The Securities and Exchange Commision charged the state of New Jersey with fraud for nearly $26 billion in bond offerings from 2001 to 2007. By the way, the governors during those years were McGreevey (Democrat), Codey (Democrat) and Corzine (Democrat).

Seems that when the state put the bonds up for sale, they stated in the bond offerings (I guess it’s like a prospectus) that the state employee pension funds were “adequately” funded, when in actuallity they were woefully underfunded, meaning the state taxpayers would be on the hook for a few billion in addition to the $26 billion in bond payments.

That was enough for the SEC to find the state guilty of securities fraud. But no fines, no penalties, no images of McGreevey, Codey and Corzine doing the perp walk. I think if it was a corporation doing the same thing, the liberals would be screaming for indictments. But New Jersey got off with a warning.

The state did not contest the charges. But they would not admit that they did anything wrong, oh, and they won’t do it again. Nice.

The TaxProf Blog has a post up with The Top 10 Highest State Income Taxes. New Jersey, with a top rate of 8.97% on all income over $500,000 is only #6 in the top 10. Hawaii and Oregon are at the top with a maximum rate of 11%.

If the democrats had gotten their way this past year with the “temporary” surcharge, I think New Jersey would have lept to #3, just behind the top dogs.

By the way, Oregon has no sales tax. And in Hawaii it’s 4%.

And do we want to talk about property taxes??

As the tax prof notes, all 10 states on this list voted for 0bama in 2008.

Another article at National Review:

Chris Christie: The Scourge of Trenton

A good blow-by-blow behind the scenes description of the budget battles from the first 6 months of the Christie administration. I like what he did, though the pension funding problem was kicked down the road and will only get worse next year.

Christie has gotten plenty of positive press with most of the complaints coming from Tom Moran and Paul Mulshine at the Star-Ledger.

Is this the same guy who was governor for 4 years??

Look at this story about MF Global, the NYC hedge fund that hired ex-NJ governor Jon Corzine to lead it to profitability.

MF Global Earns First Profit Since 2008 on Job Cuts - Bloomberg .

As New Jersey governor, Corzine had a hands-off policy concerning unionized state workers and their costly pay and benefits. He refused layoffs, only reducing headcount through attrition and costly early retirement buyouts. He did almost nothing as far as pension and benefits reforms. “We will fight for a fair contract!!” screamed the governor as talk of employee cost reduction was first discussed.

Now that Corzine is in the private sector, it’s layoffs and payroll reductions. The company reported it’s first profit in 2 years as it “ . . cut pay and eliminated jobs”. According to the article, Corzine is reducing headcount by 15%. And two years ago 63% of revenue went to employees via pay, benefits and bonuses and Corzine plans to reduce that to 50%. Sounds like the employees at MF Global need a union.

Apparently back in 2005 Corzine put his business acumen in a jar and stored it in a closet for the 4 years he was governor.

If Corzine had attacked the bloated state government with the same enthusiasm the state of New Jersey and the taxpayers would be a lot better off today.

I chuckled a bit when someone suggested that ex-NJ governor Jon Corzine would go into teaching or some kind of charity work once he was out of office. I knew he’d end up back on Wall Street.

Sure enough, today’s headline Corzine’s Back On The Street. Corzine got a job as CEO at MF Global Holdings Ltd. described as ” a brokerage specializing in futures, options and derivatives”.

So why are all those people out there whining about how hard it is to find a job, Corzine found one in 10 weeks.

I always figured he needed to make some big time money while he had the chance. I question how much he’s really worth right now. Supposedly he “retired” from Goldman Sachs back in 1999 with $250 million. Actually he was pushed out by Henry Paulson. Since then, he ran three very expensive political campaigns using mostly his own money. Plus he went through a messy divorce, and I’m guessing he got taken to the cleaners by his ex-wife. I’m sure his blind trust was heavily invested in some risky stocks and took a beating during the 2008-2009 meltdown. And finally, Carla Katz and her family shook him down for another $4 or $5 million.

So, now he’s back on Wall Street. Good luck. And if you’re getting a limo ride from Hoboken to lower Manhattan, remember to buckle up.

I was cruising around the CNBC website and found a couple of interesting slideshows (not sure why a financial site has so many slideshows).

Take a look at the results for these two surveys. America’s Biggest Beer-Drinking States and The Unhappiest States in America.

First, the top 10 beer drinking states, based on annual per capita consumption, defined as gallons of beer sold divided by the drinking age population. Number One is Montana, with a per capita consumption of 43.5 gallons per person, about a case of beer every three weeks.

1. Montana
2. New Hampshire
3. Nevada
4. North Dakota
5. Wyoming
6. South Dakota
7. Louisianna
8. Wisconsin
9. Texas
10. Nebraska

Next, the unhappiest states, based on a survey of over a million Americans done by two college economics professors and ” . . . Taking into account both subjective and objective factors . . “

1. New York
2. Connecticut
3. Michigan
4. Indiana
5. New Jersey
6. California
7. Illinois
8. Massachusetts
9. Ohio
10. Rhode Island

Notice something?? The lists are mutually exclusive. None of the top 10 beer drinking states are on the list of the top 10 unhappiest states.

Therefore, I must conclude that drinking lots of beer makes you happy and not drinking beer makes you unhappy. No shock there. Hey New Jersey, Start Drinking!! We’ll be happier!!

Or maybe people in Montana, New Hampshire and the other top beer drinking states are really miserable, but they’re so wasted that they don’t give a damn.

Except for California, all the unhappiest states are in the north east or upper midwest.

Also, I think all those top 10 unhappiest states voted for 0bama in 2008. McCain won a bunch of the beer drinking states. Maybe 0bama won the wine drinking and arugula eating states.

I took a vacation day to spend some time cleaning up my basement. I’ve got a few damp boxes to go through, but none of the stuff I lost is heartbreaking. A quiet day with the kids at school, to get rid of stuff and to reorganize my basement. It’s not a disaster, it’s an opportunity!!

Anyway, while driving to the recycling center, I saw parked in front of our post office, a protester . . an anti-0bama protester!!!

I thought, wow, what a great thing, a patriotic American exercising his right to protest our government. Speaking truth to power. Dissent is the highest form of patriotism. Etc, etc.

I thought about pulling over to talk to the guy. But then I got a close look.

Uh, oh. LaRouchies. In a country of nut jobs, LaRouchies are near the top of the list. I didn’t even realize that they were still around.

Off I drove.

They’ll be putting together a bid to host the 2014 Super Bowl in the new Giants Stadium ( Idea of big game at new Giants and Jets stadium is getting Super support ). The other contenders are Tampa and Miami.

The Jets/Giants are betting that the NFL will overlook the nasty fact that it would be the first Super Bowl played in a wintery climate. I’d be a bit shocked if they send the game to the the swamps of Jersey.

The spectre of bad weather will be lurking over the Meadowlands bid. Would the NFL risk playing the showcase game of the year in a site that normally has not-so-nice weather in early February?? Bad weather usually hurts teams that are throwing teams, so weather could determine the NFL champs.

Bookies would hate it. Lots of bets on the under if it was 15 degrees, windy and snowing.

Many of the pre-Super Bowl events are outdoors. Can you imagine the whining from the prima donnas in the national media about having to do media day outdoors??

And of course, the halftime show. Would any top name act want to do a show when there’s potential for rotten weather. Tom Petty in a blizzard?? Prince in sub-zero temperature?? Pete Townsend trying to play a guitar when he can’t even feel his fingers??

I’ve sat in the old Giants Stadium upper deck during a football game. Without snow and in bright sunshine it’s freezing. How about 9:30 at night during the winter?? Unless you’re in one of those fancy luxury suites, you’re going to need first aid to make it through the game.

They should have thought long and hard about a retractable roof if they were really serious about hosting a Super Bowl. Oh, well. In twenty years or so this stadium will be obsolete and they can build a new one. Maybe that one will have a roof.

Mine, not so good, but I guess it could have been worse.

The rain ended about 1AM, and the DynamoBuzz mansion was nearly swept away. The picture below was taken at about 7AM on Sunday morning. At about 1AM, the water was half way up the driveway.

Unfortunately, the drainage in my house STINKS and I have about an inch and a half of water in my basement. We got flooded in 2007, and we learned our lesson not to leave valuables in the basement, and most of what we have down there is in plastic tubs. But we did lose some stuff.

Oh, and a kingdom for a pump. All I have is a wetvac, so I’m sucking up 5-6 gallons at a time and dumping it outside. Not too much fun.

UPDATE : My wife went door to door and got a pump from one of my neighbors. It’s one of those pool pumps, but it works great!! My neighbor saved my life. I owe him one. Thanks!!

Yes, just a few days after the last major snow storm, we get whacked but good with a bigger one. I was out shoveling about 2PM, but it’s still coming down pretty good.

Liliana and I went out for milk and the newspaper, but we did it the old fashioned way, on a vintage Radio Flyer sled.

My kids keep on telling me that they heard the sleds with the metal runners are illegal. I think they might not sell them anymore, but my guess is that we’re not going to be pulled over by a cop.

So far, it looks like about 6 to 8 inches outside the DynamoBuzz mansion in scenic central New Jersey. Not too cold and windy yet but I hear it’s coming.

Over a year into his adminstration, 0bama is still blaming all his problems on the last president. Even 0bama supporters are not buying it anymore, since the one year statute of limitations is now up. You own it now, 0bama.

Newly inaugurated NJ governor Chris Christie has been charging right out of the box at attacking the problems left to him by former governor Jon Corzine. Christie will get more state worker reforms accomplished in 45 days than Corzine did in 4 years. Next up in Christie’s sights: COAH.

But there’s one rotting piece of garbage that Christie found on his desk that will be a lot harder to take care of. And that’s the disaster in the Meadowlands, the still unopened Xanadu shopping mall. A multi-billion dollar white orange and purple elephant.

The Wall Street Journal has the latest in Dreams of Retail ‘Xanadu’ Meet Harsh Reality. The article claims the thing is 70% leased, but most of the leases have an escape clause in case of failure on the part of owners to meet certain conditions. Like being able to open up the mall for business. And that 70% figure includes Cabela’s sporting goods, and they’ve said they doubt they’ll ever be opening up for business.

Since the state owns the land, the article suggests a nuclear option, and that is for the state to seize the building in a sort of emminent domain taking. Let’s hope it doesn’t come to that.

In the meantime, the Xanadu developers are looking for someone else to lend them a half billion to finish it. Good luck.

Looking at the news, seems like I came out of the storm OK. The DynamoBuzz mansion is in beautiful central New Jersey, about a half mile off route 22 and not too far from Bridgewater. It didn’t start snowing until about 11:30 PM last night, and it looks like we got 4 to 6 inches. I just finished shoveling (with a little help from Liliana) and it was nothing really. A very dry light snow, good for skiing but lousy for snowball fights, snowmen and igloos. But the winter isn’t over. Maybe the next storm will be better.

Haiti??

NO.

0bama is going to Massachusetts this weekend to try to save the sinking campaign of democrat senate candidate Martha Coakley (Obama to Campaign for Martha Coakley in Massachusetts). Her campaign has been a total fiasco, a disaster of historic proportions that couldn’t come at a worse time for democrats or 0bama.

If you remember, 0bama traveled several times to New Jersey to campaign for democrat incumbent governor Jon Corzine, including two rallies just 48 hours before election day. How did that election turn out ????

The Star-Ledger editorial:

N.J.’s gay marriage vote: Three spineless senators abstain

Picking on NJ state senators Steve Sweeney, Paul Sarlo and James Beach for abstaining actually misses the main point. The whole lame duck session idea is hatched by spineless politicians to allow them to ram through unpopular bills and put them into law before a new legislature and governor is seated.

It’s a disgracefull way to make law, and it should be abolished. Instead liberals are using these last few days to try to rush through gay marriage, medical marijuana and in-state tuition at state colleges for illegal aliens. That’s spineless, that’s what cowards do, try to act when they hope nobody is looking and they won’t be held accountable.

The true spineless ones are senate president Senator Dick Codey, who could have put this up for a vote anytime in the past two years, and NJ governor Jon Corzine who said he did not want gay marriage debated while he was running for re-election. Oh, and put the spineless tag on assembly leader Joe Roberts, who pulled the gay marriage bill off the floor because he wanted the senate to go first.

If this is such a great idea, it should have been brought up for a vote earlier in the year. It’s not like they were busy doing anything else, like trying to reign in spending or cut property taxes.

Columnist Mark Steyn sticks it to the TSA, Newark Airport security and NJ senator Frank Lautenberg in Crack TSA Manhunt Corners National Security Threat.

If you haven’t heard, they arrested the guy who last week snuck through airport security at Newark Airport and caused a massive flight upset and airport lockdown. The perp was 28 year old Rutgers grad student Haisong Jiang who was arrested at his Piscataway townhouse and charged with tresspassing, something that isn’t even technically a crime. It’s considered a disorderly persons-type violation that will probably result in a small fine and maybe some community service. And Lautenberg is not happy with that, he wants the guy indicted and sent to Rahway to break rocks.

As Steyn points out in his piece, the guy was just going to give his girlfriend a last minute hug before her trip to LA. The real criminals are the security personnel at Newark Airport who did their best Keystone Cops/Marx Brothers/Three Stooges impersonation in response to the inadvertent security breech.

Oh, and the guard who was in charge of the security at the gate is suspended, but his union is sticking up for him. Another reason to oppose mass unionization of TSA employees.

In the race for Ted Kennedy’s old senate seat in the people’s republic of Massachusetts, you have this latest poll:

Buoyed by a huge advantage with independents and relative disinterest from Democratic voters in the state, Republican Scott Brown leads Martha Coakley 48-47.

Corzine gets trounced in his re-election bid for NJ governor, and two months later a democrat woman is in trouble for a senate race in Massachusetts??

And what is the democrat response?? Send in Bill Clinton.
Bill Clinton to visit Mass. to stump for Coakley.

If I remember correctly, Bill and Hillary came to New Jersey to campaign for Jon Corzine. As did Joe Biden and Barrack 0bama. Didn’t help Corzine too much, did it??

Aerosmith is still popular in Massachusetts, maybe they can campaign for Coakley like Jon Bon Jovi did for Corzine. But I read somewhere that Aerosmith guitarist Joe Perry is a gun toting right winger, so maybe they can count on J. Geils.

From Friday’s headlines:

Other bloggers have noticed the same thing. It appears to me that the economic plan for 2010 is for 0bama to tell everyone the economy is doing fine and then dismiss any bad economic news as “unexpected”. Sort of like Alfred E. Neuman and “What, Me Worry??”

NY Times television reporter Neil Genzlinger does the impossible, and that’s to mount a defense of the MTV reality TV show “Jersey Shore”. In Surf, Skin and Jersey. What’s Not to Love? Neil gives a half-hearted tounge-in-cheek case for the popularity of the show.

I like reason #2, MAYBE ‘JERSEY SHORE’ WILL FINALLY KILL OFF THE KARDASHIANS.

As I stated earlier, my main complaint about the show is you have a bunch of 20-somethings acting like teenagers. I did a lot of stupid stuff down the shore when I was a kid, but I was 17. Two of the guys on this show are 27-28 years old.

First it was the tech stock bubble from 2000, taking hundreds of billions in shareholder equity from stock prices that were totally divorced from reality. Then there was the real estate bubble that drained trillions from homeowner equity, cut housing prices in half and wiped out the housing construction industry.

The next bubble that will (hopefully) pop is the college tuition bubble.

As this article from today’s Washington Post notes, ” . . Since 1980, the average cost of tuition and room and board has grown by a staggering 121 percent while median household income has risen a mere 18 percent . . . ” The credit crunch, housing crash and cuts to state colleges have resulted in a toxic mix of fianances for the upcoming college class of 2014.

How high can these prices go? This list from CNN of the top 10 most expensive colleges (one year of tuition, room and board and fees):

1. Sarah Lawrence, $55,788
2. Georgetown, $52,161
3. NYU, $51,993
4. George Washington, $51,775
5. Johns Hopkins, $51,690
6. Columbia, $51,544
7. Wesleyan, $51,432
8. Trinity College, $51,400
9. Washington University, (St. Louis), $51,539
10. (TIE) Bates College and Vassar, $51,300

My alma mater, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, must have just missed the list, checking it at $50,310 for a year.

Neither of my parents graduated high school. My father drove a fuel oil truck and my mother worked in the office of an electrical supply company. Yet between grants and loans I was able to complete a 4 year degree at RPI back when tuition and fees were about $14,000 a year. I graduated with a total of $9000 in loans, and I remember sitting there thinking how the heck am I going to pay that??

Now?? My wife and I are both college graduates, yet how the heck can I afford to send my kids to a college for $50-$60,000 a year?? These costs are totally out of whack with reality.

I remember senior year in college when students at RPI were complained about tuition, which in 1982 was about $8900. The dean reminded us of the equation to use for engineering students: 4 years of tuition equals one year of pay, which was true. Four years at $8900 a year was about $35,600 which at the time was the starting salary for an engineering major. But tuition for 2009 is now $30,000 and I don’t think engineers are pulling down starting salaries of $120,000. Tution has more than tripled in 25 years, yet starting salaries have not even doubled.

The colleges will say that the price is deceptive, that with financial aid the actual costs are much less. Well then how come there are kids graduating with $40 or $50,000 in loans??

UPDATE: I see that Instapundit picked up on the same theme. Maybe I’m onto something??

During the first New Jersey gubernatorial debate, Republican Chris Christie pointed out that New Jersey was losing residents as people got fed up with the high taxes and high cost of living. Governor Jon Corzine then made the outlandish statement that it wasn’t true, New Jersey was actually gaining population. I laughed at my computer monitor when I heard that one, I yelled “BS!”

Well CNN has posted the statistics, and New Jersey had a net population loss of over 31,000 in this past year.

The top 6 losing states for the year June-30-2008 to June-30-2009:

1. California, -98,798
2. New York, -98,178
3. Michigan, -87,339
4. Illinois, -48,249
5. Ohio, -36,278
6. New Jersey, -31,690

In 2006, the first year of the Corzine reign, the number was worse, a net loss of 77,000.

It would have been worse for these states, except that the collapse of the housing market made it tougher to move since you had to sell your overpriced California pad in order to get out of the state.

Oh, and for the decade New York lost an incredible 1,686,583 residents. I bet you that even though the state population declined, the number of New York government employees went up big time.

All of this matters because census is used to determine the number of seats in the US House of Representatives. Look for New York and New Jersey to lose seats in the reapportionment.