New Jersey isn’t particularly unaffordable, when you consider wages in addition to cost of living. Looking at raw cost of living puts New Jersey as the 10th least affordable state (it slides to #11 if you include DC). It runs about 121% of the national average cost of living. Here’s the thing though, the median income in New Jersey is roughly 130% of the national average. If you divide the incomes and costs of living to get an adjusted cost of living New Jersey comes out as the 11th most affordable state. It isn’t super scientific, different source years for the data and the general issues with manipulating a median, but it tracks with where we actually see people having the most cost difficulties, places like Hawaii and Mississippi, and less difficulties, like Virginia and Minnesota.
Have you looked at just about any other state in the union, though? The modern system of governance really breeds corruption across the board… I’m not sure that NY and NJ are any more or less corrupt than just about any other state… I just think that some places manage to hide their corruption better.
One of the worst tactics we’ve seen in the past decade is undermining pensions (through defunding or underfunding), claiming later that the costs are too high for the state to cover (a blatant lie), and then calling it a crisis (that the governors themselves created). The endgame is to demonize public employees who still have pensions while stoking private sector taxpayer anger by saying that’s the main reason their taxes will be increased. Some pols consider that to be a win-win, but taxpayers should take a good hard look at the big picture: https://www.goodjobsfirst.org/statepensions
