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Comment by reliabilityguy | Hacker News Reader

NJ, in areas with good schools, has higher property taxes.

And I'm sure we can find places with higher property taxes than those New Jersey examples.

I don't understand your point or why you are sure of that? New Jersey consistently ranks as having the highest average property tax rate of any state, and it also has relatively high income tax rates.

This is mainly caused by having a ridiculous number of tiny towns and tiny school districts, each with redundant services and employees.

Redundant may be a strong word. NJ ranks at the top of the states for public schools, e.g. https://www.usnews.com/news/best-states/rankings/education

NJ has effectively a publicly operated system of private schools where the tuition is the tax burden.

My small NJ town has its own school district, containing a single K-8 school. Yet it has both a superintendent and a principal.

Grades 9-12 feed into a regional high school, which also has its own school district containing just that school. It also has its own superintendent and principal.

I don't think "redundant" is a strong word for this situation.

How many employees at each of those schools? How much management? Is the manager / employee ratio lower or higher than where you work?

Sorry but I'm not spending an hour doing math on employee counts just to satisfy an HN commenter. There's no universe where it is sane and reasonable to have 4 separate highly-paid school superintendents in a 3-town area (towns feeding into the regional HS) with total population of only 25k, especially as these schools don't even rank particularly well.

And that's not even accounting for the principals. Think of it this way: if a country's navy has only a single boat, does it really need both an admiral and a captain?

My point was that NJ has places with higher property taxes, and people still move into those places by choice.

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