8th Grade Final Exam: Salina, KS – 1895

Grammar (Time, one hour)

1. Give nine rules for the use of Capital Letters.

Capital letters are used in American English lectionary to denote proper names of people, proper names of places, the first letter of a sentence, the letter “I” in reference to oneself, acronyms, initials, non-article and non-conjunction words of title case, and, in Christian lectionary, pronouns referencing God.

2. Name the Parts of Speech and define those that have no modifications.

The eight parts of speech are as follows: nouns, verbs, adjectives, adverbs, pronouns, prepositions, conjunctions, and interjections. The last three have no modifications.

3. Define Verse, Stanza and Paragraph.

A verse is a metrically-arranged system of words. A stanza is a grounp of lines forming one section of a poem or song. A paragraph is a grouping of three or more complete sentences arranged in a section of text to denote separation of a particular point from the rest of the text.

4. What are the Principal Parts of a verb? Give Principal Parts of do, lie, lay and run.

No idea.

5. Define Case, Illustrate each Case.

Case is the arrangement of letters in capital and non-capital form. The four distinct forms of case are UPPERCASE, lowercase, Sentence case, and Title Case.

6. What is Punctuation? Give rules for principal marks of Punctuation.

Punctuation is the system of marks used in written text in order to denote the separation of sentences and to make their meaning clearer to the reader. Periods, question marks, and exclamation points are used to mark the end of declarative/imperative, interrogative, and exclamatory sentences, respectively. Commas are used to denote the separation of clauses, similar parts of speech in a series, and the indirect objects of imperative sentences.

7 – 10. Write a composition of about 150 words and show therein that you understand the practical use of the rules of grammar.

Last night, I watched television, drank a few beers, and played video games. What might have been a better use of my time, you may ask? For starters, I could have volunteered at the Burlington Township Food Bank. I could have also done some work around the house. In a more far-fetched example, I could have donned a costume of my own creation and acted as a vigilante, stalking from rooftop to rooftop in search of those who were in need of my particular brand of help. The possibilities are virtually endless! Remember this, dear reader, the next time you are faced with the decision of spending your evening doing nothing of practical use.

Arithmetic (Time, 1.25 hours)

1. Name and define the Fundamental Rules of Arithmetic.

Addition – the act of combining two numbers in order to find their sum

Subtraction – the act of decreasing one number by another in order to find their difference

Multiplication – the act of increasing one number by its own value a given number of times in order to find their product

Division – the act of decreasing one number by an increment of another in order to find its quotient

2. A wagon box is 2 ft. deep, 10 feet long, and 3 ft. wide. How many bushels of wheat will it hold?

Believe it or not, I do know that 1 bushel = 8 gallons of dry volume. In terms of cylindrical volume, a gallon is about 250 cubic inches. 24 x 120 x 36 = 103,680 cubic inches. So I’m going to say that wagon box will hold about 48 bushels.

3. If a load of wheat weighs 3942 lbs., what is it worth at 50 cts. per bu., deducting 1050 lbs. for tare?

Having no idea what 2892 pounds of wheat translates to in terms of bushels without looking it up, I can’t answer this.

4. District No. 33 has a valuation of $35,000. What is the necessary levy to carry on a school seven months at $50 per month, and have $104 for incidentals?

Ah, a property taxes question. This I can do. Getting $454 from $35,000 would require a millage of approximately $12.97 per $1,000 of assessed value. Incidentally, this would be a lot lower than most municipalities in New Jersey.

5. Find cost of 6720 lbs. coal at $6.00 per ton.

6720 pounds = 3.36 tons, so the cost would be $20.16. Boy, inflation has gone up quite a bit since then, hasn’t it?

6. Find the interest of $512.60 for 8 months and 18 days at 7 percent.

Assuming that 7 percent is simple annual interest and the 8 months and 18 days are the first 8 months and 18 days of a non-leap year, $25.56

7. What is the cost of 40 boards 12 inches wide and 16 ft. long at $20 per m?

$3,901.44. Since it’s not in cost per square meters, I’m assuming we ignore the width.

8. Find bank discount on $300 for 90 days (no grace) at 10 percent.

No idea how to calculate bank discount.

9. What is the cost of a square farm at $15 per acre, the distance around which is 640 rods?

No idea how to convert rods to acres.

10. Write a Bank Check, a Promissory Note, and a Receipt.

Sure, if you give me the proper paperwork. Writing it down here would be of no legal value.

U.S. History (Time, 45 minutes)

1. Give the epochs into which U.S. History is divided.

What these would have been in 1895 I have no clue.

2. Give an account of the discovery of America by Columbus.

Though the idea of a spherical Earth was widely accepted at the time, Christopher Columbus became convinced in the late 15 th Century that a trade route from Western Europe to the East Indies could be established by sailing westward across the Atlantic Ocean, in contrast to the long, circuitous route through the Mediterranean, around the continent of Africa, and across the Indian Ocean. During the late 1480s, he was able to convince Queen Isabella of Spain to finance such an expedition, and set out from Palos in August of 1492 with a fleet of three ships: the Nina, the Pinta, and the Santa Maria. After over two months at sea and two out of three ships lost, Columbus arrived in present-day Hispaniola on October 12, 1492. Not realizing he had found the outlying islands of the continent of North America instead of India, he referred to the Taino natives as “Indians”. Columbus would return on three more voyages in the years that followed, exploring Central and South America and finally figuring out that they were, indeed, not India.

3. Relate the causes and results of the Revolutionary War.

After the Seven Years’ War, it became apparent that defending the American colonies from the rest of the foreign and native powers operating on the continent would require a great deal of money. A series of taxes were levied by England which caused great unrest in the colonies, most notable among them the Stamp Act and Townshend Acts. A cycle of protest against new regulations on the colonies and tighter clamping down on unrest with new regulations by England began which ultimately led to the first Continental Congress meeting in 1774. It had become clear that the American colonies had, over the course of a century, formed a separate culture and instituted their own home rule, and a rebellion became both desirable and inevitable. Skirmishes between the colonists and the local military governors developed into all-out warfare.

The effects of the war were felt throughout the globe, as for the first time, a European colony successfully rebelled against its sovereign monarch. A series of revolutions began all across the world in the early 19 th Century, signaling the end of both the age of colonialism and the prominence of royal families in the Western world.

4. Show the territorial growth of the United States.

Impossible to do via typed text in any kind of a graphical context.

5. Tell what you can of the history of Kansas.

Kansas became part of the holdings of the United States after the Louisiana Purchase in 1803, but was not admitted to the Union as a state until 1861, owing to conflicts over whether it would be a free or a slave state. Since then, it has thrived as a veritable breadbasket of agriculture and livestock, with a climate perfectly suited to the growing of corn and wheat and rail lines connecting it with the rest of the nation.

6. Describe three of the most prominent battles of the Rebellion.

Chancellorsville – Robert E. Lee’s most significant victory, but also marked the death of Stonewall Jackson

Gettysburg – The single largest and second-bloodiest battle of the war, marked the end of the Confederate advance into the North.

Antietam – Bloodiest battle of the war, and the victory that gave President Lincoln the confidence to sign the Emancipation Proclamation

7. Who were the following:

Morse – inventor of Morse Code

Whitney – inventor of the cotton gin

Fulton – don’t know

Bell – inventor of the telephone

Lincoln – 16 th President of the United States

Penn – explorer, founder of Philadelphia

Howe – don’t know

8. Name events connected with the following dates:

1607 – First permanent American colony established in Jamestown

1620 – Plymouth colony established in Massachusetts

1800 – Election of Thomas Jefferson

1849 – California gold rush

1865 – End of the Civil War

Orthography (Time, one hour)

1. What is meant by the following:

Alphabet – the series of letters that constitute a written alphanumeric language

Phonetic – the spelling of a word as it sounds

Orthography – don’t know

Etymology – the origin of a word

Syllabication – don’t know

2. What are elementary sounds? How classified?

Don’t know

3. What are the following, and give examples of each: Trigraph, subvocals, diphthong, cognate letters, linguals?

Except for dipthongs, I don’t know

4. Give four substitutes for caret ‘u’.

Don’t know

5. Give two rules for spelling words with final ‘e’. Name two exceptions under each rule.

Don’t know

6. Give two uses of silent letters in spelling. Illustrate each.

Don’t know

7. Define the following prefixes and use in connection with a word:

Bi – two of or half of; bifocals

Dis – negation of; disassociate

Mis – Improper; mistrial

Pre – Before; pregame

Semi – Diminished quantity of; semicolon

Post – After; postgame

Non – Not; nonsensical

Inter – Between; international

Mono – One of; monocle

Super – Exceeding normal quantities of; superconductor

8. Mark diacritically and divide into syllables the following, and name the sign that indicates the sound: Card, ball, mercy, sir, odd,cell, rise, blood, fare, last.

Not even going to try

9. Use the following correctly in sentences, Cite, site, sight, fane,fain, feign, vane, vain, vein, raze, raise, rays.

You must site your sources.

The site for the conference is insufficient.

The sight on my rifle pulls to the left.

Don’t know fane

I would fain have you stay here.

He feigns sincerity well.

Don Quiojote attacked the vanes on the windmill.

You’re so vain; you probably think this song is about you.

I can’t find a vein from which to draw blood.

We will raze this city to the ground.

You need to raise that picture frame up an inch.

Gamma rays could possibly wipe out all life on Earth.

10. Write 10 words frequently mispronounced and indicate pronunciation by use of diacritical marks and by syllabication.

Not even going to try this.

Geography (Time, one hour)

1. What is climate? Upon what does climate depend?

Climate is the prevailing average weather in a given geographical area. There are literally thousands of factors that can affect it, but the dominant ones are the area’s physical location in terms of latitude and longitude, its proximity to large bodies of water, and its proximity to large mountain ranges and valleys.

2. How do you account for the extremes of climate in Kansas?

Kansas is far away from both mountain ranges and oceans and located in the geographical center of the continental United States. Thus, it is subject to both powerful high pressure systems bringing cold air from Canada and low pressure systems blowing hot air up from the Gulf of Mexico. Its location frequently also exposes it to collisions between these systems, causing frequent severe weather throughout most of the year.

3. Of what use are rivers? Of what use is the ocean?

Rivers serve as cradles of civilization, providing both fresh water for drinking, easy navigational routes to transport goods to other places, and the means to harness tidal forces to generate power. Oceans absorb excess heat from the sun, produce the moisture that constitutes the bulk of the world’s rain, and drive almost all of the weather patterns which make the planet habitable.

4. Describe the mountains of North America.

North America is dominated by two main mountain ranges: the older, eroded, and less extreme Appalachian Mountains of the East and the newer, more jagged, and much taller Rocky/Sierra mountain range of the West.

5. Name and describe the following:

Monrovia – European microstate

Odessa – port city in the Ukraine

Denver – largest city in Colorado

Manitoba – province of Canada

Hecla – no idea

Yukon – A territory in the extreme northwestern part of Canada, east of Alaska

St. Helena – an island in the South Atlantic, final exile of Napoleon

Juan Fernandez – Don’t know

Aspinwall – Don’t know

Orinoco – Don’t know

6. Name and locate the principal trade centers of the U.S.

This would have been much different in 1895 than today.

7. Name all the republics of Europe and give capital of each.

Again, this would have been much different in 1895 than today.

8. Why is the Atlantic Coast colder than the Pacific in the same latitude?

The prevailing currents in the Pacific Ocean prevent Arctic air from reaching as far south on the West Coast.

9. Describe the process by which the water of the ocean returns to the sources of rivers.

The sun heats the ocean, which evaporates water vapor into the air, which flows along the prevailing winds until reaching a mountain range, where it is forced upwards, condensing and becoming clouds and, once reaching the leeward side of the mountains, rain. Since the sources of most rivers on Earth are near mountain ranges, this returns the water to rivers for the cycle to begin anew.

10. Describe the movements of the earth. Give inclination of the earth.

The Earth rotates on its axis approximately once every 24 hours. It also revolves around the Sun approximately once every 365.25 days. The inclination of the Earth is approximately 23.4 degrees to the orbital plan.

So as you can see, this is FREAKING HARD! 48 questions and I couldn’t even answer 14 of them. That’s an instant D- score of 71%, assuming I got everything else on the test right, which I’m sure I didn’t. And I have 19 years of schooling under my belt; these kids would have had to do this with less than half of that. Somehow, I feel really cheated; this is a lot of stuff I’m pretty sure isn’t even a case of, I learned it but haven’t used it in a long time, so I forgot it. I genuinely never learned a lot of what was on this test. See how well you can do.

Yesterday, NASA released a brand new Hubble photo of a small portion of one of the largest seen star-birth regions in the galaxy, the Carina Nebula. Towers of cool hydrogen laced with dust rise from the wall of the nebula. The scene is reminiscent of Hubble’s classic “Pillars of Creation” photo from 1995, but is even more striking in appearance. The image captures the top of a three-light-year-tall pillar of gas and dust that is being eaten away by the brilliant light from nearby bright stars. The pillar is also being pushed apart from within, as infant stars buried inside it fire off jets of gas that can be seen streaming from towering peaks like arrows sailing through the air.

With the passage of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, the United States Congress has now firmly established a new paradigm of socioeconomic and sociopolitical relations towards which they have been attempting to move the country since well before the inauguration of President Obama. That notion is that able-bodied and competent American citizens and institutions that have the means by which they can provide for themselves nonetheless have the right to live at the expense of their neighbors throughout the entirety of their natural existences. It’s a process that has been going on ever since the days of Theodore Roosevelt, but one which has been drastically accelerated since the economic collapse of 2008. Let’s take a look at some of the gems that we’ve been subject to since then:

• On October 3rd, 2008, Congress appropriated $700 billion in money that didn’t exist in order to give the United States Treasury the unprecedented authority to buy up illiquid assets from banks and other financial institutions via secondary market mechanisms. Through the Treasury, these "TARP" bailouts have grown to be a new “revolving purchase facility”, doling out money with very little oversight to anyone and anything that is deemed to be worthy of it (in essence, a gigantic slush fund for politically connected organizations and companies who’ve made stupid business decisions and refuse to pay the piper for them).
• On February 18th, 2009, the Obama administration announced a plan to provide $75 billion in taxpayer aid to mortgage-holders whose mortgages exceeded the value of their homes and those on the edge of foreclosure, using the tax dollars of people who were in homes they could afford and making their payments on time to pay the bills of people living beyond their means.
• On March 17th, 2009, Democratic Senator and Senate Rules Committee Chairman Chuck Schumer threatened to tax the retention bonuses of eleven executives of AIG at 100% if they did not return them, negating the contracts of a private company that were signed before it was bailed out and figuratively wiping his ass with the contracts clause of the Constitution.
• On March 30th, 2009, the Obama administration demanded the resignation of General Motors CEO Rick Wagoner as a condition of the company’s acceptance of federal bailout money, essentially firing the chief executive of a private company.
• On April 19th, 2009, the Obama administration announced a plan to convert the loans the United States had made to the nation’s 19 biggest banks during the TARP bailout into common stock, taking an ownership position in all of the country’s largest financial institutions. (You think they’re going to let go of THAT anytime soon?)
• Between late April and early May 2009, government regulators leveraged their TARP-acquired ownership share of the American automakers, General Motors and Chrysler, to negotiate the concession of majority stakes of the company to the United Auto Workers union, essentially converting two of the Big Three American automobile companies into government-union partnerships.

And these were just the appetizers, ladies and gentlemen. The main entrée was, of course, health care reform. Despite (and I would argue, because of) already being one of the most heavily regulated industries in the United States, people still have a lot of problems with the way health insurance companies do business. Costs are too high for people whose jobs don’t offer insurance as a benefit, too many are uninsured, claims can be denied if you had a preexisting condition you didn’t know about, coverage can be canceled or premiums hiked to prohibitive levels in the case of a terminal illness, and so forth. But instead of letting the providers compete amongst themselves to develop a market-based solution, our culture – as expressed through the actions of our elected representatives – decided the government needed to get involved in addressing the problems.

A bit of background on my personal perspective is in order here. Through a combination of political jackassery and the effects of the collapsing economy, I lost three different jobs between early 2006 and late 2008. I was unemployed for a combined total of eight months, and only one of the jobs I had during this period offered health insurance. I was never worried about it. Why? Because after I lost the first job, I bought a private health insurance policy. Even while subsisting on unemployment in the state with the second highest cost of living in the country, it was not cost-prohibitive to buy it. All I had to do was go out drinking one less time per week.

Now, I can already hear the arguments coming through my computer screen. “Yes, but Matt, you were a single man living alone. It’s different for a family with kids or people with health problems.” Folks, do me a favor. Go to http://www.ehealthinsurance.com. It’s a health insurance rate aggregator, where you can get instant comparison quotes of every health insurance provider legally allowed to do business in your area for yourself, you and your spouse, or you and your family. A basic policy for a family of four in New Jersey from the state’s leading company, Horizon Blue Cross, costs about $560/month. (Again, maybe it’s just me, but if you’re a two-income family living within your means, that doesn’t seem like a lot of money for something that essential.) But if I lived in Virginia , I could buy that same policy from one of that state’s leading providers, United Health One, for $127/month. Now why the HELL can’t I elect to buy it from United Health One, instead of one of the three companies legally permitted to do business where I live?

We are living in the communication age, right? Information can be faxed or e-mailed to an insurance carrier instantly, and the pencil-pushers can decide whether or not to approve the claim for the medical procedure I’m getting and get their approval or denial back to my doctor instantly, so what the hell difference does it make if my insurance provider is based in another state? The idea that I could buy health insurance for myself and any family I might have for less than my monthly beer budget, but can’t because health insurance companies are exempt from antitrust laws and my state and federal governments protect a racketeering three-company oligarchy where I live, is patently absurd to me.

The point I’m trying to make is that a market-based solution would eliminate almost every issue people have with the health care system as currently constituted. Costs for basic plans would drop through the floor, companies could sell policies as part of a high-risk pool for people with preexisting conditions, and any company that dared to drop coverage for their customers when they got sick would be skunked by the thousands of companies out there that don’t. Obviously, we’d still need public oversight of the industry to the extent that we need oversight of every industry: publicly traded insurance companies would be subject to SEC regulations and those that weren’t would be subject to criminal and civil laws.

But unfortunately, the prevailing mentality in the center of our political and legal system for at least the past decade has been, if there’s a social ill of any kind, the government should be the one to remedy it. And even though the health insurance of everyone ages 0-23 and 65 and up were already covered with my tax dollars (SCHIP and Medicare), we’ve now extended the scope of public healthcare to able-bodied uninsured adults who either can afford it on their own already or could afford it if not for the high regulatory costs involved. We have deemed that a person’s health care can be provided for them at the expense of their neighbors over the course of their entire life should they choose a life of not working full-time or working in an industry where health insurance is not readily provided. And the thought of that makes me physically ill.

I have had enough of this arrangement where I study hard, work hard, and sacrifice to advance myself in a field that makes me money (information technology) instead of a field that would give me the most satisfaction (music), and my reward consists of 40% of the money I make being taken away from me to fund entitlement programs that do not benefit me now, will not be around to benefit me when I will qualify for them, and subsidize the lifestyles of people who are doing what they want with their life instead of following the route I have taken. I think it is high time I got some bang for my buck.

I realize that the beneficiaries of my tax dollars cannot return the favor with a direct exchange, either paying for my health insurance or just giving me my money back. But there are things that people in industries where health insurance is not prevalent can give me that I would consider a fair exchange:

• Free or reduced-price theater, concert, and/or gallery tickets. Nancy Pelosi said it best the other day: “Think of an economy where people could be an artist or a photographer or a writer without worrying about keeping their day job in order to have health insurance.” Well, you now have just that. And I absolutely love going to the theater and going to concerts. It’s something that I would love to do a lot more of, but those ticket prices are just so gosh-darn expensive. I think free tickets to the venues of my choice on the dates of my choice are perfectly fair. If it’s a Springsteen concert in New Jersey and the tickets get bid up so high that they exceed the cost of a health care policy, I’d even take a reduced-price one.
• Free moving services. The second highest occupational category (after the arts) that constitutes the previously uninsured is transport workers, i.e. truckers, limo drivers, and cab drivers. I will be buying a house sometime in the near future, and it’s going to be a pain in the ass to move, especially if it’s in the summer. So how about a small rig owner comes over to my place with a couple of friends on a Saturday, loads up all of our stuff, and takes it to our new house? Perfectly fair trade. I’ll even throw in a case of beer for your troubles.
• Free contracting work. The third highest occupational category that constitutes the previously uninsured is construction workers. Again, I will be moving soon. I haven’t settled on a house yet, but chances are at least 90% that I’m going to want some work done to it when I buy it. I’d like a contractor to come over and do that work for free. After all, a place of residence is every bit as essential to life as health care, right? And every house requires maintenance. Why shouldn’t I get that for free if I can’t afford it or don’t want to pay for it? I really don’t see the difference.

What do you think, folks? Am I onto something here? After all, we’ve established that certain things in life should be free if people elect to not put themselves in a position to be able to pay for them. So why stop with health care? A good system of service exchange will make this proverbial medicine go down a lot easier.

But all has not been well in my land of fake instrumentation. I got a set of GH:WT drums for Christmas and they were awesome. The drums are the one actual rock band instrument I’ve never played and I always wanted to learn how, even if it was on a peripheral. I love that in a good 90 minutes of gameplay, I can burn 1,000 calories. But the cymbal pad stopped working three weeks into January. I got a replacement. One week later, the cymbal’s WIRE went bad. I let them sit for a month, then got a replacement last night. It worked for 20 minutes before the cymbal went bad AGAIN! 10 minutes later, my Amazon confirmation for Wii Rock Band 2: Special Edition and The Beatles Rock Band was in my inbox and my GH:WT drums are waiting to be carried out to the curb when bulk trash day comes around.

Seriously, I know it was a gift, but COME ON! The Guitar Hero franchise was right to get on the full-band peripheral bandwagon after the blazing success of the original Rock Band. But I come to find out that this is a very common complaint among gamers across all platforms (Wii/PS3/XBox). Red Octane and Activision just weren’t willing to shell out the money necessary to produce a quality set of drums. And it’s a shame too, because they were great pioneers in taking the niche carved out by Dance Dance Revolution and making it the greatest social gaming phenomenon of the past five years. They really should have been on the cutting edge of this market.

The stars really seem to be aligning in my favor lately. Right when I’ve come out of the 18-month funk of unemployment, depression, and self-destructive behavior I was in from 2007-2008 and save up enough money for a 20% down payment is when all indicators point to a leveling-off of housing prices, making it the best time to buy. The realtor I worked for from 2006-2007 is representing me and all of the mortgage brokers, attorneys, and home inspectors that used to work with our office are lining up to offer me their services.

I even found a great house that I’m seriously considering buying in my first month of searching:

It’s a very unique 4-bedroom, 2.5-bathroom colonial in Burlington Township. It’s got a 2-car garage, a huge full basement that’s just aching to be finished, a great, non-cookie cutter layout, a master bedroom suite on the first floor with its own bathroom and laundry room (that I could seriously see renting out to help pay the mortgage), and it sits on a massive 60×300 foot lot. Seriously, the back yard is half the size of a football field. The only downside is that it is on a main county thoroughfare and not near any traffic lights. Getting out of the driveway in the morning would occasionally be a bitch, and if I get the dog I’ve dreamed of owning my whole life, I would definitely have to keep him out of the front yard. But really, those are minor issues considering that this place is fantastic and a steal as far as price goes.

I took a walk through the house earlier this week and was incredibly smitten with it right off the bat. I’m going back for another look in the daylight on Sunday. Who knows? This could be the start of an awesome time in my life.

Everyone who has ever run a household budget or even has a basic understanding of what goes into one understands the concept of discretionary versus non-discretionary spending. There are some bills that simply have to be paid, and if they happen to be higher than normal in a given time period, the difference must be made up by sacrificing some of your optional expenses. If you’re not willing to do that, you will have a deficit on your hands.

The average household can spend beyond their means and assume a little bit of debt every once in a while as long as their mandatory spending doesn’t exceed the amount of money they bring in every budget cycle. When that happens, the household would be running what’s called a structural deficit, and would very quickly have to declare bankruptcy.

That is, of course, unless you’re the government.

My home state’s new governor, Chris Christie, is in a real pickle. The first major issue he has to tackle, New Jersey’s upcoming $30 billion budget for FY2011, is projected to have a deficit of anywhere from $8 billion to $11 billion. To state that another way, New Jersey has committed itself to a level of spending that is 36-57% higher than the amount of revenue that it’s taking in. I’ve been a student of politics and public management since I was 13 years old and I don’t think I can ever recall a budget at any level of government I’ve lived under being that far out of balance, though the federal government’s proposed FY2011 budget is a close second.

Unlike the federal government, however, New Jersey has a balanced budget requirement written into its Constitution. Revenues and expenditures for the upcoming fiscal year’s budget must be identical before it can be signed into law. New Jersey’s economy didn’t suddenly shrink to half its size over the past year. So how could things have gotten so bad so quickly? To understand the answer to that question is to understand the history of putrid governance this state has had for the past two decades.

With the exception of a slight blip in the early 90s, the United States experienced an unprecedented boom time from 1983-2000. The economy grew at a clip that hasn’t been seen before or since. Like most other states, New Jersey was flush with surplus tax revenue and looking for a way to use it. And unfortunately, like a lot of other states, it chose to spend the money on new entitlement and spending programs rather than shore up its long-term fiscal health. From the fiscal years between 1992-2002, state spending grew by 52%, which was seemingly fine, since the state’s GDP was moving upward at right about the same rate. After the boom ended, though, the bill for all of this new spending came due. The combined effects of the tech crash, the 9/11 attacks, and the nationwide fears over corporate accounting scandals unleashed a recession that affected the entire country, but the New York metropolitan area in particular. New Jersey’s economic activity contracted severely, and state finances were sent into a tailspin.

Right around here is where my former career working in politics began. As an intern working in the governor’s office in the early days of the Jim McGreevey administration through my advancement to a policy writer and the end of the Codey administration, I can tell you firsthand that from the period between February and July was and still is a nonstop, perennial “crisis” in that office. Every single year, there was a $3-4 billion budget shortfall that needed to be filled. Given some of the methods that were used to fill it, like McGreevey’s 2002 and 2004 tax hikes, I could never really figure out why that budget gap kept reappearing year after year, and why spending never went down, not even once, during my entire time there. As I would later find out, the state’s fiscal management included accounting methods that would make the auditors of Arthur Andersen blush. Borrowing, one-shot fiscal gimmicks, and extremely optimistic assumptions about upcoming revenues were the name of the game as the lawmakers in Trenton kicked the can down the road year after year.

Well, it’s now all finally come to a head. New Jersey has a structural deficit. Even if you eliminated all of the discretionary spending (that which is not mandated year-to-year by law), we’d still be bathing in red ink. Raising taxes any further on the most highly-taxed state residents of the nation is out of the question; some serious and radical changes need to be made in Trenton to avoid the state going into default, and a lot of sacred cows are going to have to be skewered in the process.

Let’s take a look at where the money was budgeted to go in FY2010 (July 2009-July 2010). The biggest department expenditure this state makes is the Department of Education at $9.6 billion. About $8 billion of that is spent on direct financial payouts to school districts, over half of which goes to the state’s 31 “Abbott districts” – municipalities that do not have a sufficient tax base to provide the “thorough and efficient education” mandated by the state Constitution and to whom the state is required by a Supreme Court ruling to provide as much in direct aid necessary to equalize the amount of money per student in parity with districts in the rest of the state.

As you might imagine, this ticks a LOT of people in New Jersey off. There are 3.6 million people in the labor force in this state who do not live in the Abbott Districts, so on average, each one of those men and women pays over $1,100 in state taxes every year to support school districts where they do not live. Which wouldn’t be so horrible, except for the fact that these districts are complete rat holes when it comes to funding.

The argument I hear all the time for increased school funding for urban districts with high dropout rates is that it gives chances to excel to those few-and-far-between kids who do achieve and who wouldn’t otherwise have any opportunities in life, and that has to be worth the increased burden to taxpayers even if most of the kids in the school don’t take advantage of it. Abbott school funding has been in effect since the early 1990s. When you consider the high dropout rates and the amount of kids who are just kicked upstairs every year and can’t pass a basic skills test at graduation, the cost per academically qualified high-school graduate in Abbott districts in 2006 was nearly $1 million. Average expenditure per pupil in public schools in the United States as a whole that same year is $8,287, and we had a graduation rate of 69.2 percent, which with a bit of math shows that it costs $155,680 to get that same academically qualified high-school graduate in the US as a whole. That means 85% of the money spent on Abbott schools is completely wasted.

With all due respect to those few excellent students who do come out of Abbott districts, it is far too much to ask of the rest of the state to dump almost a third of its budget into rat holes who spend six and a half times as much as other school districts to produce properly educated young adults. I’m sorry if that sounds harsh or if it would result in more people in those districts being lost to the streets, but in all honesty, the kids in those districts who do succeed probably do it in spite of all the wasted money and not because of it.

So with that in mind, there is a very simple solution that will get New Jersey out of its perennial fiscal disaster. An amendment needs to be passed eliminating the “thorough and efficient education” clause from the constitution. With that out of the way, state education funding can be normalized to what it can afford to pay per student. For instance, this year, it can be reduced to zero, and the budget can be balanced.

This will not happen via the Legislature this year, of course. Governor Christie will likely have to solve the state’s budget woes via assumption of emergency economic powers. Doing so will allow him to suspend union contracts, and with them, pension and healthcare benefits to retirees, which make up the bulk of the remainder of the state’s mandatory spending. The impasse that this will cause will most likely result in a government shutdown, for which Christie’s executive order declaring casino employees to be among the “essential” class of workers that will have to come in during a shutdown was likely done in preparation. One thing is for sure: if the structural deficit is not addressed this year, it will not be long before New Jersey becomes this country’s first failed state.

Like the rest of the hosts no one watches on MSNBC, Matthews’ profile and resulting douchebaggery has risen since the 2008 Presidential primaries, when he and everyone else on the network decided to become complete sycophants for Barack Obama. By way of Matthews’ personality, though, he became like that sycophant that the target of the affection really doesn’t want around, the guy whose attentions create problems far more often than they stroke the ego. (Every female reader knows what I’m talking about.)

During the primaries, Matthews headed up election coverage for the first few contests with fellow asshat Keith Olbermann. The decision to put opinion pundits in charge of what was supposed to be hard, objective news coverage produced pretty much what you’d expect. After Obama’s opponent, Hillary Clinton, won a surprise victory in New Hampshire, Matthews said on-air: “I’ll be brutal, the reason she’s a U.S. senator, the reason she’s a candidate for president, the reason she may be a front-runner is her husband messed around. That’s how she got to be senator from New York. We keep forgetting it. She didn’t win there on her merit.” Watching the Super Tuesday results come in, Matthews said of a speech by Obama, “I have to tell you, you know, it’s part of reporting this case, this election, the feeling most people get when they hear Barack Obama’s speech. My, I felt this thrill going up my leg. I mean, I don’t have that too often.”

Last night’s commentary about Obama’s first State of the Union speech has to take the cake:

What…the…HECK?!?

As I said in my post about Avatar, liberals have a tendency to view almost everything they encounter through the lens of identity politics, whether it be race, religion, ethnicity, sexuality, or the like. It’s a nasty double-edged sword for them, because they get to own a certain position on those issues and pigeonhole people of competing viewpoints into the opposite one, but talking about it as much as they do tends to produce unguarded moments like this, where they tell you a lot about who they really are. Chris Matthews is yet another white liberal who is so enthralled by acceptably mainstreamed minorities that he latches onto them to be able to point to his association with them as proof of enlightened thought and an absence of racism. Unfortunately for him, he’s a loudmouthed jackass with a tendency to speak before thinking, and as a result, episodes like this have a tendency to stick to him with the same lamprey-like nature that he sticks to the president.

Do not even try telling me that this was planned all along.

Promotional art for the upcoming Marvel one-shot, X-Men: Hope, seems to indicate that Hope Summers, the mutant “messiah”, the first mutant born after M-Day, is going to turn out to be the latest reincarnation of Jean Grey/Phoenix.

A lot of people had suspected this was coming during the Messiah War storyline, where we got the first glimpses of the child Cable escaped into the future with at the end of the Messiah Complex a few years into childhood. She had deep red hair, green eyes, and her powers consisted of a highly advanced telepathy and telekinesis. No, said X-writer Duane Swierczynski, I just have a thing for women with red hair and green eyes who can move objects with their mind. But come on now. I know comic book covers are often deceiving, drawn to spur interest among people looking at them on the shelves and seeing them online. But really, the firebird effect is just too much.

The worst part is, everyone knew seven years ago that Jean’s latest death wouldn’t last all that long. Even people in-universe are skeptical:

Agent Brand: That’s an entire world dead, because of one mutant. Wouldn’t be the first time, would it?
Cyclops: Jean…
Emma Frost: Jean Grey is dead, Agent Brand.
Agent Brand: Yeah, that’ll last.
- Astonishing X-Men #6

I’m not saying it’s the worst reconciliation of a comic book death. Aunt May certainly comes to mind. It’s not even worse than the previous resurrection of Jean Grey (The Phoenix Force cloned her body and manifested her essence, leaving her original form in a cocoon at the bottom of Jamaica Bay, after which Mr. Sinister clones her AGAIN to create Madyeline Prior after which the X-Men find her body, rendering her blameless for destroying a solar system). But if this proves true, we will have now had three classic characters (Magik, Captain America, and Jean Grey) return from comic book death in very cheap fashion over the course of a year (Illyana just simply realizing it was in her power to return to Earth from Limbo, poof, just like that; Captain America revealed to have been shot with a rifle that TRANSPORTS PEOPLE THROUGH SPACE AND TIME RANDOMLY; and Jean Grey spontaneously being born again in a new body with her powers manifesting at birth, which finally elevates her from mutant to cosmic entity status). It’s a lot to swallow in that short of an amount of time, Marvel. It really negates the severity and finality of death in the minds of readers to have the pearly gates be a revolving door.