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Comment by JPKab | Hacker News Reader

How many folks on HN have witnessed this same very thing within large mega-corps and government agencies? I've seen it a LOT.

The big bummer is that the crisis almost requires enabling behavior here, in the sense that if there are things wrong with said COBOL system, it's the fault of the NJ gov't for not fixing it a long time ago. People should rescue this for the sake of the unemployed, but can we please fire people for this?

This isn't a red state: They collect plenty of revenue. So IF IT IS COBOL SYSTEM, and not just bureaucrats, it's still NJ's fault.

As Bezos said recently regarding the Seattle city gov't:

They don't have a revenue problem. They have a spending efficiency problem.

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> This isn't a red state: They collect plenty of revenue.

They spend even more. NJ is in the worst spot out of all the states:

https://www.truthinaccounting.org/news/detail/financial-stat...

> This isn't a red state: They collect plenty of revenue.

Part of this revenue collection (tax policy) is why corps are moving en masse, the recent largest example is Honeywell's relocation to Charlotte. NJ's latest tax hike has actually caused them a net loss in revenue.

NJ seems to be on the bad side of the Laffer curve.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laffer_curve

How it affected their expenses? A big corp leaving lessens services utilization which might help if NJ was paying a hefty premium for over-using their infrastructure.

A good theory but doesn't apply here, but I did leave out a key piece of info: the largest drop has actually been in income tax ala large hedge fund managers who have fled the state. Carolina Panthers owner and billionaire David Tepper is one recent-ish high profile example, but there are many others. Corps like Honeywell aren't an infrequent sight either. New Jersey's revenue has fallen YoY since the loss of Tepper et all.

The insane part of me here is NJ politicians keep clamoring to raise taxes more. It's almost as if they heard De Blasio's campaign slogan and thought it was a great idea.

I was surprised to find it's not california or new york that have the highest taxes, New Jersey has the highest taxes in the nation.

I was reading more in depth about this NJ tax situation recently. Apparently a lot of it has to do with how they divided up counties into tiny municipalities, and each one gets its own public services such as firefighters/EMTs, police, etc.-- which of course all have solid pension plans.

If they consolidated and streamlined, it would be much more efficient, but there are numerous barriers to this (not least of which how eliminating a bunch of those jobs would go over with the public). They're likely going to have to do something eventually, they just haven't figured out how yet.

Yeah, I feel like as much as we programmers like to make believe that we can re-architect our programs and it'll solve all of the problems, often times the problems are up the chain with the design of the product.

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