Before Chris Christie became the governor of New Jersey, he was actually not a bad thing for the state. A book I would highly recommend, the Soprano State, a book by two political reporters from the garden state drips with praise for the work Christie did as the US Attorney. I read the book before anybody thought Christie had a hope in hell of becoming governor and even then I thought that the praise was overdone, but clearly NJ needed the heavy something to fix things. Without an elected AG, New Jersey needed something. Was that something meant for governing, though? We found out tonight.
From a purely political standpoint you have admire Christie using the messed up, territorial, corrupt political system he long fought as US Atty to get what he wanted. Many New Jersey assembly and senate members held or have held other local jobs. That may on the surface explain why so many Democratic votes went to this bill. Stephen Sweeney, the Senate President, is from South Jersey, where from what I read, is from where a great deal of support for this bill came. South Jersey is a Balkanized Democratic machine. No doubt Christie did battle with the crooks down there on numerous occasions, but now he was able to use the strong-arm political techniques to deal a blow to organized labor in New Jersey.
What is particularly shocking about the bill is not even its contents, but its context. Granted I do not live in NJ nor know anybody who will be affected by this bill. However, there is no doubt that New Jersey is a state living well beyond its means. It spends too much on just about everything and much of that lard ends up in somebody's pocket. By that I do not mean the average state employee's pocket, of course. The result, is that the state has not been contributing to the pension fund. Democrats and Republicans, including Christie, are both guilty of this. Employees have paid their contributions, however.
So the increase in the pension contributions, whatever the cost to individuals is not obscene because of how much it is, but because it comes as a way to bail out the state for not contributing to the fund itself. However, to actually clear out a lot of the waste in New Jersey would run afoul of the South Jersey political establishment...and probably more than a few Republican establishments mid-state. Taxes, well, forget about it.
What is unseemly is the end to cost-of-living increases and a firm right of unions to bargain on health care, their only trump card. First ending cost of living increase in state pensions is just cruel. Expensive as increases may be, what good is a retirement if inflation eventually outgrows the pension's value? That approach was what countries like Greece used to do before they joined a currency that they could not undervalue. Unfortunately, New Jersey uses the dollar, which will rise at the same rate in NJ as elsewhere even as retirees are like holders of undervalued debt. Promised the same amount of money, that happens to be worth less.
As for the bargaining on health care, that speaks to a broader problem. In fact it appears that that health care provision is not unlike the one unions agreed to in Massachusetts and passed by the Senate in Boston. However, as with the health care cost fight here, making employees pay more does not solve the net problem: health care costs. If you stand for responsible government you cannot dismiss out of hand increasing employee health contributions. However, you must look at them with skepticism if they come without any meaningful efforts to reduce health care costs. That means efforts more meaningful than tort reform alone. I won't go into what can be done to reduce those costs, but I will say there are things that could be done on the state level to reduce costs, but nobody has the will to do them. I feel for local governments concerns about health care costs. I live in a poor city in Massachusetts. The costs are very real, here. However, real bravery would go after the source of high health insurance costs, that is the high health care costs themselves. In New Jersey, you are merely passing the buck to the employees while doing nothing to stop the problem, which coincidentally would help the private sector as well.
Oddly some of these reforms were started under Christie's predecessor. However, Jon Corzine was not nearly as extreme and, despite being something of buffoon, may have been better to seek incremental change. Why? Because Americans do not like radical change and this bill will only inflame unions and embolden Christie resulting in an even more toxic Trenton. The loser will be, yes the employees, but also taxpayers who will not get the real reforms they need while not getting the services they demand.
New Jersey has a lot of problems, particularly in the fiscal column. However, merely because an idea is bold, like those of Christie's, does not mean it is actually the solution. In Chris Christie's case, his "bold'' solutions are not what New Jersey needs. His solutions, repackaged and loaded with unflattering attitude, are the same "wonder drugs" New Jersey pols of times past have hawked. What New Jersey needs to do is treat causes not symptoms and invest in prevention, not cures.