On the heels of his 2020 State of the State address, Governor Murphy struck back at criticism that looks for ways to tax the residents of New Jersey, during a Q and A with reporters following the launch of his Jobs NJ initiative.

‘I don’t wake up every morning reflexively trying to figure out ways to tax people’, the Governor said.  ‘In fact, to the contrary, I wake up every morning trying to figure out how we reign in the mess in property taxes that we inherited two years ago’.

Murphy said he ‘wakes up asking what is fair, what is right’, and hammered home on his call for a millionaire’s tax, twice denied him in previous budgets during negotiations with the Legislature.

‘I don’t begrudge their wealth, I don’t begrudge their success, God bless them, we want more of them, but I want this sort of to be a level playing field for the middle class’, Murphy said.

Asked about the FY2021 budget, the Governor said his administration is ‘putting the pieces together’ and there’s a ‘five or six week window between now and then’.  On the direction of the budget, Murphy said he wants to ‘begin with doing what’s right and fair’.

Responding to Cory Booker’s presidential campaign suspension, Murphy said ‘I love the guy’, adding he’s ‘got all that it takes’ but ‘sometimes its just not meant to be’.

Murphy remains optimistic for Booker’s future, saying ‘he remains a young man’ and that ‘his quest to get there is alive and well’.