Posted on 01/16/2007 9:42:11 AM PST by aculeus
When Cy Thannikary left India to come work at the UN in Manhattan, he settled in Flushing, Queens, and loved the excitement of living in the city. After starting a family, though, he traded New York’s hubbub for Freehold, New Jersey, a quiet suburb with lower taxes and affordable housing. That was 25 years ago. These days, Thannikary sometimes feels like he’s back in Gotham as he watches his taxes soar and hears neighbors grumble. He has started a new group, Citizens for Property Tax Reform, to fight the special interests that have turned both state and local government into profligate spenders. “Politicians in New Jersey have treated their citizens as ATMs,” he complains. “They have no idea how to restrain spending, and more and more people are saying they can’t afford to live here anymore.”
For more than a century and a half, New Jersey, nestled between New York City and Philadelphia, offered commuters like Thannikary affordable living in pleasant communities. Wall Street tycoons, middle managers fleeing high-priced Gotham once they’d married and had kids, and immigrants who settled first in New York but quickly discovered that they could pursue the American dream more easily across the Hudson—all flocked into the Garden State. Eventually, New Jersey’s congenial living attracted even corporations escaping New York’s rising crime and taxes. The state flourished.
But today Jersey is a cautionary example of how to cripple a thriving state. Increasingly muscular public-sector unions have won billions in outlandish benefits and wages from compliant officeholders. A powerful public education cartel has driven school spending skyward, making Jersey among the nation’s biggest education spenders, even as student achievement lags. Inept, often corrupt, politicians have squandered yet more billions wrung from suburban taxpayers, supposedly to uplift the poor in the state’s troubled cities, which have nevertheless continued to crumble despite the record spending. To fund this extravagance, the state has relentlessly raised taxes on both residents and businesses, while localities have jacked up property taxes furiously. Jersey’s cost advantage over its free-spending neighbors has vanished: it is now among the nation’s most heavily taxed places. And despite the extra levies, new governor Jon Corzine faces a $4.5 billion deficit and a stagnant economy during a national boom.
Unless Garden State leaders can stand up to entrenched interests—and the signs aren’t promising—the state may find itself permanently relegated to second-class economic status. New Jersey “could become the next California, with budget problems too big to solve without a lot of pain,” warns former Jersey City mayor Bret Schundler. “The old way of raising taxes to solve budget problems has been tried, and it’s done nothing but make things worse.”
Once a farming corridor connecting New York and Philadelphia, the state that Benjamin Franklin called “a keg tapped at both ends” began its rapid evolution in the nineteenth century, spurred by the growth of the railroads. Enterprising New Yorkers like merchant Matthias Ogden Halsted led the way. In 1837, he repossessed a 100-acre farm in Orange, New Jersey—about 12 miles west of Manhattan—and built a magnificent mansion, featuring Corinthian columns that one historian celebrated as “unlike anything the area had ever seen.” He subdivided the rest of the farm to provide homes for city friends. These new suburban commuters even chipped in to help build a railway station on the nearby Lackawanna train line—a stop that still serves commuters today.
In 1853, following Halsted’s example, Manhattan drug wholesaler Llewellyn Solomon Haskell bought land along a ridge of the Orange Mountains, laid down roads, and built grand homes. Thus was born Llewellyn Park, America’s first gated community. Described by the New York Times in 1865 as “a rough, shaggy mountain site, now transformed into an enchanted ground,” Llewellyn Park soon attracted such eminent residents as Thomas Edison, and it boasted magnificent houses designed by noted architects, including Stanford White, Charles McKim, and Calvert Vaux. Soon the entire area around the Oranges blossomed, with stylish homes on broad boulevards. Fashionable New York stores like B. Altman and Best & Co. turned the area’s dazzling main shopping strip into the rightly nicknamed “Fifth Avenue of the suburbs.”
Jersey’s development accelerated during the second half of the nineteenth and the early twentieth centuries, as more and more workers opted for suburban comfort. A new railroad line here, a bridge or road there, would unlock a whole new swath of the state to commuters, igniting countless mini-real-estate booms.
Two rail lines transformed Montclair in the mid-nineteenth century from a sleepy trading post into a bustling New York commuter town, filled with spacious Tudor- and Queen Anne–style homes. Montclair’s biggest houses, on a ridge at the foot of the Watchung Mountains facing New York, would one day house many of Gotham’s financial elite, including, during the late 1980s, the chief executives of three of Manhattan’s biggest banks. In the same way, a causeway over the Shrewsbury River in 1870, linking farmland communities like Fair Haven and Rumson to ferries on the Atlantic, prompted a number of New York financiers, including Jacob Schiff, to build estates in the area and begin commuting across New York harbor to work.
Some 60 miles north of Rumson and 50 years later, construction of the George Washington Bridge, connecting upper Manhattan and the Bronx to northern New Jersey, led to a different kind of housing boom in places like Teaneck, a middle-class town where developers erected English Tudors, Dutch Colonials, and smaller houses of stucco and brick. In the decade leading up to the bridge’s opening, Teaneck’s population grew fourfold, part of a population upsurge that remade northern Jersey.
As inexpensive mass transportation expanded, Jersey sprouted a dense network of middle-class suburbs, home to many Manhattan middle managers—the traders, back-office managers, and salesmen who serve as corporate New York’s foot soldiers. In the 1960s, the Levitt family, famous for converting Long Island farmland into the middle-class suburb of Levittown after World War II, replicated the project on a more modest scale in Somerset, New Jersey, building nearly 1,000 houses in William Levitt’s classic Cape Cod design. Middle-income New Yorkers came in droves. Farther north, in Hillsdale, where the Hackensack & New York Railroad once had a terminus, hundreds of modest two- and three-bedroom prewar colonial houses, originally built for railroad workers, formed the core of a housing market dominated by Manhattan commuters. Eisenhower-era ranch houses in Middleton, Morristown townhouse developments, condos on former industrial land in Jersey City and Secaucus—all attracted commuters, so that now more than 300,000 Gotham workers call Jersey home.
Jersey would even cultivate its own patrician dynasties of Gothamites. Shortly before launching the New York–based financial magazine bearing his name in 1917, B. C. Forbes moved his family from Bay Ridge, Brooklyn, to Englewood, New Jersey, on the western slope of the Palisades. After his magazine took off and Forbes became prominent within Englewood—by then home to many of Manhattan’s financial elite—his son Malcolm married one of the town’s finest, Roberta Laidlaw, whose family owned the New York investment firm Laidlaw & Co. The pair moved into a baronial estate in the rolling hills of Somerset County, deep in the Jersey heartland. Among their neighbors: Aristotle and Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis, former secretary of state Cyrus Vance, and longtime Dillon Read chairman and ex–treasury secretary Douglas Dillon.
The commuters have given New Jersey the highest average family income in the country—$74,000-plus a year. In one five-year period during the mid-1990s, Jersey had a net gain of $2.8 billion in family income from New York, thanks to between-state migration, the Empire State Foundation found.
The ex–New Yorkers who formed the Jersey towns favored small government and low taxes, which came to define the state’s politics. As early as 1840, the mayor of Jersey City—then a settlement of just over 3,000—boasted of his town’s “small amount of taxes levied to support state, county and city government compared to New York and Brooklyn” (an independent municipality at the time). Jerseyans could be downright ornery about taxation. During the Depression, the state’s Republican governor, Harold Hoffman, enacted a sales tax; so great was the backlash that the legislature quickly rescinded the levy. By the early 1960s, Jersey was one of only two states without a sales or an income tax; New York had both. Jersey ranked 40th among states in total tax burden, 13 percent below the national average.
The presence of a white-collar commuting workforce—and the low-tax economic climate it helped create—would help New Jersey lure firms fleeing New York. By 1910, more than half the state’s urban and suburban residents worked in office jobs, as clerks, typists, managers, and executives. When Gotham’s corporations, at first seeking space and then, beginning in the sixties, pushed by high taxes and escalating crime, began to abandon the city, Jersey was an attractive option. AT&T, Chubb Insurance, American Standard, Bristol-Myers Squibb, and others began flocking to where many of their employees already lived. Technological advances also helped Jersey draw the back-office operations of major finance players like Merrill Lynch, which kept its Manhattan headquarters but now employed thousands of support workers in cheaper Garden State digs, connected by phone and computer.
The New York corporate exiles nourished New Jersey’s economy, just as the commuters did. Starting in the 1950s, Jersey’s economy began growing at twice the pace of New York State’s and easily outperformed it for most of the rest of the century. Even in finance, New York City’s economic engine, New Jersey has almost matched Gotham’s growth in recent decades. It added 143,000 financial-sector jobs between 1970 and 2000, compared with 154,000 new jobs in New York City over the same period, as financial wizards no longer chose only to live in the Garden State but also to work there. Even soon-to-be New York mayor Michael Bloomberg got in on the action. From a small Princeton office in the late 1980s, the mayor’s company, Bloomberg LP, grew to employ 1,500 in New Jersey by the early twenty-first century.
[See link for remainder of this long article.]
Bret Schundler gave it a try but the establishment party apparatus submarined him and the sheeple repudiated him in a landslide. So the 'Pubs turned to moderate candidates like Kean Jr. and the sheeple still voted against him in droves. I guess the voters figured why vote for moderate 'Pubs who are trying to undercut the 'Rat vote when they can vote for 'Rats and have the real article ('Rats). So conservative 'Pubs get blown out in Jersey, and moderate 'Pubs also lose big time. Sounds like a hopeless case of 'Ratland to me.
Unfortunately, sometimes it is simply too late.
When the bulk of "the electorate" are either government-dependent parasites or government-enriched parasites, that doesn't leave much room for normal, honest, hard-working, traditional families to make a correction, no matter how "informed" they are. It comes down purely to a matter of numbers.
In the case of places like New Jersey and California, it's likely high time for the decent people to vacate for greener pastures; maybe head down south. Those who stick around grabbing their ankles may end up like "the last white farmers in Zimbabwe."
The painful fact is that, in America today, it is easy for politicians to ignore the hard working and productive middle class that pay the taxes. It is very difficult to ignore the government unions, the teacher unions, the professional gripers and the race hustlers. For the most part they make politicians lives much more unpleasant than middle class Americans do.
But the fellow at the beginning of this article has the right idea. The productive need to start flexing their considerable muscle. In an ideal world we would elect people whose principles cannot be shaken by threats and pressure. But given the world we live in, most politicians will do what is expedient. We have to make it expedient to lower taxes, spend less, and learn to say "No." It can be done. I have seen it done in Texas.
I figure I will never see the abuse that we had in NJ in the years left.
NJ even took a 6K Real Estate Transfer Tax tax from me. That was increased this past summer. One of the highest in the nation. I call it the door in the azz tax.
The Rats can win with dead guys and crimminals in NJ. Trust me, they will never be forced to do anything that they don't want to. The people in NJ expect to get fleeced.
They love it.
Another more recent "Acting Governor" was Richard Codey, who seemed to be fairly nice guy, judging from public appearances. Maybe that's why he was shoved aside by the 'Rats when Corzine decided to run.
BTW, there will be a Lt. Governor in NJ starting with the '09 election, so there won't be any more "Acting Governors."
Yep, typical - - the scumbags foul their own nest and then move away only to continue voting for Democrats.
There was a better article about NJ that lays it out in fine detail. It was posted here on FR a while ago. Can't remember the title.
I am delighted to have left.
I like this guy, he starts a group to stop the spending by the politicians,,who the hell put the freakin democrats in !!! The morons in the state did ,they deserve what the hell they get.
Just like the country elected democrats and now we are going to pay and pay and pay
I think you make a good point about the culture in New Jersey. It's extremely different from Minnesota, where we have some of the highest voter turnout in the country, and corruption is much less rampant. I think culture makes a big difference - we don't have people exploiting state benefits and social programs the way that people seem to in New Jersey.
I just moved here about a year ago - I was transferred from Minneapolis to New York. While Minnesota taxes are actually worse than New Jersey, the overall cost of living in Minnesota is much lower. I sold my house in St. Paul and found that I couldn't afford anything here that wasn't in a complete ghetto. Right now I'm renting and waiting out another chance to transfer (or get a new job), either back to Minneapolis or to Chicago. Where did you relocate to? I also would like to leave, but I definitely do NOT want to follow the herds down south.
The problem is, they don't. The libs flee the mess they have made and infect a new host with their sickness. The Southwest states, New Hampshire, etc.
My county's board of supervisors just voted to give the county's 7000 employees the right to unionize. I wonder how much payola was involved in that? Sinking further into the mindless, corrupt, Socialist hellhole.
Why not? It's 70 degrees out and Florida is a machine gun state. Plus we need normal people to balance out the liberal twits.
I'm a man who's favorite hobbies include hockey, ice fishing, and cross-country skiing. Most people like the warm weather...not me. Not to mention I can't STAND the humidity. I'll take paying taxes over all that.
Extrapolated across twelve grades, that amounts to a mind-numbing $41,667 per student per year.
For essentially nothing!
I am well and truly speechless...
Sadly, that does appear to be the case.
At least tacitly, the voters approve of their governance. In our political system, where voters get the government they deserve, New Jersey appears doomed in the long-term.
I work with a lot of folks from NJ, and I think Jerseyites are starting to realize that tax reform is not the answer - spending cuts are. All tax reform does is change how you get skinned.
Pennsylvania then. Hockey, skiing, and machine guns. Good hunting, too, plus you can handgun hunt.
You may know...LI's Suffolk County was Republican territory for years, and has the highest paid police in the Nation.
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