The Wall Street wizard Phil Murphy left behind a financial train wreck

The view from Trenton is looking mighty expensive these days. The bill has come due, not for a lavish party, but for the fiscal hangover left by the last administration.

The Wall Street veteran who occupied the governor’s office for eight years, Phil Murphy, has departed, leaving behind a landscape of “one-shot” budget gimmicks and massive spending increases with no sustainable revenue to pay for them.

Now, Governor Rebecca “Mikie” Sherrill stares down a canyon of a budget shortfall, a problem massively deepened by Washington’s recent “megabill”—a masterclass in cruelty that cut taxes for billionaires and corporations while dumping the costs onto New Jersey’s doorstep, slashing aid for health care, food, and our climate future.

So here we are, the Garden State, at a crossroads. Do we follow the old, tired playbook?

Do we nickel-and-dime the commuters with higher tolls, squeeze the homeowners with even more outrageous property taxes, or hike the sales tax on every grocery run in Paterson and Pennsauken?

Or is there another way—a way that asks something from those who have benefitted most from our state’s economic engine while being insulated from its everyday struggles?

Enter the Wealth Proceeds Tax.

This isn’t a radical new idea; it’s a simple correction.

Right now, if you’re a nurse in New Brunswick or an electrician in Edison, you pay a higher tax rate on every hour of overtime than a retiree in Short Hills pays on a million dollars in stock dividends.

We tax work aggressively, but we treat wealth’s self-generated income with kid gloves.

The Wealth Proceeds Tax would change that, targeting only the passive investment income—dividends, interest, certain capital gains—of households making over $250,000 a year.

For the vast majority of New Jersey families, it changes nothing. For the state’s coffers, it changes everything.

The numbers from the non-partisan Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy are eye-opening for a state used to budget magic tricks.

A modest Wealth Proceeds Tax could bring New Jersey between $300 million and a staggering $1.4 billion in new, annual revenue. An enhanced version could net over $1.3 billion. That’s not pocket change.

That’s the sound of fully funding NJ Transit so it doesn’t crumble. That’s the sigh of relief from a senior in Toms River who can keep their property tax freeze. That’s the new textbooks in Camden schools and the repaired roads in Sussex County.

And the beauty of it is in the bureaucracy, or lack thereof. The framework already exists at the federal level.

For New Jersey’s tax filers, it would mean just an extra page on their return—no new calculations, no complicated rules. It’s a lever we can pull using a system that’s already in place, turning a trickle of fairness into a river of revenue.

This is about more than just balancing a ledger poisoned by past gimmicks and federal abandonment. It’s about what kind of New Jersey we want to be.

Will Democrats in Trenton continue a system that favors wealth over work, that forces middle-class families to shoulder the burden for society’s needs while the yacht-and-vineyard crowd sails on, untaxed and unscathed?

Or does the party of the people choose a path of basic fairness—where the money that makes itself while its owner sleeps on the Jersey Shore finally contributes to keeping the lights on, the trains running, and the schools open for everyone else?

With commanding Democratic majorities in both legislative chambers, the Republican naysayers are powerless to stop a progressive solution.

The choice is clear. We can chase more one-shots and gimmicks, or we can build something stable.

We can ask more from those struggling to afford this state, or we can finally ask wealth to pay its fair share.

For Governor Sherrill and the legislature, the Wealth Proceeds Tax isn’t just an option on a list.

It is the most equitable, straightforward, and necessary first step to rescue New Jersey from a mess it didn’t create, and to build a future that works for the many, not just the moneyed few.