I thought that people clamored to their legislators setting forth societal ills which needed governmental action because the ills were too large for individuals to handle on their own. As in we have 200000 kids who are as dumb as a brick and we need to school them up. The legislators would talk privately amongst themselves and then publically. Privately they would say, yup those kids are dumb as bricks, but the parents vote so let's build a school system. The would deliberate and attempt to find a means of solution to the problems facing society. Which usually means spending money.
In NJ, there would seem to be no end to the types of ills that would require legislative action.Click on pressing need to see the important work that captures the attention of NJ Legislators.
Pressing Need
Exhibit 1
Of course that is just one example. Having the highest property tax rate in the nation is yet another.
Or having a pension system for public employees that is so actuarially unsound that it has resulted in the down grade of the state's credit rating several times in the last year. So bad is the pension system liability that many people believe it may very well bankrupt the state and turn it into a very large version of Detroit. It may already be happening in that almost one out of every ten homes in NJ is vacant, a very closely guarded statistic, for recognition of that little nugget would undermine house values immediately.
We all know the story of Detroit, or we all should know it. The pension liabilities grew unabated and the city fathers continued to add all manner of jobs to the public paycheck as reward for donations and the like. One day they found themselves in the position of having to raise property taxes, and once and done was not part of their plan. The raise the taxes solution was so attractive that it was done over and over again. One day they woke up and found that people had literally abandoned their homes as unsaleable (because of taxes) , unsaleable home have no value, so the value dropped like a rock and more and more people packed and walked. There are those who would tell you it was drugs and crime, but the reality was that good and decent people could no longer make their home there because they could no longer afford to. This very same scenario has been repeated in many other cities and in virtually every city in NJ.
It is so bad that the state stepped in and assumed about 25% of the tax burden in places like Paterson, Trenton, Camden, pushing the load off onto the rest of the state.
There are problems with a Medicaid system that takes 20% of the state budget and insures about 20% of the population, yet has no way to determine eligibility. A person with net worth of hundreds of thousands of dollars can receive Medicaid or Meals on Wheels or any number of other program assistance dollars.
There are heroin addiction problems such that the governor on his own has initiated an attempt to get it addressed, with scant assistance from the legislature, I might add. A day does not go by where an easily recognized drug overdose death is not revealed in the obituary pages. Just yesterday close to 50,000 bag doses were seized just one town over from mine.
So it was no small measure of disgust that I opened the paper over the weekend and saw that at least one legislator in NJ wanted to address a pressing problem affecting the lives of Jerseyans. Seems like this guy wants to legislate for the proposition that all candidates for Presidential office must release their Tax Returns before they get placed on the ballot. The inanity of the bill was so striking in the face of all the other problems of the state that I found myself shaking my head , thinking it is no small wonder why people are fleeing this state in droves.
I looked up the guy's bio and I was surprised, not by his party affiliation-of course Democrat, but by his lack of knowing any better. He is an accomplished guy, partner in a major law firm, with history and experience. What he lacks apparently is the common sense to understand that the people of NJ are deserving of meaningful legislation, not some political hit piece intended only to further party goals. I was annoyed and then I realized it was just this type of annoyance that caused people to come out and vote for Trump.
Apparently there is no time in legislative circles to address real world issues and problems, there is only time to take aim at political foes. Hopefully, when this crosses the Governors desk he takes the time to throw it out, and make the point that if the legislator is so insistent on tax returns that he make his bill applicable to all elective offices---not that it is relevant to anything, but just to show the point of irrelevancy. And perhaps the governor can let the legislator know that there are some constituents who are not really into frat boy style gotcha games. There really is a need to address these pressing problems.