Exodus from Philadelphia and New Jersey - Very Troubling New Research on U-Haul Rates

You would not know it if you relied on the main stream press in New Jersey but the migration of people out of state is accelerating. Last February I started keeping track of the U-Haul rate differences between key cities including my home town Wayne New Jersey and Austin Texas.  How much to rent a truck to go to Austin From Wayne and vise a versa. The rate difference supported the anecdotal evidence, people were leaving New Jersey - the cost to leave was nearly twice as much as to go to New Jersey.  Later in the year I checked again several times and around September the cost difference rose to 2.4 times more expensive to go to Austin than to come from there.

The Hippies begot the Hipsters, hipsters begot ... ??? 

I also compared rates with Chicago witch was 3 to 1 and San Francisco 2 to 1. They have basically stayed the same.

Today I took a fresh look at the numbers they have changed drastically, they are much worse for New Jersey. The migration out of New Jersey based on my admittedly simplistic and non scientific analysis though arguably a strong assessment point has exploded to a record pace.  In the last census period as I recall New Jersey lost a congressional seat. At the current pace they may loose another.

Click for data

More fundamentally is the concentration of the massive debts of New Jersey. The unfunded liabilities among the worst in the nation on a per capita basis. That burden will be born by a contracting population. This will be reflected in all aspects of New Jersean's lives, from jobs to home prices to business opportunities to public safety.

And of course increasing property taxes. Taxes that are already the highest in the nation.

Where did New Jersey go wrong?  So wrong and seemingly so fast?

What can we learn from New Jersey's plight?

First let me dispel the speed, frankly this is the slowest train wreck in history, the price of a ticket, simply pennies worth of thoughts,   the obfuscation, ... priceless. Well, not quit priceless, that's just a saying, it will be anything but priceless.

Simple, two accounting standards = two classes of society.  We have lots more than two sets of accounting standards, suffice to say FASB and GASB are at the core. These two sets of standards enabled  the fraud and deception of the voters regarding their financial obligations to the retirement plans of their public employees.  What was illegal under one standard FASB was tactical under the other GASB.

The generation that has led the state of New Jersey to the brink of ruin.

Arguably the high schoolers of the 60s and 70s, now the teachers and leaders of today. It is this generations half baked liberalism that has shaped our today.  Ironic is it not that yesterday's "flower children" turned into today's "blooming idiots".

America's Clueless Generation, the self righteous anti establishmentarians have now taken over and consumed the establishment, in doing so they have morphed it into a parasitic sponge, consuming the aspirational soul of generations and more fundamentally creating a corporatist culture that has plagued opportunity in America, squashing the drive of individualism and creating barriers to our former freedoms.

Scary days lie ahead for New Jersey and the Nation but as I see it, the sooner the cancers of America are brought to the surface and exposed to the light of truth the sooner the solutions to our future can be found.