From NJSpotlight, September 21, 2012:

Charles Steindel, the Treasury Department’s chief economist, said the increase in New Jersey’s jobless rate from 9.0 percent to 9.9 percent over the past five months is contradicted by employer surveys showing a gain of 50,000 jobs over the past year. …

But Senate President Stephen Sweeney (D-Gloucester) was skeptical of the Christie administration’s claims.

“This feels like Groundhog Day,” Sweeney said. “Every month we have to hear the same bad news, followed by the same inevitable spin from this administration trying to hide why it is so completely inept at getting people back to work.”

NJPP President Gordon MacInnes, rather than talking about the technicalities of the survey, reminded the Governor and the legislative leadership that a tax cut proposal should no longer be on the table.

“The increase in New Jersey’s unemployment rate to 9.9 percent comes the day after New Jersey lost out to New York City for the location of 234 high-value pharmaceutical research jobs,” said MacInnes. “These are the kind of jobs we need to capture if we are to put the state on the path to prosperity.”

“Here’s what we can be sure of: Roche didn’t pick NYC because of its low tax rates,” he added. “Yet, both the governor and legislative leadership are obsessed with tax cuts as the only response to high unemployment.”

“The latest jobs numbers for New Jersey merely reaffirm the basic fact that we’ve known for months: we are recovering from the Great Recession much more slowly than the rest of the nation,” MacInnes said.