Bahahahahahahahahahahahaha

Research 2000 goes after Nate and 538

jerseyhoya wrote:This is unbelievable

It seems Research 2000 was basically just making up their numbers

...the even-odd property should match about half the time, just like the odds of getting both heads or both tails if you tossed a penny and nickel. If you were to toss the penny and the nickel 18 times (like the 18 entries in the first two columns of the table) you would expect them to show about the same number of heads, but would rightly be shocked if they each showed exactly the same random-looking pattern of heads and tails.

Were the results in our little table a fluke? The R2K weekly polls report 778 M-F pairs. For their favorable ratings (Fav), the even-odd property matched 776 times. For unfavorable (Unf) there were 777 matches.

Common sense says that that result is highly unlikely, but it helps to do a more precise calculation. Since the odds of getting a match each time are essentially 50%, the odds of getting 776/778 matches are just like those of getting 776 heads on 778 tosses of a fair coin. Results that extreme happen less than one time in 10228. That’s one followed by 228 zeros.

so chi-squared

I have to give Governor Christie credit, he's a good deal smarter than I thought. Everything in the New Jersey budget is going down (or simply not being paid for) except direct state services which are going up 1.5% including more than a 15% increase in unspecified "interdepartmental" allocations, to a total of over $6.5 billion. So while the things the State has control over don't have to take any hit at all, everyone else is told-"here's less. If you weren't so irresponsible it would be plenty." Finger-wagging is always a lot more satisfying than tough choices, particularly when you get credit for both.

worst person in the world: thurgood marshall

who knew?

swishnicholson wrote:I have to give Governor Christie credit, he's a good deal smarter than I thought. Everything in the New Jersey budget is going down (or simply not being paid for) except direct state services which are going up 1.5% including more than a 15% increase in unspecified "interdepartmental" allocations, to a total of over $6.5 billion. So while the things the State has control over don't have to take any hit at all, everyone else is told-"here's less. If you weren't so irresponsible it would be plenty." Finger-wagging is always a lot more satisfying than tough choices, particularly when you get credit for both.

Well that's not fair. I'm not really sure what those things are that went up (source for that?), but I suppose a big part of the spending on state services is state employees and Corzine worked out a deal with unionized state employees to make sure his election year budget worked at the expense of the following year's budget. And I'm pretty sure gutting the property tax rebates is something that people recognize as coming from the state.

jerseyhoya wrote:

swishnicholson wrote:I have to give Governor Christie credit, he's a good deal smarter than I thought. Everything in the New Jersey budget is going down (or simply not being paid for) except direct state services which are going up 1.5% including more than a 15% increase in unspecified "interdepartmental" allocations, to a total of over $6.5 billion. So while the things the State has control over don't have to take any hit at all, everyone else is told-"here's less. If you weren't so irresponsible it would be plenty." Finger-wagging is always a lot more satisfying than tough choices, particularly when you get credit for both.

Well that's not fair. I'm not really sure what those things are that went up (source for that?), but I suppose a big part of the spending on state services is state employees and Corzine worked out a deal with unionized state employees to make sure his election year budget worked at the expense of the following year's budget. And I'm pretty sure gutting the property tax rebates is something that people recognize as coming from the state.

Well, it comes right from the budget statement issued by the Christie administration, but while you'll find a lot of puffery and unsubstantiated statements of HOW BAD THINGS WOULD HAVE BEEN WERE IT NOT FOR ME, you'll find surprisingly few hard numbers, particularly, as I say, in the areas where spending increases occurred.

I have little sympathy for the salary increase argument. Isn't that what he's telling municipalities to do? To reopen contracts and force unionized workers to make sacrifices based on budget realities? I'm not going to argue whether this is a good idea or a bad idea. I'm simply saying that Christie couldn't manage it and has masterfully misdirected anger and responsibility away from himself.

I have to admit, I never understood property tax rebates. Really. Where DID this money come from? As far as I was concerned, i paid my taxes and hoped they did something useful with it. The last thing I wanted to do was to pay someone to mail it back to me. I'd give a big hurrah for this if it were actually increasing State or municipal services. But it has nothing to do with my point except perhaps to lend support to it. Not sending money out to individual citizens does nothing to indicate that you have actually trimmed what you've characterized as a wasteful and overblown state government. It just means you've kept more money without making any intrinsic changes and left it up to the municipalities to do all the hard work.

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GqnjzONrPiA&feature=player_embedded[/youtube]

I saw that ad, and I call bs--any fool can fire off a few rounds--but no evidence she actually hit anything. I want to see the targets.

Some nasty operative could have fun mashing up the clip of her firing off the machine gun and bin Laden doing same.

swishnicholson wrote:

jerseyhoya wrote:

swishnicholson wrote:I have to give Governor Christie credit, he's a good deal smarter than I thought. Everything in the New Jersey budget is going down (or simply not being paid for) except direct state services which are going up 1.5% including more than a 15% increase in unspecified "interdepartmental" allocations, to a total of over $6.5 billion. So while the things the State has control over don't have to take any hit at all, everyone else is told-"here's less. If you weren't so irresponsible it would be plenty." Finger-wagging is always a lot more satisfying than tough choices, particularly when you get credit for both.

Well that's not fair. I'm not really sure what those things are that went up (source for that?), but I suppose a big part of the spending on state services is state employees and Corzine worked out a deal with unionized state employees to make sure his election year budget worked at the expense of the following year's budget. And I'm pretty sure gutting the property tax rebates is something that people recognize as coming from the state.

Well, it comes right from the budget statement issued by the Christie administration, but while you'll find a lot of puffery and unsubstantiated statements of HOW BAD THINGS WOULD HAVE BEEN WERE IT NOT FOR ME, you'll find surprisingly few hard numbers, particularly, as I say, in the areas where spending increases occurred.

I have little sympathy for the salary increase argument. Isn't that what he's telling municipalities to do? To reopen contracts and force unionized workers to make sacrifices based on budget realities? I'm not going to argue whether this is a good idea or a bad idea. I'm simply saying that Christie couldn't manage it and has masterfully misdirected anger and responsibility away from himself.

I have to admit, I never understood property tax rebates. Really. Where DID this money come from? As far as I was concerned, i paid my taxes and hoped they did something useful with it. The last thing I wanted to do was to pay someone to mail it back to me. I'd give a big hurrah for this if it were actually increasing State or municipal services. But it has nothing to do with my point except perhaps to lend support to it. Not sending money out to individual citizens does nothing to indicate that you have actually trimmed what you've characterized as a wasteful and overblown state government. It just means you've kept more money without making any intrinsic changes and left it up to the municipalities to do all the hard work.

State workers aren't as good of a target as the local employees because they already made the concessions (specifically contributing to their own healthcare) that Christie wanted the teachers and other local employees to make. There was less to be gained from concessions from them. Additionally in their contract, they had the built in raise if furloughs/layoffs were tried before next year so you would have to make substantial reductions in numbers to make it cost effective. He could have asked them to reopen their contract, but they had no incentive to because the stick (furloughs/layoffs) he could have used to threaten them was essentially taken away by Corzine in the prior deal. Teacher's unions had the very real incentive of cooperating to prevent their members losing their jobs. I wouldn't be surprised if next year Christie makes more of a concerted effort to go after the state workforce.

Jeez, I'm trying to compliment the guy jersey. "The Teflon Zeppelin" is the moniker I'm thinking of. But it won't stick, because he's, um, teflonic.

I think it's a tremendous achievement for someone to neither reduce the size of government nor cut taxes-in fact, to in effect raise taxes significantly by cutting out rebates and forcing communities to individually generate previously shared funds-and yet to gain the reputation as someone who has done both. So much so that he can hitch his bully pulpit to the caboose and go on a whistlestop tour preaching austerity. Add to that the magnificent 180 degree turn he's made in converting property taxes from being nearly universally regarded as an inequitable solution for funding education to the only possible solution, and I think there's true genius there-when state government's the problem rather than the solution people generally stop looking to you for answers, leaving more time for hectoring greedy second grade teachers.

Good for him.

I guess we have a different definition of what constitutes reducing the size of government. His budget was about 5% less than last years, and that was accomplished without over $1 billion in federal stimulus money. The savings were on the grants and aid side of the budget, which accounts for about 3/4 of state spending.

In the direct state spending portion the budget only went up 1.5%, or less than $100 million in spite of a $300 million increase in state employee salaries that Christie was committed to by the previous administration that was trying to squeeze through an election year budget without pissing off one of their most important constituencies - public sector union employees.

Additionally Christie is taking real steps to try and slow the long term growth of the state and local budget by attacking root causes, and has made various issues of the debate part of the public discussion for the first time. He has won important concessions from many of the local teachers unions from around the state, made a start on pension reform, and is now pushing the 2.5% property tax cap that will hopefully become a solution to slow the growth of unaffordable property tax payments.

I'm not sure why you think Christie has gained the reputation as someone who has cut taxes. Do people think he has cut their taxes? He certainly doesn't talk about having cut taxes, but rather discusses regularly that the problem is on the spending side, not the revenue one. Rome wasn't built in a day, and New Jersey's budget problems won't be solved overnight, especially with a Democratic legislature that is pushing back on key parts of the Governor's plan. But we're in a better place today than we were a year ago, and a better place than we'd be if Corzine had been reelected.

"We're in a better place" is a true statement only if you're looking at the the balance sheet, and even that's not assured since revenue projections are always somewhat of a guess and with no new revenue sources explored and some that were in place suspended things could easily turn the other way. And I'm not going to debate about Corzine-I didn't vote for him even having a good idea of what we were getting with Christie.

Christie can weigh in on local teacher union contracts and limiting property taxes all he wishes-his opinion doesn't hold any more legal weight than yours or mine. It's an easy way to enhance his reputation without having to do the actual work of deciding where to cut spending. The property tax limitation is silly-municipalities already have it in their power to limit tax increases, this just adds another layer of government and legal obstructions to arrive at the figure the community finds to be equitable.

I'm repeating myself now so I'll cut out. We're not going to find much common ground anyway since I define the strength of a community, including the larger state community, by how well it provides shared services to its citizens. Show me a place with great parks, schools, libraries, cultural and recreational opportunities, support for the poor and elderly, etc. and that's where I want to be. Others, I guess, want to be in a place that impinges on them in the most limited way possible.

That, of course, is my main problem with Christie, rather than the credit he receives for largely non-existent reforms. Is there any way in the world that Christie is moving New Jersey in the direction of a state that provides more, and more equitable, funding for it's schools, that seeks better protection for its environment, that cares for parks so they shine and supports cities as vital places to work and live, even should economic conditions provide available resources to do so? Of course not. And in the short term I'm going to be paying more in taxes this year and "enjoying" state supported entities with reduced hours and curtailed services. So I'm not really ready to join in the applause.

Pols in our setup seldom directly bring about any betterment for their jurisdictions themselves. Certainly it's much more often the case that they take credit for improvements that come about while they hold office, or positions relevant to the improvements. That sort of comes with the territory.

Often the appeal, or lack thereof, of a candidate or officeholder is the extent to which they embroider their role in positive developments, or declaim them in the case of emergent problems. While it certainly has many other dimensions as well, Swish's Christie summary is illustrative.

The most awesomest race evah?

Phan In Phlorida wrote:The most awesomest race evah?

The winner is deliciousness.

dajafi wrote:

Phan In Phlorida wrote:The most awesomest race evah?

The winner is deliciousness.

A race in which almost everyone can be satisfied with the winning candidate, and for which the extent and variety of fanciful write-in candidates can only be imagined

From the Lindsey Graham profile in the NY Times:

On four occasions, Graham met with Tea Party groups. The first, in his Senate office, was "very, very contentious," he recalled. During a later meeting, in Charleston, Graham said he challenged them: " 'What do you want to do? You take back your country — and do what with it?'… Everybody went from being kind of hostile to just dead silent."

I'm not sure how much of a 'maverick' he is other than he simply seems willing to actually, you know, try and legislate, unlike many of his current Republican brethren. I still don't agree with most of what he wants, but at least he's trying to work towards solutions.

pacino wrote:From the Lindsey Graham profile in the NY Times:

On four occasions, Graham met with Tea Party groups. The first, in his Senate office, was "very, very contentious," he recalled. During a later meeting, in Charleston, Graham said he challenged them: " 'What do you want to do? You take back your country — and do what with it?'… Everybody went from being kind of hostile to just dead silent."

translation: they didn't give him any money

David Brooks with a get-well card to (or pre-eulogy for) Christopher Hitchins, which semi-self-consciously makes a case for David Brooks as the bizarro Hitchins