traderdave wrote:Well I think Christie at least deserves an atta boy for having the stones to tell it like it is and for saying what everybody is probably thinking anyway. And he did it knowing full well how incredibly unpopular it would be and will be.

Obviously it is wayyyyyy too early to start discussing such things but his reward for setting the state back on the right track could be one term and done because he would have rubbed too many people the wrong way to do it.

A new era of apocalypiticians...?

So, the cuts to schools will be interesting. Currently, according to NJ.com, NJ spends an average of 13,601 per student, an 8% increase from last year.

Average per child comparative costs in K-12 districts rose to $13,601 during the 2008-09 school year, compared to $12,598 the prior year, and $11,939 in 2006-07.

I dunno, but I think you could probably make due at 12k per kid.

Census gives a different figure. It seems NJ is 2nd in per pupil spending, at $15,691 in th 2006-7 year. I think a reasonable comparison might be CT, which in the same year got $12,979.

Something really weird--Wyoming was way up there--$13,217. You say, well, all those long distances and stuff. OK, but then why is Utah, with I would imagine similar issues, the lowest in the US at $5,683?

http://www2.census.gov/govs/school/07f33pub.pdf

Why the Mainstream Media Loves Palin

I thought this was fantastic from Politico

traderdave wrote:Obviously it is wayyyyyy too early to start discussing such things but his reward for setting the state back on the right track could be one term and done because he would have rubbed too many people the wrong way to do it.

Just like Florio. Funny how this stuff comes back around.

TenuredVulture wrote:So, the cuts to schools will be interesting. Currently, according to NJ.com, NJ spends an average of 13,601 per student, an 8% increase from last year.

Average per child comparative costs in K-12 districts rose to $13,601 during the 2008-09 school year, compared to $12,598 the prior year, and $11,939 in 2006-07.

I dunno, but I think you could probably make due at 12k per kid.

Census gives a different figure. It seems NJ is 2nd in per pupil spending, at $15,691 in th 2006-7 year. I think a reasonable comparison might be CT, which in the same year got $12,979.

Something really weird--Wyoming was way up there--$13,217. You say, well, all those long distances and stuff. OK, but then why is Utah, with I would imagine similar issues, the lowest in the US at $5,683?

http://www2.census.gov/govs/school/07f33pub.pdf

And therein lies a lot of NJ's problem. Per the school funding formula, the state says that the base cost of educating a student in NJ is around $10k. My district is spending between $14k and $16k per student (depending on where you look), which seems a bit on the high side to me and your figures definitely back that up.

Plenty of people have gone through the funding formula and approve of it but (having been studying it a bit the last couple of days) I simply cannot shake the feeling that there is double and triple counting going on, which favors districts with high numbers of "at risk" students.

jerseyhoya wrote:Why the Mainstream Media Loves Palin

I thought this was fantastic from Politico

I wonder who was saying something similar recently...

The left loves to mock her, the right rushes to defend her and folks in between seem to be fascinated by the whole spectacle.

We see it at POLITICO. Whenever there is a Palin story or blog post — and, yes, there have been many — the comments pile up in a way that they do on almost no other topic.

I thought you would like it

Though admittedly I wasn't stressing the right's reaction too much, but the right's reaction isn't very relevant in the context of these threads.

Loons in TX and Lynchburg VA are apparently out to "prove" that the US of A's founders were intent on doing God's work.

What a waste of energy.

Any schoolchild can see, without need of all the tippytoe parsing that 3rd-rate "academics" from Liberty University Law School like Cynthia Dunbar engage in, that Madison and his colleagues were not so concerned with whether church and state should be be commingled, as with curbing ANY institutional folderol; with striking a more prudent balance between individual and institution, whatever the latter's cultural role.

I loathe the Cindy Dunbars not because their delusional religiosity is so malignant; it's rather their tedious, conventional, predictable, fascistic, pathetic, & small-minded yearning merely to supplant one mode of oppressive institutional scaffolding with another.

If Madison et al hadn't separated church and state, we wouldn't have to deal with letting Baptists and other nuts vote. Really, getting rid of the Episcopal establishment turns out to be a big mistake.

Swiggers wrote:

traderdave wrote:Obviously it is wayyyyyy too early to start discussing such things but his reward for setting the state back on the right track could be one term and done because he would have rubbed too many people the wrong way to do it.

Just like Florio. Funny how this stuff comes back around.

I came to really dislike Christie during the campaign because it sounded to me like he had no intention of grappling seriously with NJ's structural/budgetary problems. Good on him for proving me wrong, and it's very smart tactically for any newly elected office holder to do the politically difficult stuff as early as possible, since it might be forgotten by re-election time and if it yields positive results, those might be evident by then.

But it should concern everyone that when guys like Florio come in and try to be responsible in office, they often get voted out in favor of panderers. I'm increasingly dubious on this whole democracy thing, to be honest with you.

dajafi wrote:

Swiggers wrote:

traderdave wrote:Obviously it is wayyyyyy too early to start discussing such things but his reward for setting the state back on the right track could be one term and done because he would have rubbed too many people the wrong way to do it.

Just like Florio. Funny how this stuff comes back around.

I came to really dislike Christie during the campaign because it sounded to me like he had no intention of grappling seriously with NJ's structural/budgetary problems. Good on him for proving me wrong, and it's very smart tactically for any newly elected office holder to do the politically difficult stuff as early as possible, since it might be forgotten by re-election time and if it yields positive results, those might be evident by then.

But it should concern everyone that when guys like Florio come in and try to be responsible in office, they often get voted out in favor of panderers. I'm increasingly dubious on this whole democracy thing, to be honest with you.

Sadly, I think that train is starting to get pretty crowded.

Question democracy all you want. Authoritarianism doesn't have a better track record.

TenuredVulture wrote:Question democracy all you want. Authoritarianism doesn't have a better track record.

That's because it's always been humans doing the authoriting. Put aliens or robots in charge, and boy howdy!

edit: or to put it another way, the problem isn't with democracy as a system, it's with we the voters. We're short-sighted, selfish, whiny morons who fail to understand or appreciate the distance between our desires and our means. I'm not sure we deserve democracy.

This is something I'm studying pretty carefully right now. The issue isn't whether voters don't do dumb things, or sometimes appear to hold contradictory positions. Enumerating the shortfalls with democratic governance is easy. But the shortfalls need to be compared to something.

There's some really interesting work by Phillip Tetlock (Expert Political Judgment is an outstanding, and scary book) which details the failures of elites and experts. It's not just that experts are sometimes wrong. They're systematically wrong, for reasons having to do with their background and training. To make it worse, they are not self-correcting. That is, it turns experts are often terrible Bayesians--they do not update predictions when new information becomes available to them. They stubbornly persist in holding onto predictions even when it is clear they are wrong.

Democracies, by contrast, for reasons that are becoming better understood, correct course much more readily. Now, this can be something of a fault from a certain perspective--Madison warned against a lack of constancy in the Federalist papers.

There's also work by Amartya Sen and I think Elinor Ostrom makes some interesting contributions here.

The point is that democracy isn't some Rousseauist ideal uniquely capable of identifying a general will. It's that democracy avoid making big mistakes.

dajafi wrote:But it should concern everyone that when guys like Florio come in and try to be responsible in office, they often get voted out in favor of panderers.

Florio didn't help himself by being so arrogant about it. Corzine had some of the same problems.

If Christie can try to do reform without the self-righteous attitude, it'll be interesting to see how that goes over.

Florio's problem I think was that he was really smart, but I think he was insecure about it.

Corzine, I don't think ever figured out that the skills that lead to success in the world of finance are very different from the ones that lead to success in politics.

Swiggers wrote:

dajafi wrote:But it should concern everyone that when guys like Florio come in and try to be responsible in office, they often get voted out in favor of panderers.

Florio didn't help himself by being so arrogant about it. Corzine had some of the same problems.

If Christie can try to do reform without the self-righteous attitude, it'll be interesting to see how that goes over.

Christie has been pretty arrogant how he's doing it so far. I'm pretty convinced his heart is in the right place, and he's targeting important reforms, but he's alienating the Dems in doing so much of this through the executive. I think Steve Sweeney's a pretty reasonable guy, and hopefully Christie can find a way to smooth things over with him. I don't know if I have much confidence in the Dem Assembly leadership. Joe Cryan is an asshole, and I don't know much about Oliver. Anyway, more like how he's tackling pension reform, and less of the emergency spending powers, and he'd probably be better off. It's still exciting that someone taking a hatchet to things and doesn't appear to care about being popular.

jerseyhoya wrote:

Swiggers wrote:

dajafi wrote:But it should concern everyone that when guys like Florio come in and try to be responsible in office, they often get voted out in favor of panderers.

Florio didn't help himself by being so arrogant about it. Corzine had some of the same problems.

If Christie can try to do reform without the self-righteous attitude, it'll be interesting to see how that goes over.

Christie has been pretty arrogant how he's doing it so far. I'm pretty convinced his heart is in the right place, and he's targeting important reforms, but he's alienating the Dems in doing so much of this through the executive. I think Steve Sweeney's a pretty reasonable guy, and hopefully Christie can find a way to smooth things over with him. I don't know if I have much confidence in the Dem Assembly leadership. Joe Cryan is an asshat, and I don't know much about Oliver. Anyway, more like how he's tackling pension reform, and less of the emergency spending powers, and he'd probably be better off. It's still exciting that someone taking a hatchet to things and doesn't appear to care about being popular.

I think the school thing might get people to go ape shit. Especially if there's increases in property taxes.

I think it's good to tilt at the sacred cows quickly though, for the reasons that others have alreay mentioned.