We pay the highest taxes in the country for a few reasons… first, 500 odd local municipalities with their own governments, schools, etc… that’s not cheap…. then you have some of our larger cities requiring taxpayer based support…and the north subsidizes the south county wise (kind of like a microcosm of the country)…. but, the biggest reason is that NJ is the most “independent” state of the federal government. What that means is that we are a donor state to the tune of 10’s of BILLIONS every year, with most of these funds going to red states… we only get back about 60 cents for every dollar to DC… Our reps on both sides totally shaft us… why does no one see that as an issue? If we got about 70 cents back for every buck, we could fund everything and run a surplus to boot… yeah, some of the pension stuff is over the top but no one says boo about the federal transfer of payments deficit that we have…