Gottheimer Announces His Plan to Lower Property Taxes by Nearly 15 percent
Rental Rebates, Incentives for Seniors
Family Income Tax Cut for Middle Class
Tax Cut for Families & Businesses Moving to Jersey
Plan Fully Paid For
PARK RIDGE, NJ — Today, at PIM Brands, Inc, Congressman Josh Gottheimer, Democratic candidate for New Jersey Governor, unveiled his “Tax Cut Plan” to lower taxes for Jersey families. During his speech, Josh highlighted how expensive New Jersey has become and outlined his strategies to cut taxes and lower costs. Josh’s plan will cut property taxes by nearly 15 percent, give renters an annual tax rebate, cut income taxes for families and seniors, and incentivize businesses and families to move to Jersey. And it’s fully paid for.
“We must make Jersey more affordable, and when I’m Governor, we will.
Cutting taxes and cutting costs will be my number one most urgent priority – I will be the ‘Lower Taxes, Lower Costs’ Governor.
I will lower costs and lower taxes by cutting property taxes, providing a rebate to renters, an income tax cut for middle class families and giving extra help to seniors. I am a problem solver. Taxes are killing families. I will take that problem on, lower taxes, and make Jersey more affordable.”
“As Governor, I will lower your taxes, run government more efficiently, and make life more affordable. We don’t need higher taxes to pay for more government spending: We need lower taxes, higher growth, and better, smarter government spending,” said Josh Gottheimer. “I’m not new to this — since the first day I ran for Congress back in 2016, my lawn signs have said ‘Lower Taxes. Jersey Values’ — just like they do today in this campaign. And I’ve got a record these last years in Washington of taking on costs and taxes. That’s what I’ll do as your Governor.”
Now, I know that there are skeptics out there — the political class that says we can’t make Jersey more affordable. They’ve given up — thrown up their hands and say that it’s impossible. I couldn’t disagree more. I’m a problem solver. I never have and never will give up on Jersey. We have an affordability problem and I will take it on. And I’m the only candidate for Governor with a plan to do this — a plan to deliver for Jersey families and improve the services we depend on.
“I’ve always been a problem solver, taking on challenges others said were impossible — and solving them, whether that passing historic gun safety legislation, the largest investment to beat climate change, or the Bipartisan Infrastructure Bill, which is now fixing our roads, bridges, and the Gateway Train Tunnel.”
Josh’s full Tax Cut Plan is available HERE and the main points are summarized below. HERE is a link to the speech.
Cut Property Taxes by 15%
- New Jersey has the highest property taxes in the nation. As Governor, Josh will cut property taxes for everyone by nearly 15%. This will save homeowners thousands of dollars a year and help families move to and stay in Jersey.
Deliver Rent Rebates
- It’s not just homeowners who can’t afford the cost of housing, it’s also renters. The cost of rent in New Jersey is up 33% over the last five years for the 1.2 million Jersey families that don’t own their own homes.
- Josh will give every renter a $500 annual rebate. This will help those just entering the workforce, families who can’t afford to buy, and seniors looking to downsize.
“Family Income Tax Cuts” for Middle Class Families with Extra Help for Seniors to “Retire in Jersey”
- Josh will also implement a new “Family Tax Credit” for every Jersey middle class family with kids or senior parents they’re taking care of.
- Josh’s Tax Cut Plan also includes extra help for seniors with a new “Retire in Jersey” incentive. For those who turn 70, and have lived in Jersey for at least a decade, you’ll get a $1,000 credit on your state income tax return.
Incentives to Attract Jobs and Families to Jersey — Growing our State
- To grow our population and economy, we need to get new families and jobs to move to Jersey.
- Josh will also make Jersey the first “property tax neutral” state in the nation, taking high taxes off the table in relocation decisions. If you move here, his “Move to Jersey” program will let you continue to pay the same property tax at the same rate you paid in the state you left for five years.
- Josh will create a “New Job Business Tax Credit” for every job created in New Jersey. If your company moves new jobs to Jersey, it will get a tax credit of $5,000 per new job created.
It’s All Paid For
- Josh’s Tax Cut Plan is fiscally responsible and fully paid for, and takes account of our structural deficits.
- His effort is all about making government better, providing better services, and operating with higher efficiency. Following models from other states, he’ll achieve 5% savings by making things run better.
- Josh will stop letting New York rob us blind, especially when it comes to tax revenue. By going after New York’s claim to our state’s tax revenue, he can save Jersey taxpayers about $1.4 billion.
- Josh plans to claw back more money from the federal government to New Jersey. Right now, Jersey is only getting back 75 cents for every dollar we send to Washington. Fighting for what’s ours will save hundreds of millions per year.
- Finally, Josh believes in lower taxes—but hates tax cheats. He’ll go after tax cheats who are currently shirking their taxes and make them pay what they owe.
In the coming weeks, Josh will present his plans to cut other costs, like child care, food, and utilities. To watch Josh’s full remarks on his Tax Cut Plan, click HERE. For more details on Josh’s Tax Cut Plan, please visit Josh4Jersey.com.
CONGRESSMAN JOSH GOTTHEIMER
REMARKS ON TAX CUT PLAN, AS DRAFTED
PARK RIDGE, NJ
January 22, 2025
Thanks to PIM, a great Jersey company, for having us here today. Thanks to the 1,200 workers PIM employs in our great state, including the three hundred you’ve added in just the last couple years, as you’ve continued to expand. One thing Michael has told me over and over: I want to keep growing in Jersey, I love it here, but it’s expensive — not just for his business, but for his many of his factory workers and other employees. They just can’t afford the taxes, their rent and housing, child care, and utility bills.
Unfortunately, that’s not the first time I’ve heard that concern over the years — and, it’s only gotten louder. Since November, after announcing my candidacy for Governor, I’ve visited with families in diners in nearly all 21 counties in our great state. And almost to a person, I’ve heard the same thing in booth after booth: I love New Jersey, but it’s just too damn expensive. I just can’t afford it. Can you help?
To the moms and dads, grandmas and grandpas, and young people I’ve met — and to the rest of the folks across our great state — the answer is a resounding yes. Help is on the way. We must make Jersey more affordable, and when I’m Governor, we will.
Cutting taxes and cutting costs will be my number one most urgent priority – I will be the “Lower Taxes, Lower Costs” Governor.
I will lower costs and lower taxes by cutting property taxes, providing a rebate to renters, an income tax cut for middle class families and giving extra help to seniors. I am a problem solver. Taxes are killing families. I will take that problem on, lower taxes, and make Jersey more affordable. I will do this not just because our families deserve and need it, but because it’s also the key to our state’s long term success — to our job and economic growth, to our ability to invest in Jersey, and to provide the best services to our families. It’s just common sense.
Because, here’s the reality: If we don’t make life more affordable for our families, recent grads, and seniors, for our workforce, and for our job creators, we will keep losing our people, our jobs, taxpayers, and tax dollars. In fact, between 2022 and 2023, our state lost nearly 500,000 people. The data just out
this month calls us the number one out-migration state in the country — for the seventh year in a row. We keep bleeding out people and jobs. Why? Because the taxes are so high! I mean even “Taxachusetts” has lower taxes than Jersey. It’s outrageous.
To boot, over the last decade, we lost a third of our public companies. These are good paying jobs. And when they leave, we lose the tax dollars to invest in our schools and roads, in child care and in school meals. That’s a devastating long term formula, and I am going to change it.
We have the highest property taxes in the country — and some of the highest income taxes. In Monmouth County, as of 2023, the average property tax was $10,590, in Bergen it was $12,856, in Essex it was $13,448, and in Middlesex it was $9,058. And when you add to that all the other costs, from rent to health insurance, to utility bills and food, to auto insurance and child care, which, by the way, is the second highest in the country, you can understand why people feel like they’re getting crushed. And it’s why they’re leaving.
And as I hear too often, business owners don’t want to move to Jersey, or start a business here, because we have the highest business taxes in the nation, and a notorious bureaucracy that makes it tough for them to operate, grow, and create jobs.
Yet, even as we’re losing people and jobs, our state budget is up 46 percent since Fiscal Year 2019 – and it’s continuing to grow. Do you feel like you’re getting 46 percent more value for what you pay in taxes? We can change this. As Governor, I will lower your taxes, run government more efficiently, and make life more affordable. We don’t need higher taxes to pay for more government spending: We need lower taxes, higher growth, and better, smarter government spending.
Today, I’ll be laying out my “Tax Cut Plan” for Jersey, including steps I’ll take as Governor to lower your property taxes and rent, cut income taxes for middle class families, lower taxes for our seniors, and attract more jobs, and, importantly, how I’ll pay for it. I’ll be announcing my “Cost-Cutting Plan” in a few weeks, which will take on issues like child care and utility prices. Everything in my “Tax Cut Plan” is paid for, with room to deal with our state’s structural deficit and the ability to continue making our pension payments.
First, as Governor, I will cut property taxes across the board by nearly 15 percent. That will save homeowners thousands of dollars a year and help families move to, and stay, in Jersey.
And, it’s not just homeowners who can’t afford the cost of housing, it’s also renters. The cost of renting in New Jersey is up 33 percent over the last five years for the 1.2 million Jersey families that don’t own their own homes. I want to make sure that the cost of putting a roof over your family’s head comes down for every New Jersey family. That’s why, for all of those renters, as part of my “Tax Cut Plan,” I’m also announcing a new $500 a year renter rebate. This will especially help those just entering the workforce, families who can’t afford to buy, and seniors looking to downsize.
To get housing prices down, we need to build more housing that’s affordable. We just haven’t built enough to keep up with demand, and that impacts prices and our ability to grow. That includes starter and workforce housing for recent grads and younger buyers and senior housing for retirees, and for those whose kids have left the house. When demand outstrips supply, the costs go up — and that’s exactly where we are right now. Jersey needs to add more than 200,000 housing units to fix our current shortage, and I’ll work to cut red tape that gets in the way of building more homes — especially those near mass transit and in abandoned office parks.
We also need to grow our state. We can’t keep losing people and jobs — and the stats I mentioned before are killing us and our tax revenue. If we grow, we’ll have more resources to invest in our state. We grow our economy in two ways.
We need to actually get new families and jobs to move to Jersey. But, with the highest property taxes in the nation, and high income taxes and reams of red tape, that can be a hard sell. We’ll still need to do more.
So, that’s why, as part of my “Tax Cut Plan,” I’m announcing new incentives for families and businesses to come to Jersey and help reboot our state. If you move to Jersey and stay here, we’ll match your property tax rates from where you came from with my “Move to Jersey” Tax Credit.
So, if you’re paying 0.91% to live in Florida, we will match it. That’s right. New Jersey will become the first “property-tax neutral” state in the country. Simply put, if you move here, you can buy a house and pay the same property tax at the same rate you paid in the state you left. For the average American moving here from lower-tax states — and that’s a lot of the other states — that will mean a savings of around $5,000 for the first year you’re here. It will phase out over 5 years, so you get five years worth of property tax savings.
As Part of my “Tax Cut Plan,” I’ll also implement a new “Family Income Tax Credit” for every Jersey middle class family with kids or senior parents they’re taking care of. That will help ease the burden on their income taxes. As part of this, we will cut income taxes for families in the lowest bracket basically in half. For those up to the median New Jersey income, we will cut income taxes by roughly one-quarter. And every New Jersey family with children or elders to support, regardless of income, will see their taxes go down.
My Tax Cut Plan also includes extra help for seniors with a new “Retire in Jersey” incentive. For those who turn 70, and have lived in Jersey for at least a decade, you’ll get a $1,000 credit on your state income taxes. I’m hoping that will help you afford to stay in Jersey and not move to North Carolina or Florida or, God forbid, New York.
By bringing in new residents and keeping our older ones here, these tax incentives help to pay for themselves. For instance, every person from Pennsylvania or New York or Delaware — or even lower-tax states like Hawai’i — who qualifies for my “Move to Jersey” credit will wind up paying as much in income taxes as what we give up in direct property tax revenue. So, the credit basically funds itself. That’s not counting the sales tax, support for our restaurants and businesses, and other revenue we derive from them being here.
We also need to get more good paying jobs here for families — we can’t afford to keep losing jobs. I’ll be doing a more in-depth discussion of jobs and economic growth in the coming weeks. But, let me give you the coming attractions.
To attract more businesses to move and hire here, we will be giving a “New Job Business Tax Credit” to businesses for each job they bring to the state — not moving from one part of our state to another, as some of these programs have done. But, new jobs from elsewhere: New York, Pennsylvania, Connecticut, you name it.
We need to go after those jobs. I’ll be going door-to-door around the country, making the strong case of why those jobs should move here – whether they are a life sciences company, a tech startup, or in financial or high-skilled manufacturing. After all, we have the best educated workers and the perfect location. We also have people commuting to Philadelphia and New York City every day and they’d rather work locally, be home for their kid’s game and family dinner, and avoid the Congestion Tax and the misery of tolls and traffic. I will encourage every Philadelphia and New York business with Jersey employees to open a satellite office here – and every innovator to start their business here.
Now, if you’re saying to yourself, this is great Josh – but how do you pay for all of it – that’s exactly the right question to ask. And, as I mentioned above, I’ve spent a bunch of time on just that question — you can find my detailed plan at josh4jersey.com. In the meantime, let me give you some highlights — and you’ll see that it’s very doable. This is a problem we can solve if we actually put our mind to it. And let me be clear again, this is a fiscally responsible plan — everything is paid for. So, here’s how we pay for it:
First, we can’t keep letting New York rob us blind, especially when it comes to tax revenue. We are leaving nearly a billion-and-a-half dollars a year on the table for folks from New York who work in Jersey and vice versa — and we just don’t go after the tax revenue. If you work from home in New Jersey and your main office is in New York, the New York taxman lays claim on all of your income tax. Jersey doesn’t get a penny, and we don’t even fight it. People from New York who work here — we don’t chase their tax dollars hard. New York tries to take them. We will change that — no free Jersey lunch. Let’s be honest, from the Congestion Tax to the Port Authority, New York sticks it to us every chance they get.
It’s time to Strike Back at the Empire State.
Second, we need to be much better at clawing money back from the federal government to Jersey. We only get about 75 cents for every dollar we send to Washington. Rhode Island, which is smaller than us, gets over 48 percent more than we do every year in grants for roads, first responders, and the like. That doesn’t make sense. In my District, since I’ve been in Congress, we are up more than 357 percent in what we’re getting back for our families, which helps subsidize local costs and lowers property taxes. Fighting for what’s ours will save us at least $200 million a year. And we need a new role in Trenton — a Clawback Czar — who just focuses on getting money back to Jersey instead of going to Moocher States or to our neighbors who are better than we are at clawing it back.
Third, we need to make our state government and our 564 municipalities more efficient. We are legendary in New Jersey for our bureaucracy — for layers, and for everything taking too long, from a permit to fix your house to a license to open a small business. We can streamline things and stop overpaying for things like our state prescription drug program … how much we pay for purchasing goods and services … overly-layered permitting and licensing processes … how we manage state vehicles and real estate … outdated technology and other systems … and more. Dozens of other states and even cities and towns have conducted comprehensive efficiency efforts that consistently save 5 percent or more off the cost of government’s operations. Our state government costs have risen by 46 percent since Fiscal Year 2019 — certainly we can find at least 5 percent in improved efficiency like other states have.
My approach is far from the typical Republican attack that calls everything in government “waste, fraud, and abuse” as an excuse to kill critical programs and investment. We all are against waste, fraud, and abuse. But my effort is all about making government better, providing better services, and operating with higher efficiency to ensure that you are getting your money’s worth! My plan will improve services and protect programs that we value and help people afford to live here.
Finally, I believe in lower taxes — but I hate tax cheats. Those who skirt the rules are costing their fellow taxpayers hundreds of millions of dollars a year in foregone revenues that must be made up through higher taxes or reduced services, or both. I won’t tolerate tax cheats, and as Governor I will invest in the resources we need to analyze, identify, and go after those who aren’t paying what they owe.
Now, I know that there are skeptics out there — the political class that says we can’t make Jersey more affordable. They’ve given up — thrown up their hands and say that it’s impossible. I couldn’t disagree more. I’m a problem solver. I never have and never will give up on Jersey. We have an affordability problem and I will take it on. And I’m the only candidate for Governor with a plan to do this — a plan to deliver for Jersey families and improve the services we depend on.
I’ve always been a problem solver, taking on challenges others said were impossible — and solving them, whether that passing historic gun safety legislation, the largest investment to beat climate change, or the Bipartisan Infrastructure Bill, which is now fixing our roads, bridges, and the Gateway Train Tunnel. And I’m not new to this — since the first day I ran for Congress back in 2016, my lawn signs have said “Lower Taxes. Jersey Values” — just like they do today in this campaign. And I’ve got a record these last years in Washington of taking on costs and taxes. That’s what I’ll do as your Governor.
Because I know that, if we work together, and aren’t afraid to fix what’s broken, we can solve this problem. After all, Connecticut cut their income taxes last year. Our neighbors, Massachusetts and Pennsylvania, have cheaper taxes than us — and they don’t have half of what we have going for us. The bottom line: it’s doable.
So, to everyone I’ve talked to in a diner, on the street, or at the grocery store -— from Hackensack down to Camden — who’s said that Jersey is too damn expensive, I’ll leave you with this: Help is on the way. I’ll be the “Lower Taxes, Lower Costs” Governor committed to making life here more affordable. As Governor, we’ll lower our taxes, put money back in your pockets, grow our economy and improve the services we all rely on — and it’s all fiscally responsible and paid for. And, I’ll do it while protecting our Jersey Values. We can solve this problem. That’s what I do.
Again, you can get more details of my Tax Cut Plan at josh4jersey.com. I urge you to read it, and I’ll have more cost-cutting and job growth policies coming your way. If we work together, we can do this, and ensure in the greatest state and country in the world, our best days will be ahead of us. Thank you and God bless you, our great state, and country.
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE: January 22, 2025
CONTACT: [email protected]
