(Governmental) Expansion and (Popular) Exodus

According to a recently released report, after four years of the McGreevey-Codey Administration, the State now boasts substantially more jobs than it did a scant five years ago. Indeed, 45,400 more people work in New Jersey than they did in 2000.

Alas, private sector employment FELL by 3,200 positions. Happily, the non-productive governmental sector more than stepped in to fill the gap, adding another 48,600 hard working public employees in a scant five years. One in six of us now makes his living off the tax revenue of the rest. 15.8% of all workers now work for government. It’s the second largest employer, after "trade, transportation, and utilities".

Scared yet?

New Jersey ranks almost dead last in the business climate, meaning that the productive people we need moving here to help pay for the "progressive" utopia Governor Corzine hopes to create will take their jobs and money elsewhere. Statistics from the same report seem to show that they are doing precisely that.

Consider what New Jersey pays its public employees. Although the folks at the top are often underpaid by private sector standards (imagine the head of a company with a $30 billion budget making $175,000 – the Governor’s salary – or a top flight lawyer making $141,000 – what a Superior Court judge receives) the same cannot be said of those in the rank and file. Public employees routinely make more than their private sector counterparts and enjoy solid gold pension and benefit plans. The average governmental employee makes more than $50000 per annum, about $3000 more per year than the average private sector employee makes. Obviously, something is wrong with this picture.

None of which to say is that we, as a society, shouldn’t treat those who serve us as governmental employees with respect and pay them reasonably. But, clearly, there shouldn’t be quite so many of them.

Given the punitive tax policies pursued by the Democrats these last four years, it should surprise no one that the greatest job losses came in the highest paying positions. The report notes that in the 1980s and 1990s, New Jersey drove the regional economy. Now, like other high tax, business unfriendly states – New York, Massachusetts and Connecticut – we sit on the sidelines and watch while high paying jobs locate to states with more rational tax policies.

The same report details population change, noting that almost 60,000 Americans more moved out of New Jersey than moved in from the rest of the country. The report notes that

"... if the causes of the sharply increasing net negative internal migration are due to the state’s high cost of living, high taxes, and weakening economic activities, then this is a signal that the state has some fundamental economic problems that require prompt attention."

Just so.

Read together, these two articles demonstrate that, every year, progressively greater numbers of Americans abandon New Jersey for greener – less expensive, lower taxed, less regulated – pastures elsewhere. They take their relatively high paying jobs with them. Apparently, the people who remain behind either go to work for government or want its services. As a result, government continues to expand, hastening the exodus of the very people Jon Corzine wants to tax to fund government’s further expansion.

About the high cost of living, government can do little except attend to its own house. But that’s quite a formidable edifice. We could start by reducing the number of governmental entities, the number of people they employ, and the taxes that support them. Governor Corzine should reconsider his no-lay-offs determination; every department should be returned to its 2000 levels (or, in the unlikely event that those levels were lower than at present, kept where they are) Every County and municipality should, likewise, retrench to their 2000 employment levels.

It insults no hard working public employee to observe that we simply cannot afford that many of them. We got by with 50,000 fewer of them a scant five years ago; we can do that again. At $50K per, cutting 50,000 saves the taxpayers $2.5 billion. Add to that another $1 billion or so in benefits and we’re talking real money, never mind the long term liabilities each employee carries with him.

If nothing else, it’s a good first step toward a rationally sized government.