Ten union jobs will be created for favorite suck-ups. They will have endless meetings over sticky buns and coffee. No progress will be made. Progress is not the goal. Sucking down federal dollars while doing nothing is the goal.

Add to this the overhead (buildings, salaries, benefits) and petty bureaucrats that pushed the paper to get this done.

The results of this largesse from the rest of us will be negligible. Of course you'll have another set of state bureaucrats finagling the results data.

Net, net, nothing to see here.

$5M won't even cover all the DUI's that Democrat Senators Lautenberg and Menendez rack up in an average year.

Hard earned tax dollars meet big black hole.

While I agree that all of this federal spending is silly, please stop making it sound as if New Jersey is sucking money out of "heartland" states because New Jersey always sends more to the federal government than it gets back, generally between 50 and 75 cents for every tax dollar collected and often in last place in that regard.

The giant sucking sound goes from NJ to states like New Mexico, Mississippi, Alaska, Louisiana, West Virginia, the Dakotas, Alabama, Kentucky, Virginia, Montana, Hawaii, Maine, Arkansas, Oklahoma, South Carolina, Missouri, Maryland, Tennessee, and Idaho, all of which get significantly more money back from the federal government than they pay in. All of those farm subsidies, dam projects, levees, long stretches of rural interstate highway, and so on are paid for by NJ tax dollars, not the other way around.

For details, see:

http://taxfoundation.org/article/federal-taxing-and-spending-benefit-some-states-leave-others-paying-bill-1

I used to carpool with someone who was a citizen patrol cop in NJ. He quit because he was told that on DUI roadblocks they were expected to find something, anything, that could warrant a citation. I hadn't realised what a police state NJ had become until I left.

We are talking about NJ. All of the money will be sucked up by the filthy, corrupt, blood sucking parasite (govt workers) unions.

#5: those numbers are quite fraudulent, since taxes paid by headquarters are usually from profits made elsewhere. NJ is a corrupt toilet, run by govt goons and a gang of dirty Democrat politicans. Christie helped by jailing 50 of them but there are hundreds more. By the way, NJ's police force is among the most corrupt in thhe nation. By the way, I live in NJ.

#8 how much do you think it costs to build and maintain all of that rural infrastructure paid for or subsidized with federal dollars like dams, electrical and telephone wiring, highways, levees, and so on that run for miles and miles to service a relatively small number of people? And note that I'm not even touching on military spending. You may not like it, but please stop making excuses for it. If every state got to keep their federal tax dollars and gave up federal money, NJ would benefit and many heartland states would not. That's the bottom line.

Now, you may want to make an Obama-like argument that the heartland deserves to take that money out of NJ for one reason or another, but be aware of how rose arguments are going to sound.

Please note that I am not saying that NJ is great. It has some serious problems including corruption and draconian gun control laws. But it is also a very rich state that contributes a great deal of money to the federal government, a point any conservative should be able to understand.

#10 Can New Jersey feed itself with the food it produces in state? Can it produce the oil and gas that it takes to make electricity, fuel its autos and heat its homes? Does it produce salt so the roads are passable in the winter?

The State Police will get another helicopter.
That's about it.

Too bad. I'm afraid their drunk driving efforts will be to no avail unless they get $2,960,087.

Many of those western states cited by poster #5 have millions of square miles of federally-owned land that should be producing income to the federal and state governments in the form of oil and gas leases, coal and hard rock mineral production, and logging. The federal government SHOULD be paying for infrastructure maintenance relating to those long stretches of highway out in the middle of nowhere.

The real problem is that, under the Obama administration, no oil and gas, no mining, and minimal logging are undertaken due to capricious regulatory and discretionary restrictions imposed by the EPA, Energy Department, and Agriculture Department.

#11, none of that changes the fact that more money leaves New Jersey to the federal government than comes back. And let me know if you are familiar with the following quote, because it sounds an awful lot like the argument you are making:

"If you’ve been successful, you didn’t get there on your own. You didn’t get there on your own. I’m always struck by people who think, well, it must be because I was just so smart. There are a lot of smart people out there. It must be because I worked harder than everybody else. Let me tell you something — there are a whole bunch of hardworking people out there."

[...]

"So we say to ourselves, ever since the founding of this country, you know what, there are some things we do better together. That’s how we funded the GI Bill. That’s how we created the middle class. That’s how we built the Golden Gate Bridge or the Hoover Dam. That’s how we invented the Internet. That’s how we sent a man to the moon. We rise or fall together as one nation and as one people, and that’s the reason I’m running for President — because I still believe in that idea. You’re not on your own, we’re in this together."

Is that *really* the sort of argument you want to be making?

General rural infrastructure has long been expensive to build and maintain and unless it's built to specifically get to resources that will support the infrastructure, it's not profitable. There are a lot of "bridges to nowhere" out there in rural America paid for thanks to a local politician's earmarks, especially in states that had powerful Senators such as New Mexico and West Virginia.

Of course a big part of the difference is that New Jersey is full of rich people and Mississippi isn't, which means that the the rich "1%" in New Jersey is paying a lot of taxes while poor people in rural Mississippi, for example, are part of the 47% who don't pay taxes and often qualify for benefits.

Please note that I'm also not saying that this is terrible or wrong. It makes sense to put military bases in heartland states where the cost of land and living is much cheaper than it is in urbanized coastal and norther states and it makes sense that retirees flee the high cost of living in the Northeast and West Coast when they retire. My point is simply that New Jersey only gets back 50 to 75 cents back for ever tax dollar it sends to Washington, DC and the idea that it's somehow sucking up more than it pays in is wrong and people need to deal with that even if they don't like it. The reason why Obama is so competitive in heartland states like Ohio, Iowa, and Minnesota is because there is a lot of federal money flowing into the heartland.

Will these grants produce something like the anti-tobacco ads that run in the middle of the night ?

#11....answers.........
Yes; we aren't called the Garden State for nothing.....fruit, vegetables, meat you name it we grow it. Almost %60 of NJ is NOT developed. Bet you didn't know that.

Yes; You might want to research the origins of the Petroleum industry in America. We have the refineries and the offshore fields.

And finally, Yes. There are actually a couple of salt production facilities for sale in NJ right now.

#5, the return on tax dollars to NJ averages between .52 to .57 per dollar.