Property Tax Information: This is where the Division of Community Affairs posts annual spreadsheets with columns and columns of property tax information. You can find other nuggets from the main page. The Treasury Dept. has some data too, though it's not exactly user-friendly. Or you can go wide and see how New Jersey compares to the rest of the nation. The Census has the raw data. Or, you can peruse the analysis of the non-partisan Tax Foundation, which has New Jersey tax data in numerous categories.
The New Jersey Data Center: The Division of Labor Planning and analysis has dozens of databases you can peruse online. As expected, there is gobs of data on employment and unemployment; there is a nice repository on building permits; and our personal favorite, New Jersey wage data by occupation and industry -- now you can see if you really deserve a raise.
The New Jersey Department of Education: Data is a natural byproduct of the educational system. There's data on students, data on teachers, data on administrators, data on money. The DOE lays it all out cleanly here, so no need to give you specific links. However, if you ever feel the need to go national, we really enjoy the U.S. DOE's online data tool, which allows you to build a custom table to compare school across state lines.
Life, Death & Disease in New Jersey: The State Department of Health and Senior Services has a large cache of vital statistics. The U.S. Center for Disease control also has an interesting tool for measuring trends in "behavioral risk factors" in New Jersey and elsewhere.
The U.S. Census Bureau: In addition to the decennial Census that produces data used by researchers in numerous fields, the bureau conducts dozens of other surveys on an ongoing basis. In an effort to produced decennial-Census-like data on an annual basis, the Bureau recently began the American Community Survey, which produces oodles of New Jersey data. It's a small sample size, so the results are most accurate at the state and county level. Another key Census program is the annual population estimates, which go down to the town level. Another excellent feature is the new employment