Using a comparison of 2 states to show the (bad) effect of the types of cuts the Republicans are fo

NJ is an affluent state with an abundance of jobs in R&D and in Finance. It is also a state where high school kids are among the top performing in the country. It also has a significant number of older urban centers that were once successful cities. Another state that could be described similarly is MA.

Since Governor Christie was elected in 2009, you can think of these two states as if they were testing the republican and the Democratic economic solutions. From two sources, here are the unemployment rates.


December 2009 (a month after Christie was elected - as a baseline): NJ - 10.0 MA - 9.3
December 2010 : : NJ - 9.1 MA - 8.2

May 2011: : NJ- 9.4 MA - 7.6


If you look at NY, also run by a Democratic governor, the results look like MA's. What is clear is that the cuts that Christie forced through have hurt the state of NJ.

Here are the two links:

For the 2009 and 2010 data - http://www.foxnews.com/us/2011/01/25/unemployment-rates... /
For the 2011 data: - http://www.ncsl.org/?tabid=13308

(Both are simply releases of the same government data.)

I realize that a more complete analysis could be done using all states - comparing Republican to Democratic. That has its problems too. There may be systemic differences between the red and blue states that even if the same policies were used in both, there would be a significant difference in how they work. That is why I looked for a state that was in many ways similar to NJ that was run by a Democrat. The two most obvious choices were NY and MA, where MA seemed more similar.