"Jon Corzine will be giving his final State of the State speech on Tuesday. So when I was walking around the Statehouse the other day, I decided to ask people for their thoughts on how to sum up his four years in office.
I soon ran into Deborah Howlett, a former Star-Ledger reporter who left the paper to join Corzine’s staff. She made a spirited defense of her soon-to-be-ex-boss. He had trimmed more than $5 billion from the current year’s budget, she boasted. In fact, said Howlett, he would leave office as the only governor to have a fourth-year budget lower than his first year’s budget.
That was quite an accomplishment, I granted. But having cut all that spending, just what public services did Corzine cut?
'Well he cut the Statehouse staff in half,' Howlett replied."