John Gramlich:

But there’s another line Christie likes to use to describe the fiscal situation he inherited: “The day of reckoning is here.” It’s difficult to argue his point. While nearly all states are in deep fiscal trouble, New Jersey is in deeper than most. Its deficit amounts to 37 percent of the entire state budget. Christie has responded by proposing to slash billions of dollars in state spending on everything from aid to municipalities to the normally sacrosanct K-12 education system. More than 1,300 state government positions would be eliminated.
The governor’s proposal — and his unapologetic defense of it — have made him a villain to mayors, teachers, superintendents and other public employees. But Christie, perhaps more than any other governor these days, has captured the imagination of conservatives who admire his eagerness to take on powerful public employee unions. Many Republicans believe that Christie’s tough stance on spending is hitting exactly the right political note in a major election year marked by anti-government anger and Tea Party activism.
Indeed, with the governorships of 37 states up for grabs in November — and state finances not expected to improve much anytime soon — Christie’s budget-cutting quest and all the hot rhetoric both for and against it may amount to much more than political theater. It may be a preview of how some new Republican governors will lead in states they win this year. In Pennsylvania, Attorney General Tom Corbett, the front-runner to become the GOP’s candidate for governor, says he’s been paying close attention to what’s going on in the state next door. Chris Christie, he told Stateline in an interview, “has made a very good example.”

It is difficult to see growth in redistributed state and federal tax dollars for K-12 organizations over the next few years.
State of Wisconsin K-12 redistributed tax dollars have grown substantially over the past 25+ years, as this chart illustrates.


Redistributed state tax dollars are generated from personal & corporate income taxes and fees.
The Economist has more on New Jersey:

I watched him campaign last year. His message was simple: he vowed to cut spending and red tape. He also stressed that he was not Jon Corzine, the unpopular Democratic governor. Mr Corzine, for his part, emphasised that Mr Christie was a) a Republican and b) fat. The first argument alone would usually be enough to win an election in New Jersey. But last year was a bad time to be a) an incumbent or b) a former boss of Goldman Sachs, and Gov. Corzine was both.
I wondered at the time if Mr Christie meant what he said about doing painful things to rescue New Jersey from its deep pit of debt. It seems that he did. In no time at all, he plugged a short-term budget gap by slashing spending. He has also set his sights on the outlandish benefits enjoyed by some public-sector workers, citing as an example a 49 year old retiree who paid $124,000 towards his retirement benefits and expects to get back $3.8m.
He proposed to balance the budget for fiscal 2011 by cutting a third from projected outlays. He suggested that teachers’ pay be frozen, rather than raised by 4-5%, and that they contribute a small amount (1.5% of salary) towards their health benefits.

NY Post:

New Jersey voters just sent another loud reminder of their disgust with out-of-control taxes.
Of 537 school budgets up for a vote in the Garden State, 315 — a whopping 59 percent — went down in flames Tuesday.
That’s more than the state’s seen in decades.
Why so many rejections?
Because some 80 percent of those budgets sought property-tax hikes.

Mike Antonucci:

Minnesota lawmakers felt their Race to the Top application was adversely affected by insufficient teacher union buy-in. So they heeded the union’s repeated calls for “a seat at the table” by giving Education Minnesota President Tom Dooher, well, a seat at the table. Unfortunately, it was a seat at the legislators’ table during a committee hearing and Dooher is not only the union president, but a registered lobbyist.
Republican state Rep. Mark Buesgens said it was “like having Vito Corleone watching over his foot soldiers.”
The Democrats said the meeting was a working group and not a full committee hearing, so Dooher’s presence at the legislators’ table was not a breach of protocol. However, the Minnesota House voted 128-2 yesterday to bar lobbyists and executive branch members from sitting at the committee table with lawmakers during official meetings.

Geoff Mulvihill:

They’re the kind of obscenity-laced schoolyard taunts that could get a student suspended.
But the target of this tirade is New Jersey’s Gov. Chris Christie — and the perpetrators are the state’s teachers, irate over his calls for salary freezes and funding cuts for schools.
In Facebook messages visible to the world — not to mention their students — the teachers have called Christie fat, compared him to a genocidal dictator and wished he was dead. The postings are often riddled with bad grammar and misspellings.
“Never trust a fat f…,” read one profane post on the Facebook page, “New Jersey Teachers United Against Governor Chris Christie’s Pay Freeze,” which has some 69,000 fans, many of them teachers.
“How do you spell A– hole? C-H-R-I-S C-H-R-I-S-T-I-E,” read another.

James Freeman:

‘I said all during the campaign last year that I was going to govern as if I was a one-termer,” explains New Jersey Governor Chris Christie on a visit this week to the Journal’s editorial board. “And everybody felt that it was just stuff you say during a campaign to sound good. I think after the first 12 weeks, given the stuff I’ve done, they figure: ‘He’s just crazy enough to do it.'”
Call it crazy, or just call it sensible: Mr. Christie is on a mission to make New Jersey competitive once again in the contest to attract people and capital. During last fall’s campaign, while his opponent obliquely criticized Mr. Christie’s size, some Republicans worried that their candidate was squishy–that he wasn’t serious about cutting spending and reining in taxes. Turns out they were wrong.
Listen to Mr. Christie’s take on the state of his state: “We are, I think, the failed experiment in America–the best example of a failed experiment in America–on taxes and bigger government. Over the last eight years, New Jersey increased taxes and fees 115 times.” New Jersey’s residents now suffer under the nation’s highest tax burden. Yet the tax hikes haven’t come close to matching increases in spending. Mr. Christie recently introduced a $29.3 billion state budget to eliminate a projected $11 billion deficit for fiscal year 2011.

“Hellasious”:

This blog was created in late 2006 in order to “vent” my frustration over the huge debt bubble and what I perceived to be the risks it posed to the global economy. In summary, I claimed that the economy had become hooked on debt to create additional GDP growth – or “growth” in quotation marks – and that the finance “tail” was wagging the real economy “dog”.
Soon thereafter, the bubble burst – first in the U.S. and then everywhere else. What followed was the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression. And we are still in the midst of it, albeit in ever-mutating form, so today’s post is meant as a tour d’horizon, a quick summary of how I see things shaping up today.
I believe all that has happened so far is The Great Debt Bailout. Governments and central banks have issued trillions in new government-backed debt, some to replace private debt gone bad (bailouts for billionaires) and some to finance massive budget deficits (pennies for penniless). It is a policy mishmash produced by the combination of (a) Bernankean revulsion to monetary deflation and (b) Keynesian aversion to economic recession.

As School Districts consider property tax increases to address spending growth and flat or reduced redistributed state and federal tax dollars, it may well be useful to keep local goodwill in reserve for future funding challenges.
Related: Peter Gorenstein: Pray For Inflation — It’s Our Only Hope and New Jersey’s K-12 Staffing growth.