NJ Government needs a diet!

An excellent opinion piece appeared in the Courier Post today entitled In '08, government needs to lose weight. The commentary cites some progress made across several fronts this year by the Corzine administration. The challenge has been that almost every success has been "some" success capping property tax increases, "some" success in reducing "some" people's bill via the rebate program and higher rebates and "some" progress on establishing rules to get school budgets cut.

The problem there is that nominal progress in this state is often met with outright backwards movement on the same topic a short time later. Because of this, Corzine needs to make a real effort to make significant progress across these same fronts next year. And the biggest is the size of government.

Trenton should go on a full court press with incentives to get small school districts to share superintendents and other administrative personnel, multiple fire districts in towns to merge, police departments to go regional over several small boroughs, towns to share public works employees, county governments to share services and equipment with towns, etc.

Of course these are the sacred cows of New Jersey regional government.

Then there's the bloated state government with more than 80,000 employees. That has to shrink, significantly.

Lawmakers have so far avoided the type of fiscal reform that would lead to thousands of government jobs being eliminated. Yet that's really the next step for this state. Taxes can only be rebated so much if too many tax dollars continue to pay for a grossly over sized government. Despite being the third smallest state geographically, New Jersey has more municipalities per square mile -- 566 total -- than any other state, and has 615 school districts, more than Pennsylvania, Delaware and Maryland have combined.

Just under 9 million people live in the state of New Jersey. Of those, 37% are either below working age or over the age of 65. That leave 5.5 million people who are of working age. The private non-farm employment in this state is estimated around 3.5 million people. Why then do we make such a big deal of any reduction in the jobs of 80,000 people who work for the state? I know many people who have experienced job reductions in their "private" companies in excess of 15% over the past few years. Yet NJ state employment has grown.

I agree with the Courier Post. It is time for NJ to go on a diet.

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