Christie to the 1%: Please Occupy New Jersey
Now that the governor has controlled state spending, he's pushing tax reform and hoping to steal businesses and residents from neighboring blue states.
By JAMES FREEMAN
Garden State Gov. Chris Christie has a message for the top 1% of income earners: Please occupy New Jersey. "I'm going to start going after a lot of these hedge-fund guys who are in Connecticut and New York and say, 'You're going to get a better deal with us,'" says the country's most important Republican not running for president.Mr. Christie's new tax-reform plan also offers an improved deal to the bottom 99%, which is why he may be able to move it through New Jersey's Democratic legislature: a 10% cut in tax rates across the board.
The governor is two years into a four-year term. In 2010, he told the Journal's editorial board that the Garden State represented America's best example of a "failed experiment" in rising taxes and bigger government. As he returns to the Journal for another visit, it's time to check the results of his counter-experiment.
The Coming Tech-led Boom
Three breakthroughs are poised to transform this century as much as telephony and electricity did the last.
By MARK P. MILLS AND JULIO M. OTTINO
In January 1912, the United States emerged from a two-year recession. Nineteen more followed—along with a century of phenomenal economic growth. Americans in real terms are 700% wealthier today.In hindsight it seems obvious that emerging technologies circa 1912—electrification, telephony, the dawn of the automobile age, the invention of stainless steel and the radio amplifier—would foster such growth. Yet even knowledgeable contemporary observers failed to grasp their transformational power.
In January 2012, we sit again on the cusp of three grand technological transformations with the potential to rival that of the past century. All find their epicenters in America: big data, smart manufacturing and the wireless revolution.
Information technology has entered a big-data era. Processing power and data storage are virtually free. A hand-held device, the iPhone, has computing power that shames the 1970s-era IBM mainframe. The Internet is evolving into the "cloud"—a network of thousands of data centers any one of which makes a 1990 supercomputer look antediluvian. From social media to medical revolutions anchored in metadata analyses, wherein astronomical feats of data crunching enable heretofore unimaginable services and businesses, we are on the cusp of unimaginable new markets.
Corbis
The second transformation? Smart
manufacturing. This is the first structural shift since Henry Ford
launched the economic power of "mass production." While we see evidence
already in automation and information systems applied to supply-chain
management, we are just entering an era where the very fabrication of
physical things is revolutionized by emerging materials science.
Engineers will soon design and build from the molecular level,
optimizing features and even creating new materials, radically improving
quality and reducing waste.
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