Let New Jersey Join the E.U.

“New Jersey Faces a Transportation Funding Crisis, With No Clear Solution,” reads today’s New York Times headline. The story is pretty much what you’d expect: people in power ignoring or actively killing funds for infrastructure; steadily decreasing subsidies from Washington; a greater burden placed on commuters at the turnstile and the pump as problems mount and service gets worse.

It’s the same formula for failure we’ve had to deal with in Pennsylvania, but in New Jersey, it’s most acute. As I’ve been saying for years, demographically and economically New Jersey is less like a U.S. state than a small European country, with the same sort of challenges faced by Belgium or Denmark—only far, far less political will or government support available to meet them.

New Jersey is a small country forced to beg for scraps in Washington like every other state, its two senators contending with colleagues from Vermont and Montana for money from an ever-shrinking pie. New Jersey needs and deserves subsidies more than most other states— and not just because it pays more federal taxes than most of them. The Northeast is the lifeblood of the U.S. economy and living on New York City’s doorstep creates transportation and infrastructure needs unique to this hemisphere.