Have Fun Cleaning Up Christie's Mess, Jersey

The biggest problem with the "small government" crowd's fantasy is that it both can't and shouldn't be done, and when they try to, they leave us with a mess to clean up after. Reagan left Bush and Clinton his mess, Dubbya left Obama a house-fire, and it happens in state capitols every couple years. They refuse to raise taxes, can't get legislative support from anyone sane to cut education, infrastructure, or public safety spending, and instead go into gimmick land and wreck the government's books. Their successor takes over and has to clean up after them.

Well New Jersey, it's about to be your turn. You thought Chris Christie was cool. You fell in love with his personality. You loved his "no-nonsense" talk. You bought into a fraud who's quietly turning your state into a wasteland almost as bad as our's is in neighboring Pennsylvania. He's talking with Cuomo about privatizing PATH. He won't tax millionaires. He won't build the transit-tunnel that is desperately needed to New York. His idea of reform at the Port Authority was political punishment for Fort Lee. He pulled out of the regional greenhouse gas project. He gave the Sixers a taxpayer funded practice facility in Camden. Oh, he basically made Camden get rid of their police force too. I could go on and on. He's a disaster of a governor, and well, you elected him, twice. Easily the second time too.

Well, sometime in the near future the rooster's coming home to roost. Christie continued the trend of not funding the state's pension fund. In effect, he never really balanced his books, but that's for another day. He skipped mandatory payments, and the fund hasn't paid out cost-of-living increases in recent years. Currently, his irresponsible actions are in court, and his successor is likely to have to pay out huge payments to clean up his mess. This isn't limited to pensions though- Christie did this with property tax rebates too, simply delaying and skipping payments when he decided he didn't have the funds. That has to get paid too. He'll have to clean up several of the messes in the last paragraph too, or leave those to his successor too. In other words, someone has to be accountable for this mess.

Christie wants to high-tail it out of Jersey before he is responsible for his failures. He wants to get out before everyone realizes that he killed job creation, cut the top rated schools in the nation when he took over, and cancelled a tunnel into New York City that would have created thousands of permanent jobs. He wants to get out while people don't realize what an overmatched imbecile he is. He wants to leave New Jersey to clean up after his disaster.