Candidates for governor promise corporate welfare and more corporate welfare

When Giacchino Michael ‘Jack’ Ciattarelli and Rebecca Michelle ‘Mikie’ Sherrill appeared with each other before the New Jersey Business & Industry Association at a reception for gubernatorial nominees, the Republican said the Murphy administration “doesn’t celebrate the business community.”

The air in Trenton is commonly thick with the usual political theater—performative outrage, manufactured victimhood, and the tired spectacle of a challenger grasping for a narrative that doesn’t exist.

Ciattarelli, a perennial also-ran of New Jersey politics, rolled out his latest grievance in an attempt to link Sherrill to Governor Phil Murphy, the Goldman Sachs millionaire who typifies the neoliberal corporate control that has befallen the party of the people.

It’s a curious accusation, one that collapses under the slightest scrutiny—like a cardboard fort in a rainstorm—because the truth is the Wall Street millionaire has not just celebrated the business community. He’s thrown them a taxpayer-funded parade.

Let’s talk numbers, since Ciattarelli seems allergic to them.

Under Murphy, New Jersey has shoveled billions in corporate subsidies into the pockets of private interests with the enthusiasm of a blackjack dealer doling out chips to high rollers.

The Economic Development Authority’s Grow NJ program is an $11 billion free-for-all, doling out incentives like Halloween candy to corporations that hardly needed the help.

Amazon, for instance, pocketed $1.5 billion in tax breaks for a warehouse project that would have happened anyway, because Murphy felt Jeff Bezos needed a handout. New Jersey offered potential tax breaks, reaching up to $7 billion, to attract Amazon to Newark.

Then there’s the $14 billion in corporate tax breaks Murphy signed off on in 2020, a package so generous it would make a Rockefeller blush.

The justification was always the same: jobs, jobs, jobs. But the fine print told a different story—one of loopholes, lax oversight, and a disturbing trend of companies taking the money and then quietly downsizing anyway.

Did the business community feel uncelebrated when Murphy handed Holtec International $260 million for a Camden facility that later laid off workers?

Were they neglected when the state cut checks to Prudential, Subaru, and other Fortune 500 giants already swimming in profits?

And let’s not forget the pièce de résistance of Murphy’s corporate welfare buffet: the film and television tax credit program, a $500 million giveaway to Hollywood studios filming in the Garden State.

Nothing says “supporting a strong local economy” like subsidizing Netflix and Steven Spielberg.

Ciattarelli’s complaint isn’t just wrong—it’s a deliberate fiction, a straw man erected to distract from the reality that Murphy’s administration has been one of the most business-friendly in recent memory, provided you define “business” as “massive corporations with well-connected lobbyists.”

Small businesses? They got crumbs. Main Street entrepreneurs? They got lip service. New Jersey allows tipped workers to be paid $5.62 an hour – an appallingly low number in a state with a high cost of living.

Big players—the ones with the lawyers and the PAC donations—they feasted.

So when Ciattarelli claims Murphy has turned his back on the business community, what he really means is that vulture capitalists haven’t been given enough.

The Democrat in name only governor hasn’t fully embraced the trickle-down fairy tale, the race-to-the-bottom economics that Ciattarelli himself peddles as gospel. It’s not that Murphy doesn’t celebrate business—it’s that he doesn’t celebrate Ciattarelli’s version of it, the kind where workers lose and CEOs win bigger.

Sherrill’s economic agenda is not readily distinguishable from othe neoliberal corproate welfare programs but that’s another story. The irony of the GOP attack is thick enough to choke on.

The same Republicans who once railed against corporate welfare now pretend it doesn’t exist—or worse, that it’s not enough. Meanwhile, the money keeps flowing, the deals keep getting cut, and the business elite keep cashing in. If that’s not a celebration, what is?