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......
In the end, people in NJ love “services” but don’t want to pay for them. While capping property tax rates prevents many of us from losing our homes to tax liens, it also means these services can’t be maintained at their current levels, but nobody wants to cut anything. We’ve kicked the can so far down the road that little is left of current revenues to fund current services; they are being used to pay people who retired long ago - and many subsequently fled the high-tax state they created that now feeds them.
Most NJ policemen are not in dangerous environments, and those that are “stood down” long ago due to racial politics. That is why despite the density of our population and large minority communities we rarely have police-involved shootings (per capita); the people of NJ have been left to fend for themselves.
Who would “create jobs” in such an environment?