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The Baddest Governor on the Planet this morning passed his first budget and talks about it with Joe Scarborough and White House media aide Mika Brzezinski.Christie has also called for a special session of the state legislature.
Update: An interview from CNBC's Squawk Box.
Partial transcript from Part 2:
CHRISTIE: We need to bring the public sector into the real world of what’s going on in the private sector, because the people who are paying the bills for that public sector are the folks who are losing their jobs in the private sector. We can’t have that anymore.
JOE: I saw that there was a total of 55,000 teachers that lost their jobs. That will be a number that’s thrown out, and it sounds like a lot. No one likes to see teachers lose their jobs. But there’s been literally millions and millions and millions and millions of people in the private sector that are out of work.
CHRISTIE: Joe, there’s no doubt about it. And let me give you New Jersey as an example. Last year we lost 121,000 private sector jobs in the State of New Jersey in 2009. At the same time, we added 11,300 jobs at the municipal and school board level. This is insanity and we can’t do it anymore. And I don’t want any teacher to lose their job any more than I want somebody in the private sector to lose their job, but we simply cannot print money like the federal government. We can’t afford it any longer, and everyone has to share in this sacrifice. And to this point, the public sector unions have been exempted from the sacrifice. And the people who are paying the bills, our constituents in New Jersey who are not in the public sector, and even some that are, they are tired of it. They can no longer do it. They’re losing their jobs, they’re losing their homes, they’re losing their life savings. And we have to stand up and say “no”, and that’s what we’re doing in New Jersey.
BECCA: Governor Christie, I hear your point about how the state can’t print money; the federal government can. Is the federal government, in your opinion, doing the right thing by trying to provide stimulus right now, and some of that unemployment insurance, along those lines. Do you think that because they’re in that different position, it’s the right time for them to be using those printing presses.
CHRISTIE: Becky, I have to tell you something. We’ve been using the printing presses now for almost the entire Obama administration. And we have not seen the results from that that we’re promised when we started running the printing presses.
