Author: Larry Littlefield

Ever since I started tabulating and analyzing data from the Governments division of the U.S. Census Bureau in the early 1990s, I’ve found that the results are something that no one of any political persuasion has wanted to see. My former supervisors at City planning once presented the data, along with a bunch of other information, to former NYC economic development czar John Dyson. He was so upset that most of NYC’s extra local government taxes as a share of personal income, over and above the U.S. average, went to categories of spending that no business person would consider “public services” that he started ranting “New York stinks” at a conference that very evening. When presented with the same data his boss, former Mayor Giuliani, was not happy to see that NYC’s staffing and spending levels were so high for police and low for education, given that he wanted to make them higher and lower respectively. A housing advocate and city planner grew upset with me when I pointed out New York City’s comparatively high spending on housing and low spending on services such as education and parks, accusing me of immorally “trading off one need against another,” as if that wasn’t what the data showed had already happened. And when I presented the data to the City Planning Commission as part of the preparation of the charter-mandated Planning and Zoning Report, former commissioner Ron Shiffman felt the comparison with the U.S. average made NYC look unfairly bad. “At least compare us with other cities for God’s sake,” I recall him saying. Very well Professor Shiffman, this post and the attached tables contain the comparison you asked for.

In the spreadsheet attached to this post, I provided tables of comparative data on local government employment and pay for different parts of New York State in March 2007, along with the data and capacity to quickly make similar comparisons with major counties around the country. The sources and tabulation methods are explained in that post. Attached to this post is a table that takes similar information I compiled five years ago, when the 2002 Census of Governments was released, and compares it with 2007 for the United States; New York City; the downstate suburban counties (Nassau, Suffolk, Westchester, Rockland, Putnam); the mostly highly urbanized Upstate NY counties (Albany, Broome, Dutchess, Erie, Monroe, Niagara, Oneida, Onondaga, Orange, Rensselaer, Saratoga, and Schenectady); the other more rural Upstate New York counties; and the total for New Jersey. The data show that full time equivalent local government employment per 100,000 people rose 1.4% in the United States from 2002 to 2007. For New York City it fell 4.3%, for the Downstate Suburbs it rose 8.2%, for the Upstate Metro counties it rose 1.1%, for the rest of New York State it rose 2.9%, and for New Jersey it rose 5.4%. Needless to say, I am not surprised.

One of the arguments the city’s dead trees made to overturn term limits, and perhaps eliminate real elections, is that Mayor Bloomberg has financial acumen beyond nearly all other New Yorkers, and is indispensable at this time of financial crisis. Recently I have gained firsthand knowledge of the financial brilliance with which the City of New York is being run. It seems that the City has made an investment with a 60% rate of return over 7 ½ months. Over a full year that is nearly a 100% rate of return, or a doubling of the City’s money. Unfortunately, I have found this out because I am on the other side of the trade, and forced to pay that massive rate of return. If I do not, “further legal action may ensue.”

It wasn’t easy and it wasn’t fun, but I’ve compiled a spreadsheet of local government employment and payroll data from the U.S. Census Bureau’s 2007 Census of Governments in time for Governor Paterson’s emergency budget session. The attached spreadsheet has two summary tables that print in two pages; one shows the number of full time-equivalent workers in various categories (police officers, sanitation department workers) per 100,000 people in March 2007, and the second shows their level of pay at that time, relative to the national average. In each case, the summary tables provide data for all local governments in the United States; New York City; the downstate suburban counties (Nassau, Suffolk, Westchester, Rockland, Putnam); the mostly highly urbanized Upstate NY counties (Albany, Broome, Dutchess, Erie, Monroe, Niagara, Oneida, Onondaga, Orange, Rensselaer, Saratoga, and Schenectady); the other more rural Upstate New York counties; the total for New Jersey, and Fairfield County in Connecticut. In a new feature, I have put one additional column in the summary tables — “your county here.” By blocking that column, and replacing text in the existing formula with the column letter (s) for whatever county one is interested in, one can put any other county in the table. The choices are all the counties in New York and New Jersey, almost all of the counties elsewhere in the country with the most total private-sector employment in 2006, and a few others that interest me, because I know people who live there. A discussion of where the data came from and how to interpret it follows.

The destruction of our public and private institutions due to their exploitation by greedy insiders, the former I have long been familiar with and frustrated by, the latter has been shocking to me in its extent, have much in common. Take this recent article from Bloomberg News. “Americans, it seems, don't want declines of 50 percent or 70 percent in the year-end bonuses paid to those who work at the nation's banks and securities firms, or at least the ones they now own, partly through the government's $700 billion bailout. No, these Americans want Wall Street bonuses to go to zero.” “The industry, however, seems not to get it. Maybe the survivors are in denial. Perhaps they believe that surely since they did a good job this year — presuming they don't work in mortgage securities or derivatives or whatever the real losers are — that they deserve the same bonuses they got during the seven fat years. Or maybe they think if they get just one more good hit, they will have accumulated ‘the number’ they need to retire and never work again.” So who on the public sector side will be looking to make one last score and hit “the number” and never have to work again?” I’ll give you a hint: for some the number is currently 55, for others the number is 62, and the idea is to get a special deal to reduce it, for those anywhere close now, at the expense of the future. Again.

The data is out for the employment phase of the 2007 Census of Governments (the finance phase will not arrive until next summer), and I have thus far tabulated the information for selected state governments: the State of New York, the U.S. average for all states, some other states around the Northeast — New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Massachusetts, and Connecticut — and some other states carried by President-elect Obama in 2008 — California, Colorado, Virginia, and North Carolina. One might expect people in those states, as opposed to (say) Tennessee, to have similar public service expectations to those of New York. The data show that New York had less state employment per 100,000 residents in March of 2007 than the U.S. average and all of the states listed save Pennsylvania and California, and that while New York State’s per capita income was 19.9% above the national average in 2006, it’s March 2007 payroll per full time equivalent worker was only 17.3% above average. A more detailed analysis, however, shows this is somewhat misleading — low New York employment and pay in higher education, and the shift of some functions to the local level, offsets above average employment and pay in other categories. The data is attached (set to print in two pages), and discussed below.

The domestic U.S. auto industry and state and local governments face a crisis. Sales for the former and tax revenues for the latter are collapsing, at the same time each face soaring health care costs for employees and (because of the rich pensions after early careers their employees receive) retirees. General Motors has said that absent assistance it will have to shut down by the end of the year; public services are about to collapse, and state and local taxes are about to soar, particularly in New York. The federal government could prevent the disaster by enacting a universal health care financing system at the federal level, providing a choice of a public program such as a less extravagant version of Medicare and a similar subsidy for the purchase of private insurance. Such a system would lift an enormous weight off both older corporations with many retirees and state and local governments, more than enough to offset the taxes that would be required to fund it, and federal aid in other categories that states and localities could thereafter fund themselves. But there is a political party, and powerful interests backing that party, that stand in the way, because they have such a sweet deal under the existing system. I refer, of course, to the Democratic Party, the auto industry, and public employee, auto industry and health care unions and lobbyists.

Most people who were paying attention saw this fiscal disaster coming from a long way off. Lots of interests affiliated with the public sector decided they had as much right to exploit the rest of us, in exchange for next to nothing, as the Wall Street Robber Barons, since while the money was rolling in they could pretend those Robber Barons would pay for it all. Now, predictably, the money is rolling out. Yet for the Mayor and Council, representing the private and public overlords respectivley, the problem seems to have arisen over the past 24 hours. Remember that a year from now, before the 2009 election.

Don't vote for any Republicans at the federal level, regardless of your opinions on social and foreign policy issues, on generational equity grounds. And don't vote for any incumbents of either party in the New York State Legislature, on generational equity grounds; because they have favored (former) producers of public services to an unfair degree over consumers of such services (other than the super rich who do not require them); because they have represented the interests of those with special deals, privileges and favors over those without; and because New York State barely be classified as a democracy.  The vote is symbolic, but if you are going down to vote for President anyway, take the opportunity to vote no.

Every five years the U.S. Census Bureau conducts a census of government employment and finances in the United States. The finance data for 2007 is due out next summer; the employment data was released (thus far on their “ftp” site only) last week. It will take a great deal of work data for me to reorganize the data for states and counties (including data for all local governments within a county) into usable form, as I did for 2002. To put the election for President into perspective, however, I have whipped up a summary of federal, state and local government employment at the national level (attached). The data show that the federal government accounted for just 12.3% of the 22 million U.S. government employees in 2007. A few exclusively federal categories, national defense and international relations, the post office and the space program, accounted for more than half of all federal workers. Excluding as well other functions that are primarily divided between federal and state governments, such as social insurance administration (mostly Social Security at the federal level, unemployment insurance at the state level) and natural resources, the federal government accounted for just 2.6% of government employment. These categories, and (more importantly) state universities and prisons, account for most state government jobs.

Looking at the vast majority of government functions, local governments account for 85% of total government employment. Federal governments collect and distribute money, but local governments do the work. The next President will only directly administer, for the most part, national defense, the post office, and collection and distribution of money via Social Security and the IRS. He will influence much else, but only in association with the Congress and state governments, which control the flow of funds to other organizations. Obama vs. McCain is just one piece of the decision. Aside from foreign and military issues, control of Congress and the State Senate are as important or more important.