I posted for the first time on this site three years ago today. During that time I’ve written about 470 posts, generally three to four typewritten pages long, or about three per week, many with extensive spreadsheets based on data I had downloaded, tabulated and analyzed. More recently I’ve been slowing down. At this point, anyone who has read my posts from the beginning should be able to understand how I think, what my values are, and what the information is that informs my opinions on a variety of subjects in great detail. If someone has been reading right along, it should begin to seem repetitious, as a comparison between my first post and this one shows. It isn't because I don't have an open mind, it is because the same pols backed by the same interests remain in charge in Albany, the therefore same things keep happening. And some things that have and will happen are pre-ordained by irrevocable decisions of the past. More and more in my new posts I summarize, and back link to more detailed posts I have already written. For anyone not familiar with what I have to say and show, on the other hand, I don’t want to leave things out. Particularly things I’m not reading elsewhere, as I explained last year. My Room 8 writings, however, are an extension of a mostly losing battle going back far longer than three years, and that gets discouraging. And thus my offer and request.
The most important thing going on this year, for purposes of telling the truth about what our state and local politicians have done (and then reverse engineering what their values actually are), is the availability of 2007 Census of Governments data from the U.S. Census Bureau. The data only comes out every five years, and allows (with quite a bit of work) a comparison between New York and state and local governments and those throughout the country. I’ve already compiled and written about data from the organization and employment phase, but the finance phase will come out over the summer.
It is ridiculous that I’ve been one of the few people in the state compiling and discussing that data, and the only one doing it in the detail that I do. I am almost certainly the only person in the state who has read the whole Census Bureau manual on government employment and finance, now that Dick Netzer (who helped design the Census of Governments back in the 1950s) is gone, and the only one who catches data errors and reports them to the Census Bureau and other statistical agencies. It isn’t just that dataset for which that is the case. When I applied for an account with the Center for Medicare and Medicaid state data cube, I was stunned to find out that no one else from New York State had. And remember, I’m doing this in my spare time, and not getting paid.
It isn’t that New York doesn’t have people working in public policy. The problem is most of them work for interest groups on creating propaganda, to the extent that those interests even feel the need to bother with even highly selective facts. And it isn’t as if other policy analysts aren’t capable. They are just irrelevant to the non-decisions being made and deals being done, aside from after-the-fact rationalization. I know — up until five year ago at this time, when I left public service with what I had hoped to be a bang with my protest campaign against the New York State legislature, I was one of them.
Here is my offer and request. Is anyone with some background and interest in this sort of information willing to watch me work with this data, and help me compile it? You’ve got to be able to handle a spreadsheet, and be willing to sweat it out with me nights and weekends (no air conditioning in my house) after the data is released, probably in August, possibly in July. If so, I’d be happy to have others participate, and the more help I get, the more I’m likely to do, as it is a big job. The more people thinking about what our state and local government have done and talking about it honestly, the better.
In particular, with some assistance perhaps I’ll try to replicate the graphic and text box presentation of the data I did for NYU’s Taub Urban Research Center back in 2001 (now taken down). Mr. Prof. Netzer e-mailed I would have been better off skipping the “cartoons” and just going with the spreadsheets that were linked to them. But people less interested in the subject than Prof. Netzer might prefer cartoons, particularly now that the good work his generation in New York City is being undone subsequent generations in the New York State legislature. How can this be done? Power point presentations as Room Eight attachments? I’ll have to see what I’m up to doing. If those with more remaining energy will help, perhaps I’ll do more.
My offer to sit down with any journalist covering state and local government, and show them things as they actually are, also stands.
If anyone is interested let me know; I’m not hard to find. You show me what you can do, and I’ll show you how I do what I do. Thus putting you in a better position to understand and explain what is coming.