New Jersey, THIS Is Your Future!

Via Baseball Crank, we get a vision of the post-apocolyptical world that is the city of Detroit:

How bad is Detroit? It once gave the keys to the city to Saddam Hussein.

Over the last several years, it has ranked as the most murderous city, the poorest city, the most segregated city, as the city with the highest auto-insurance rates, with the bleakest outlook for workers in their 20s and 30s, and as the place with the most heart attacks, slowest income growth, and fewest sunny days.

It is a city without a single national grocery store chain. It has been deemed the most stressful metropolitan area in America. Likewise, it has ranked last in numerous studies: in new employment growth, in environmental indicators, in the rate of immunization of 2-year-olds, and, among big cities, in the number of high school or college graduates.

Men's Fitness magazine christened Detroit America's fattest city, while Men's Health called it America's sexual disease capital. Should the editors of these two metrosexual magazines be concerned for their safety after slagging the citizens of a city which has won the "most dangerous" title for five of the last ten years?

Probably not: 47 percent of Detroit adults are functionally illiterate.

A city of Democrats who refuse to vote any other way no matter how much the party has failed them; does that sound like any state you know?

Well, the WSJ knows where to look for abject failure:

New Jersey Is the Perfect Bad Example

When Barack Obama makes his New Year's resolutions, at the top of his list ought to be the following: "I will not allow America to become New Jersey."

....It seems not to have dented the consciousness of our political class that New Jersey's dismal economic performance might be linked to the state's tax policy. According to the nonpartisan Tax Foundation, New Jersey is home to the most hostile tax environment for business in the nation. We also bear the nation's highest burden of state and local taxes. And on the list of the 10 counties with the highest median property tax, we claim seven of them.

Of course, there was one area where jobs did grow. From 2000 to 2007, says the New Jersey Business & Industry Association, the government added 54,800 jobs. To put that in proper perspective, that works out to 93% of all jobs created in New Jersey over those seven years.

So how do we respond to these new hard times? Beginning New Year's Day, New Jersey workers will see even more money taken from their paychecks...

How long until we become Detroit? Or California? Or Ramallah? That's up to us, of course, for in a democracy the voters always get the government they deserve...