Angry New Yorker

Semi-Daily Rants from New York City's Angry Man

"As I know more of mankind I expect less of them, and am ready now to call a man a good man, upon easier terms than I was formerly." - Dr. Samuel Johnson, Boswell, Life of Johnson, Sept. 1783

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Monday, July 06, 2009
 
CityJournal's Steven Malanga is digging again in NYC and NYS finances noting:

"Over Bloomberg’s tenure, the city has, thanks to annual spending increases,
expanded the budget on an inflation-adjusted basis faster than any mayor since
John Lindsay, whose spending pushed New York to the edge of bankruptcy (see “New York’s Next Fiscal Crisis,” Summer 2008)."

Remember this when "Mayor Mike" starts blustering about cost-cutting and his fiscal responsibility - neither of which are true in any meaningful fashion.

Malanga's full article is here: The City’s Finances: Budget-Cutting Made Simple

posted by anonymous at 12:28 PM

 
Frederic U. Dicker finally gives up on NY. And he was one of the holdouts.

See http://www.nypost.com/seven/07052009/postopinion/opedcolumnists/albany__i_give_up_177689.htm?&page=0

Money quote:

"After three decades as a journalist covering state government, if I had to
do it all over again, I'd find another job.

I've covered Govs. Hugh Carey, Mario Cuomo, George Pataki, Eliot Spitzer and David Paterson and for New York to wind up like this after 35 years of modern leadership, it's clear to me that my real job has been to chronicle the devolution -- the decay and decline -- of New York state."


posted by anonymous at 12:20 PM

Tuesday, May 05, 2009
 
New York in Decline.

Steve Malanga's op-editorial, Shackling New York: Why State is in Decline, in today's New York Post highlights why New York, unless it changes course, is doomed to steady and ultimately perhaps irreversible decline.

Malanga notes "New York state is dead last in the freedom index 'by a wide margin,'" according to a recent study by George Mason University's Mercatus Center. The Mercatus Center study, Freedom in the 50 States: An Index of Personal and Economic Freedom, is available here [PDF]. Malanga queries, and rightfully so in our opinion, as to the consequences of this lack of freedom and states,
"[t]he best way to judge is to look at the collective condition of the states with the worst rankings. (New Jersey is in 49th place, following California and Rhode Island.)

Together, New York, New Jersey and California face some $65 billion in budget deficits in 2009, amounting to more than two-thirds of the budget gaps faced by all 50 states. These states' stratospheric spending and taxes have stifled economic growth and left them scarily unprepared for the economic downturn."

Further, Malanga reports on the contrast with the study's freest states: New Hampshire, Colorado, South Dakota, Idaho and Texas, which have unemployment rates at or below the national average. (New Hampshire's is 6.2 percent, or two full points below the nation's, according to recent Labor Department statistics.) You decided whether it is also a coincidence that each of these states is a net winner in terms of domestic migration, with far more citizens entering than leaving.

The Mercatus' Summary of the Study states:

This paper presents the first-ever comprehensive ranking of the American states on their public policies affecting individual freedoms in the economic, social, and personal spheres. We develop and justify our ratings and aggregation procedure on explicitly normative criteria, defining individual freedom as the ability to dispose of one’s own life, liberty, and justly acquired property however one sees fit, so long as one does not coercively infringe on another individual’s ability to do the same.

This study improves on prior attempts to score economic freedom for American states in three primary ways: (1) it includes measures of social and personal freedoms such as peaceable citizens’ rights to educate their own children, own and carry firearms, and be free from unreasonable search and seizure; (2) it includes far more variables, even on economic policies alone, than prior studies, and there are no missing data on any variable; and (3) it uses new, more accurate measurements of key variables, particularly state fiscal policies.

We find that the freest states in the country are New Hampshire, Colorado, and South Dakota, which together achieve a virtual tie for first place. All three states feature low taxes and government spending and middling levels of regulation and paternalism. New York is the least free by a considerable margin, followed by New Jersey, Rhode Island, California, and Maryland. On personal freedom alone, Alaska is the clear winner, while Maryland brings up the rear. As for freedom in the different regions of the country, the Mountain and West North Central regions are the freest overall while the Middle Atlantic lags far behind on both economic and personal freedom. Regression analysis demonstrates that states enjoying more economic and personal freedom tend to attract substantially higher rates of internal net migration.

The data used to create the rankings are publicly available online at www.statepolicyindex.com, and we invite others to adopt their own weights to see how the overall state freedom rankings change.

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posted by anonymous at 8:56 AM

Monday, April 06, 2009
 
Danger, Will Robinson!! [h/t David Freddoso in NRO's Corner]

Behold the death of the American experiment. For if this idiot's thinking because further pervasive, as it appears to be, there is no end but disaster, disunity and division. As Freddoso, notes "Cook County Board President Todd Stroger recently explained cigarette tax increases in an unexpectedly candid radio interview.

Host John Williams asked: Isn't it unfair to keep targeting smokers with tax increases?

"That is the American way," Stroger replied. "And the way that it's generally done is, you find some group that's small enough where they can't beat you up, and you tax them and you tell everybody else, 'See? We didn't tax you.' "

And it's our experience that the local and state level are following suit. Of course, this is President Obama's bedrock philosophy too in his "share the wealth" program. There's fewer [rich, producers, energy companies, etc.] than poor voters, ergo, tax, tax, tax Group A to get votes of the poorer. Lather. Rinse. Repeat. (At least until your hair falls out completely).


posted by anonymous at 2:24 PM

 
From "protect and serve" to "wait and report"

The recent upstate Binghamton shootings revealed a disturbing trend in police operations (which isn't just limited to the U.S. as Mark Steyn has noted) where police in responding to 911 "emergency" calls arrive and then... wait. But it highlights that in a real emergency you're on your own - and should plan and react accordingly. Jack Baeur isn't coming to come bursting through the window at the 11th hour to save the day.

As "Jack Dunphy" notes in The Corner:
Even if the gunfire had ceased, the people already wounded deserved an all-out effort to provide them with medical care as quickly as possible. I expect we’ll be learning that some of the victims bled to death while waiting for the help that came too late. Knowing how police departments function as I do, I have no doubt that there were officers ready and willing to enter the building within minutes but were prevented from doing so by superiors who, in ordinary circumstances, make no decisions weightier than selecting which desk tray to place a piece of paper in. These people had to be prodded from their desks when the trouble started, and their presence at the scene merely clogged up the decision-making process.


posted by anonymous at 8:57 AM

Sunday, January 11, 2009
 
Gaza Ruminations

Human suffering should never please another human. That is the goal. Hamas, however, is anti-human, in that it's official position is the affirmative suffering and the continuation of suffering and death. As such, the only possible way to defeat them is to grant their wish and deliver such suffering and death that the pain of waking each day, the heavy anguish of ongoing suffering, the soul killing understanding of the ruination and rubble resulting from their death wish, finally, finally delivers the message that their ideology is defeated.

Without receipt of this message only pain and suffering lie ahead. And the faux "humanitarians" who wring their hands about a "humanitarian crisis" will have the blood of future combatants on their well-meaning but idiotic hands. Complete defeat of Hamas is the only option. If the population that voted for them continue support, then they, too, need to be defeated. Completely. Until their spirit is utterly broken, their lives ruined, and the hearts emptied of the will to fight.

As harsh as this is history and human nature have time and time again shown that, sadly, this is the only viable resolution. Anything else is a wistful pipedream born of liberal wishes and an ignorance of human folly.

posted by anonymous at 3:19 PM

 
Grabbing the Brass Ring.

When we were children, several decades back, it never entered our minds that our goal should be "to grow up and go work for the city." The fathers of several friends worked for the city - as sanitation men, fire fighters or in some unknown civil bureau. Other than a mentor who went to work for he NYC court system and the father of the friend who worked for the DEP on the NYC water system we felt mildly sad for those men went to work for the city; as if circumstances and some failing conspired to push them into the arms of the city civil service as a last resort.

Working for the city was for those who either weren't able to or couldn't finish college or find a "decent" spot in the private sector. The examples of people we personally knew who'd gone to work for the city included a childhood friend whose girlfriend got pregnant at 18 and who dropped out of college to honorably support his sudden family by joining the transit cops; a friend who couldn't make it at college and joined the fire department, etc.

In our view a city career was a safety escape hatch. You'd virtually always have a job, but you'd be limited to a small apartment over a deli or an attached house in a distance part of Brooklyn or Queens. Your day would be drudgery, your hours, conduct and promotions fixed by minute and dry rules and regulations.

Today, however, those who went to work for the city at the time we were in or finishing up college are retired and living off hefty guranteed city pensions while the value of our 401Ks have dropped like a rock. We're in our third career at the moment and get home each night around 9:30 now, after having been laid off twice in the past two years. The economic
news each day is paralyzing. And those people that we felt mildly sorry for as having to settle for working for the city had the last laugh. This is no way to run a railroad.

From today's NY Times:
City Employee Pay Is Outpacing Private Sector, Report Says. “Bolstered in part by Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg’s spending, the average New York City employee cost the city $107,000 a year in wages, health insurance, pension and other benefits in the 2008 fiscal year, an increase of 63 percent since 2000, according to a new report.

City worker compensation grew twice as fast as that of employees in the private sector and elsewhere in the public sector during the same period. . . . The increase was driven by contractual raises that outpaced the inflation rate, and by the rising cost of health insurance and pension benefits, said the commission, a business-backed research group.

* * *

Critics also say that Mr. Bloomberg has not been forceful enough addressing soaring health and pension benefit costs. Those costs have jumped by 182 percent since 2000, according to the Citizens Budget Commission, in contrast to a 52 percent increase for other state and local governments, and a 40 percent increase for private industry.

Part of the reason that health benefits have jumped so much, the report said, is the city’s longstanding practice, unchanged by Mr. Bloomberg, to pay 100 percent of health insurance premiums for employees and their families, as well as for retirees and their spouses. The report noted that “Most other employers require their workers to pay some share of the premium.”

* * *

Over all, the report found that city employee pay rose to an average of $69,000 annually as of last June 30, up from $52,000 in 2000, an annual increase of 3.6 percent, while inflation rose an average of 3.2 percent during the same period. Average benefits now cost almost $38,000 a year, up from $13,000 a year.

Thanks to overtime and other supplemental payments, firefighters have an average annual compensation package totaling $186,000, the highest among city employees. Department of Education employees cost the city almost $99,000 annually."

posted by anonymous at 11:36 AM

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