NJ is so screwed up this 3-year-old law was never implemented

This is not a story about support for a law. This is not a story in favor of new laws. We have too many. This is a story about complete incompetence and proof that New Jersey government is too big, too clunky, and too ineffective.

We begin three years ago. The legislature passed a bill that would help folks who work for small businesses save some money toward retirement. It would create a virtual marketplace for small businesses to comparison shop private retirement plans that were pre-vetted by our state government. The idea was to make it simple for small business owners to give their workers a way to automatically deduct from their paychecks into a safe retirement account.

Chris Christie signed it into law three years ago. His signature ushered in the age of the Small Business Retirement Marketplace. Well, it was supposed to.

You see, it became law with Christie's signature and then nothing happened. His administration never implemented it. Nothing happened. For years. Then, only 7 days before Chris Christie left office, some three years after this law which was supposed to be implemented immediately, his Treasury Department finally took a small first step by issuing a request for information from financial services firms. It was all meaningless as Phil Murphy, sworn in as governor days later, changed everything in favor of a different plan.

I'm not advocating for or speaking out against the virtual marketplace law. The bigger issue here is how screwed up New Jersey is. The government is too big. The left hand doesn't know what the right hand is doing. Keep in mind, we're not talking about something that became law and just wasn't enforced, like those silly outdated laws you hear about like where it's illegal to put a whistle on a bicycle. This is a law that was created then the work to launch it was simply not done. How does this happen? Like I said, government is too big. We have been taught to overly rely on a state government which has grown to overregulate.

If something this major can fall between the cracks, imagine the countless examples of waste that must be out there? It would be interesting to see how much money we taxpayers could be saving if independent efficiency experts and auditors were to be given complete access and a fine toothed comb to go through all this government does. Of course, the government itself would hire those firms, and the politicians would give those jobs to a donor's sister's husband and nothing would ever change.

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