By Gordon MacInnes

Twenty-five years ago, New Jersey was just one of eight states that enjoyed Wall Street’s highest AAA credit rating. How times have changed!

Today, only Illinois suffers from a lower rating. But for some reason, New Jersey’s political leadership seems anxious to claim the title as the nation’s Least Responsibly-Financed State Government.

How could any state’s leaders act willfully to increase its unfunded liabilities, and thereby increase the bill to taxpayers by hundreds of millions of dollars? It’s easy! Few citizens understand the complexities of public finance, but all voters notice increased taxes, be they local property taxes or state income, sales and gasoline taxes.

The state budget lawmakers sent to Gov. Phil Murphy would pressure his administration to reshape New Jersey’s prison system, calling for the closure of two of the state’s 13 prisons and cutting the corrections department budget by more than $40 million.

Language inserted by state legislators would also seek to divert an additional 1,000 prisoners into halfway houses, a nearly 40 percent increase.

The budget proposal comes amid tension between the first-term Democratic governor and legislative leaders from his own party. Murphy has refused to say exactly what he’ll do about the budget lawmakers sent him, which he must act on by Sunday to avoid a government shutdown.

It’s Groundhog Day in the Garden State.

With only six days left before the deadline for a state budget to be enacted in New Jersey, Gov. Phil Murphy on Monday once again did not say publicly what he plans to do with the $38.7 billion state government spending plan that lawmakers sent him last week.

"All options are on the table,” Murphy said during an unrelated news conference at the New Jersey Institute of Technology in Newark.

A group of activists filed an ethics complaint Friday with the Joint Legislative Committee on Ethical Standards in connection with the special Senate committee investigating New Jersey’s controversial economic development program — saying five of its seven members had ties to George E. Norcross III.

They said the connections, some professional and others personal, represented a conflict. Norcross is the Democratic powerbroker whose companies and related business entities received millions in state tax incentives now a focus of a separate investigation by a governor’s special task force into the incentives and the state Economic Development Authority.

The Senate committee had been scheduled to open public hearings on the tax incentives and the EDA on Monday, but the session was postponed late Friday because of the ongoing state budget negotiations.