re: #37 engineer dog

I responded down below, but I’ll repost:

e: #178 engineer dog

I could tell you that he did cut funding for education from his first year’s budget, but not only increased funding for the current fiscal year - but exceeded the budget amount from over the amount allotted during the Corzine administration’s last budget. Much of the dispute over funding had to do with Abbott district and its expanded funding formula for certain urban areas. [so the way the education funding looks, it went from what would be x, then x-10, to x+.05, for the final Corzine budget, Christie’s first year budget, and then the current fiscal year budget]

The courts have an outsized role in education funding to the point where I think that they’re unconstitutionally imposing themselves into the legislative process - because they continue to misread the constitutional requirement for a thorough and efficient education as requiring money that the state simply doesn’t have in its budget.

Christie has gone to great lengths to try and put the state’s structural deficits to an end and to get spending under control and with the pension deal, which includes payments into the funds that have been avoided for a couple of years, he has managed to get a lot done on that front.

How he did it antagonized the education unions quite a bit. There was and remains quite a bit of animosity there - and also against Democrats who ended up cutting the education funding deal with Christie.

His performance during the flooding following Irene and Lee has shown that he knows how to manage natural disaster mitigation - and showed he can take charge of the situation and make sure that state resources are available and deployed, which was a major improvement over the perception that he failed during the blizzard last winter (when he was on vacation in Florida at the time).