This looks a little worse than a map studded with surveyor’s symbols.
About 20 minutes after Christie, 48, told a town-hallmeeting in Paramus today that health-care costs “willbankrupt” the state, the New Jersey Economic DevelopmentAuthority cut its tax-exempt school-related bond offering bymore than half to $712.3 million.
Brendan McGrail gets two sources from the Christie administration to try and knock this down: the state treasurer’s office doubts that “anybody who is a serious student of the
bond market
thinks thegovernor’s comments had anything to do with this bond sale.” Yet part of the spin is that
Christie has been saying this for months
. What’s the effect of repeated assurances from a governor that the state will go bankrupt if it doesn’t do something? Good question, though the counter-argument is: What would happen to the bond rating if the state went bankrupt.
Worth noting, at this point: The conventional wisdom was that Christie would take a popularity hit from his handling of the December 2010 snowstorm,
and he didn’t.
Via Bruce Bartlett.
