Author: Larry Littlefield

In my first post on a way out for the MTA, I proposed breaking up the MTA transit monopoly and settling the payroll tax controversy by turning the bus systems, and the payroll tax/taxi surcharge revenues, over to New York City and the counties. New York City and the counties would also shift their existing MTA contributions, excluding those for rail station maintenance, to their bus systems. The MTA would no longer operate buses. If the suburban counties didn’t want to keep the surcharge, fine. If they didn’t want to have buses, fine. These new transit systems would not inherit the rules of the old ones. Just the vehicles and depots. One might think, given this proposal, that I have joined the many MTA bashers. Having worked at NYC Transit twice in two different eras, I in fact know more about MTA dysfunction than most of those complaining, but I also know the agency works better than most in the public sector. My actual reasoning is as follows.

Where folks have found out the hard way that government of the seniors, by the seniors, and for the seniors eventually leaves no one left to pay for the seniors.  New York suckers take note. "More than 1,000 chanting protesters rallied at the state Capitol today against a proposed tax on retirement income that Gov. Rick Snyder called a necessary move that had silent support from many people. The governor’s mantra of 'shared sacrifice' isn’t sitting well with many retirees, though."

Michigan's Governor is open to criticism because he is using some of the revenues from having retirees pay the same taxes as those who are working to cut business taxes. The fact that the state has lost a huge share of its jobs — and the young workers that go with them — over ten years does not seem to concern those with retirement income, which in that state is now higher than the hiring wage. Here in NY, it would be nice if we just had more money to pay for public employee pensions and retiree health care without destroying public services.

Proponents of nuclear power, back in the days of anti-nuclear protests following Three Mile Island, believed that people feared nuclear power because they feared the unknown. With the current disaster unfolding in Japan, however, I’m beginning to think that I didn’t fear nuclear power because of what I didn’t know. I didn’t know you couldn’t turn it off.

Here is the standard education in nuclear power provided to someone who got a pretty good education by 1970s standards, and has a very good long term memory. The nuclear reaction is controlled by control rods. You pull them out to start the reaction, and put them in to shut it off. You are safe, because of the control rods. Well in Japan, the reactors survived the earthquake. They survived the tsunami. The control rods were inserted. But the tsunami knocked out power to the plant, shutting it off. And when it shut off it went into self destruct mode.

Liu's report compares private sector and public sector pay, and claims that NYC's public employees are underpaid and thus, one might assume, are being cheated and deserve to retailiate by doing less work in the coming year. But they way the comparisons are made shifts from one part of the analysis to the other, always in ways that would make public sector pay seem lower.

Suddenly newly elected Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker, someone few Americans had heard of two months ago, is the most controversial politician in the United States. The reason is that Governor Walker, in addition to demanding public employee givebacks to help solve a budget crisis, has also proposed limiting collective bargaining with unions to wages (New York State eliminated collective bargaining on pensions in the 1970s after soaring pension costs wrecked New York City), giving state residents the right to a referendum on wage increases if they exceed the inflation rate (a referendum is already required for any pension changes in San Francisco), no longer forcing public employees to pay union dues, and giving public employees the ability to de-unionize in an annual vote. The resulting controversy has been nationalized by the national press and politicians from both parties. Outside Wisconsin, the proposals are seen as an attempt to destroy public employee unions, and thus the Democratic Party those unions fund, leaving the wealthy the only remaining source of campaign funding in the country. So who is this right wing maniac, and why did Wisconsin vote for him?

Until the recent controversy, I hadn’t really heard of Scott Walker either. But in my job, I have written a quarterly report on economic, demographic and real estate trends in the Milwaukee Metropolitan Area, the state’s largest at 27.8% of total state population and its economic engine, for the past six years. And since Milwaukee County accounts for 60.3% of the Milwaukee MSA, I had heard of the Milwaukee County pension scandal – the scandal that made Scott Walker’s career and probably shaped his attitudes. Here is the backstory the mainstream media has failed to deliver.

The rants keep rolling in, but I know what they are really about: Say on Pay. "Washington, D.C., Jan. 25, 2011 — The Securities and Exchange Commission today adopted rules concerning shareholder approval of executive compensation and 'golden parachute' compensation arrangements as required under the Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act."

The entitlement of these executives sounds very much like the public employee union leaders with their retroactive pension enhancements. The stock market bubble ended more than a decade ago, but some people still expect their pay — or pensions — to be based on an assumption of soaring stock prices. But don't dare question it.  When will we reach the statute of limitations on executive claims that their excess pay packages are based on the creation of "shareholder value," and retroactive pension enhancements are "free" because stocks will go up more than 8.0% per year from the inflated levels of 2000?