LaZare backs millionaire’s tax

Assembly candidate Jill LaZare said on Monday that she supports Gov. Phil Murphy’s proposal for a millionaire’s tax.

“I am totally able to come out for it … If I had any say in it, I might put the threshold at $1.5 million or $2 million, but I certainly would not say we’re not going to do it. We have a lot of debt in this state and we have to pay it down,” LaZare said. “We got to get out of debt and we have to stop putting all of the burden on the backs of people who we’re trying to help in the state, like our public workers, like our teachers.”

LaZare is seeking the Democratic nomination in the 21st legislative district.

Her primary opponents, Stacey Gunderman and Lisa Mandelblatt, on Sunday told the New Jersey Globe they weren’t ready to support a millionaire’s tax, citing the cap imposed on state and local tax deductions by the tax plan passed by congressional Republicans last year.

The 21st is among the most affluent districts in the state, and backing a tax on high-earners could push millionaires there to fund Republican incumbents in the general election.

Assembly Minority Leader Jon Bramnick (R-Westfield) and Assemblywoman Nancy Munoz (R-Summit) currently represent the district, which Republicans have held unchallenged for close to 20 years.

Unlike her primary opponents, LaZare did not shy from lavishing praise on Gov. Phil Murphy, whose performance over his first year and a half in office Mandelblatt and Gunderman gave a B.

“I would give Murphy much more than a B,” she said. “I’d give him an A-. I think he’s working really, really hard to try to fix our problems, and one thing that we haven’t had is someone to fix our problems.”

LaZare docked some points because some of Murphy’s policies — the millionaire’s tax and marijuana legalization, for example — have stalled in absence of support from legislative Democrats.

Though LaZare puts the blame for that on legislators, not on Murphy.

“The residents of New Jersey voted for him overwhelmingly to be our governor, and the representatives who are pretty much working against him now supported him overwhelmingly, it seemed, when he was running, most of them,” LaZare said. “And now they’re making it near impossible to put through the very things that he ran on, that the voters of this state want to happen.”

Primary day in June 4.