An acquaintance just retired at 46 as a cop in NJ; the public-sector “workers” are to blame for this problem in NJ. This guy will most likely spend more time collecting his pension than he ever spent working.
What really has brought this to a head is that a lot of teachers in NJ would stay on the job well past retirement age because they didn’t have to do any work and raked in incredible salaries (due to union rules, based on years of service); within the last couple of years those teachers were offered great packages if they retired or risked a lot if they stayed on - so they retired. Those costs, coupled with the costs of their replacements, are crippling the state.
Christie has maintained he will not raise taxes; he knows that is just speeding up the death spiral here by forcing more and more companies and Americans to flee (shrinking the tax base further). Nobody is foolish enough to open a business or buy a house here as long as it means buying a share in a huge IOU to people who retired decades ago; one can expect no return at all on current taxes paid to the state/municipalities while we pay off those commitments to former “workers”.
There's no doubt that there is a lot of dead wood amonst state workers - we could probably do quite well with about twenty-five percent fewer high-paid "administrators", "analysts", and "assistant deputy assistant commissioners" - in fact since many of them are political cronies and payoffs who get their jobs by who and not what they know, they often get in the way of those qualified people working to keep the state operating, so things might run more smoothly if they simply disappeared - on the other had, they do pay a percentage of their salaries into the pension fund along with all other state employees while working the twenty-five years until they can retire - if they last that long....
There's also no doubt that the state's in trouble financially, with businesses as well as people moving out - but to blame this solely or even mainly on the state employees pension system is to ignore the massive amounts of waste throughout state government. The Department of Environmental Protection or whatever it's called is a perfect example, with its draconian and often absurd regulations that can make life expensive and exasperating. I have in my front yard a small depression of about ten square feet which occasionally gets an inch or two of water in it temporarily after a heavy rain. When my house was built the ground had to be inspected by the DEP, and I have somewhere an official letter from that Department calling that portion of my yard a designated wetlands preserve on which I can build or even place nothing more permanent than a layer of crushed stone if I decide to put a driveway in. Then there is the Department of Education with its senseless and at times destructive policies, like the new statewide standardized testing program. Niece who is a teacher in the state calls this multimillion dollar effort a disaster in so many ways - for instance it is administered to kids starting in the third grade via laptop computer, but involves multiple pages of text and answer sheets requiring the child to jump back and force in giving his responses, so it will not be clear how much of the results are measures of the kids' knowledge and how much is a reflection of their ability to use the computer. And then let's not forget the voters themselves, who keep approving hundred million dollar referendums on using taxpayer money to buy and preserve "greenspaces" - that's empty land (probably from some politically-connected land owner) which will never be built on or become tax ratable. And it was only a year or so ago that the people of the state approved raising the minimum wage for workers in Jersey - wonder how much that's playing into the state's being 49th in new job creation......