Sunday, January 11, 2009

New Jersey: Voting With Their Feet !

How unliveable have liberals policies made the is the Garden State? The Asbury Park-Press reports:

The study, which tracked the number of moves United Van Lines, the nation's largest moving company, made into and out of each state, found that New Jersey had the third-highest percentage of out-migration in the nation, behind only Michigan and North Dakota. Of the more than 9,000 residential shipments United handled in New Jersey last year, 58.7 percent were outbound while only 41.3 percent were inbound.

Apparently, next to Jersey. the only worse places to live in America are Michigan - home of crime, bankruptcy, and sociatal collapse, and North Dakota - a frozen tundra, empty of opportunity, warmth, and women. The Park-Press lays the blame squarely where it belongs, and adds a depressing thought on what might be the only thing keeping the outflow from being a stampede:

Today's unaffordable taxes — likely to become even less affordable under the Democratic leadership in Trenton again this year — coupled with the sour employment picture aren't likely to alter the state's migration patterns. The only thing that might help check the outflow is the difficulty in selling one's home, which could force some people to defer plans to head to more affordable climes.

And thus the tax reciepts will continue to fall, in direct proportion to how much the rates are raised. What will Corzine and the toddlers in Trenton do, when their pet liberal projects cannot be funded? You got it - they'll raise them taxes some more! Or else they'll cut spending in imperative areas that will simply force others to collect the funds required for essential services:

[Corzine's] proposed cut of $90 million in combined aid to municipalities and public schools will surely mean yet another hike in local property taxes in a state that already is the nation's most heavily taxed.
And while Corzine proposes reducing Trenton's contributions to the state employees' pension fund by $115.6 million,
it should be noted that he was the first governor since Christie Whitman, who had declared a "pension holiday," to mandate such contributions.


He's imposing a wage freeze on all non-union state workers, and asking the unions to reopen their contracts and forgo negotiated pay hikes. If they don't, he says, furloughs and layoffs will result.
Good luck with that, though: The unions have rejected Corzine's proposal, demanding that he raise the state income tax instead.


So even if state tax burdens do not get increased (a highly unlikely scenario, I grant), local municipalities will certainly need to raise theirs, in order to simply keep the schools open. And really, why do I think instead of seeing union layoffs, we'll see instead Jon Corzine struggling to explain why the state income tax must be rasied yet again?

This is gonna get way, way worse....

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