New Jersey has been trying to run us off for years — we’re still here

At some point in the last few years — maybe late at night, maybe after opening the property tax bill, maybe after the insurance renewal came in higher than the year before, which was already higher than the year before that — you did the math. You sat there with a pen or a spreadsheet or just your own head and you ran the numbers. And the numbers did not work.

You know what you did next. You closed the laptop. You went to bed. You got up in the morning and drove to work.

That is not denial. That is not naivety. That is something more specific to this place and the people who have chosen to stay in it. It is defiance. Quiet, stubborn, completely unreasonable defiance. And I think it is time we named it for what it is.

Update, September 23: Since this ran in June, my other piece on the people actually leaving went a little viral, over 400,000 views and counting. Worth reading both sides of this. Because the truth is, both things are happening at once, and neither one cancels the other out.

What this state has actually put us through

Let's be clear about what we are defying. New Jersey has the highest property taxes in the country — averaging over $10,000 a year statewide, well past $12,000 in Bergen, Essex and Morris counties. The auto insurance rates that make out-of-state people's eyes go wide when we tell them what we pay. The utility bills that stopped being predictable years ago. The tolls that keep going up while the roads they are supposed to fund keep falling apart. The gas tax. The estate tax. The cost of simply existing here that compounds year after year in ways that no single bill captures but that you feel in your chest every time you check your bank account.

And then there is Trenton. Thirty years of promised reform that never arrived. Thirty years of governors and legislators telling the people who love this state the most that relief is on the way. Stay NJ was supposed to be different — a real program, real money, real acknowledgment that the people who stayed deserved something back.

That fight didn't end the way either side wanted. The final budget cut those payments to a new maximum of $4,875, short of the $6,500 that was originally promised, and higher than the $4,000 Sherrill had proposed cutting it to. Nobody got what they were fighting for. The people who stayed just got a smaller check than they were told to expect, and stayed anyway.

SEE ALSO: Your Stay NJ check really is half of what you got before. Here's why.

FILE- In this April 21, 2011, file photo, cars pass through the toll booths at the Garden State Parkway's Asbury toll plaza near Tinton Falls, N.J. Although the average drive grudgingly pays tolls for highways, bridges and tunnels, some go to great lengths to beat those tolls. Many of those drivers have racked up thousands of dollars in unpaid tolls and related fees that can lead to theft and other criminal charges. (AP Photo/Mel Evans, File)

What that actually says about us

I have been around this station for 27 years. I have been in New Jersey radio off and on for 48. We have taken this call ten thousand times — the person who did the math, who cannot make it work, who is calling from a new house in Florida or the Carolinas or Tennessee with that particular lightness in their voice that tells you they finally exhaled.

I understand that call completely. I am not dismissing it. The people who left made a rational decision that a lot of people who stayed have quietly thought about making themselves.

But here is the thing about the ones who are still here. They have done the math too. Every one of them. They know the numbers. They are not staying because they cannot figure out that it is cheaper somewhere else. They are staying because leaving would mean something they are not willing to accept.

New Jersey is not going to beat them. That is the decision. Not a financial one. Not a logical one. A temperamental one. A deeply, specifically Jersey one.

We are not a state that produces people who quit when things get hard. We are a state that produces people who fight the traffic on Route 1 every single morning and show up anyway. People who pay the property tax bill and mow the lawn the same afternoon. People who watch Trenton break a promise, get angry about it on the radio, and vote in the next election. We complain louder than anyone and leave less than anyone and those two facts are not a contradiction. They are the same thing.

The math we are actually doing

When New Jersey residents do the math at midnight and close the laptop and go to bed, they are not choosing to ignore the numbers. They are choosing to weigh them against something the spreadsheet cannot capture.

The neighborhood. The family two towns over. The Shore in August. The diner at midnight. The friends from third grade who are still within driving distance. The identity that was built here and that does not fully transplant no matter how nice the new house is.

That is not sentiment. That is a calculation. It just uses different inputs than the property tax bill.

And yes, there is something else in there too. Something less poetic and more honest. We are still here partly because this state does not get to win. It has been raising every bill and breaking every promise and testing our patience for over thirty years and we are still here, still paying, still showing up, still calling the station, still arguing about it, still flying the flag.

New Jersey has not beaten us…yet.

Trenton, that stubbornness is an asset you keep treating like a given. The people who are still here after everything this state has cost them are not an inexhaustible resource.

We are still here. For now, that has to be enough. But it is not a permanent condition. It is a decision that gets made again every year when the bill arrives.