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.

This entry was posted on Sunday, December 27th, 2009 at 9:08 pm and is filed under New Jersey. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Responses are currently closed, but you can trackback from your own site.