By John Farmer Jr.

It's become a ritual of gubernatorial transition in New Jersey: the incoming governor expresses "shock" at the dismal state of New Jersey's finances, thus setting up his predecessor as the scapegoat for what will become -- because it has been -- every administration's failure: to resolve New Jersey's crisis of affordability.

Granted, Gov.-elect Phil Murphy's way of expressing concern -- by quoting then-Gov.-elect Chris Christie's own words to Gov. Jon Corzine back to Christie eight years later -- is a bit more pointed than in prior transitions. But the dynamic is unchanged, as is the stark reality that threatens to make New Jersey ungovernable: We pay too much in taxes, and it's never enough.

New Jerseyans have been for years among the most highly taxed citizens in the nation, but our tax revenues cannot keep pace with the state's commitments -- to schoolchildren, to the poor, to the elderly, to public employees such as police, firefighters and teachers, and to the provision of local and county services.

To make matters worse, as the population ages and costs escalate, the amounts that the state pays in pension and health benefits to public employees at every level of government are increasingly leaving New Jersey's economy -- as seniors and others choose to move to warmer and more affordable states. Our population growth, among the lowest in the nation, cannot keep pace with that of other states or with steady increases in the cost of obligations, resulting in pressure to raise taxes further.

It isn't hard to envision the result if nothing intervenes to change this dynamic: a death spiral, the statewide equivalent to what many cities have experienced, in which a shrinking tax base is asked to pay higher and higher taxes, which causes the tax base to shrink further. New Jersey lost one congressional seat as a result of the 2010 census; we will struggle to maintain our 12 seats after the 2020 census.

Hence the perpetual blame game. But the finger-pointing masks a fundamental question: Why have so many well-meaning administrations been unable to solve the affordability crisis?

The answer, in my opinion, lies in its seldom-mentioned root cause: our state's stalled revolution.

Seventy years ago, the framers of our modern state constitution, weary of trying without success to advance New Jersey's interest as a state, sought to overcome the centrifugal force of warring local interests by establishing several institutions with statewide reach, empowered to achieve statewide objectives.

They created an office of the governor with unprecedented power, with the ability to pocket-veto all legislation, to line-item veto appropriations, to appoint judges and prosecutors, and to reorganize the executive departments of government by executive order, among other powers.

They established the attorney general as an independent constitutional officer with statewide law-enforcement authority over the prosecutors and police throughout the state. They wrested control of the county courts away from local authorities, creating a statewide judiciary and vesting supervisory authority over the courts in a powerful Supreme Court.

Finally, they designated Rutgers, the original land-grant college, as the State University of New Jersey, adding campuses in Newark and Camden to assure that, as the state's university, Rutgers would speak and act with a statewide perspective.

Much has been achieved by successive administrations to advance New Jersey's standing as a state as a product of the revolution that began in 1947. Among other measures, New Jersey built the Turnpike and Parkway, preserved the Pinelands and Highlands and tens of thousands of other acres around the state, attracted major sports teams from New York by building the Meadowlands Sports Complex, and enacted statewide sales and income taxes to address radical disparities in funding for essential services that existed among affluent suburban and impoverished urban districts. "Jersey justice," as delivered by its courts, was transformed from a national joke to a national model.

The state increased dramatically its support for education generally and for the poorest school districts, and completed the largest merger of public higher education in history by adding medical and dental schools to Rutgers.

All the while, however, the costs associated with governance have been escalating, exposing the revolution in governance as perhaps fatally incomplete. For in putting in place institutions capable of advancing statewide interests, New Jersey left undisturbed the structures that have served to advance local interests. The result was that local and state interests have taxed in parallel. In enacting the statewide taxes, which were supposed to lessen dependence on locally levied and regressive property taxes, the state has never required a corresponding offset as a condition of receiving state aid.

Put simply, the state added -- and then built upon -- additional layers of statewide taxation without eliminating, or even circumscribing the growth of, the existing layers of local taxation supporting county and municipal government. State aid came to be taken for granted; in a perverse way the assurance of state aid made it easier to raise property taxes, and the availability of so many revenue streams made it possible to negotiate public pension and health benefits and to implement other programs that, it has become clear, the state simply cannot afford.

Although the issue received scant attention during his campaign, Murphy will be judged in large part by his ability to address our state's crisis of affordability. Many admirable programs have been advanced by prior administrations to mitigate the effect of our stalled revolution by slowing the growth of property taxes and curbing pension and health benefits. But stopgap measures can no longer suffice.

We have reached a point where the crisis of affordability can be addressed only by revisiting and completing our state's revolutionary transformation. This will require an eight-year commitment to making the hard choices -- curtailing benefits, consolidating layers of government -- that have been seen as politically impossible for 70 years. It will require taking decisive steps to complete our stalled revolution.

New Jersey begins the Murphy era as a state in transition; without sober and deliberate gubernatorial leadership, he will leave us a state on the brink.

John Farmer Jr. was New Jersey's attorney general on Sept. 11, 2001. A former senior counsel to the 9/11 Commission, he is a university professor and special counsel to the president of Rutgers University.

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