

Other states are taking notice of New Jersey’s lousy business climate and are trying to pilfer our businesses and jobs. They realize that there is a limit to how many taxes, fees, surcharges and penalties one state can heap on its job producers before the cumulative weight of all that wealth redistribution forces businesses to go elsewhere.

The financial transaction tax would affect any firm processing 10,000 or more financial transactions a year using electronic infrastructure in the state. The firms would pay a tax of a quarter-cent on every transaction they handle, including stocks, options, futures and derivatives trades.

That doesn’t sound like much of a tax hit, until you consider that the New York Stock Exchange’s Mahwah data center handles more than a billion trades of shares on a typical day, according to the Wall Street Journal. And that’s just one of many data centers in the state.

Read the full op-ed here.