The public sector destroyed the northeast and is preventing any recovery; there is no way to attract businesses (corporate or individual) when families and businesses are saddled with the costs of maintaining this upper middle class that really produces nothing (children aren’t educated in schools, and cops aren’t allowed to enforce the law due to political correctness). Here in Irvington NJ (next to Newark) they literally ran out of money to fuel police cars; Newark itself laid off 160 cops at the height of a record-setting year for murders because the money ran out (the usual system of having the state bail them out fell apart because the state had no money left to do so).
When the few public servants I know point out the need for their services, I respond that we simply can’t afford them anymore (without getting into the merits of the services themselves). A bloated civil service had become such the norm for decades here that people can’t imagine turning the clock back, but they have no choice - there is no money left, and pretending there isn’t a problem is just chasing more Anglo taxpayers out of the state. The underground economy that is replacing them (illegal apartments, under-the-table wages) won’t pay the “government class”, so layoffs follow...
The austerity that hit private-sector Americans due to globalization is coming to the government-worker class whether they like it or not.
I’ve often considered government as creating jobs which provide a middle class lifestyle for otherwise unemployable people.