Author: Larry Littlefield

With Long Island and Westchester trading charges over who is more overtaxed, and reports blaming duplicative and inefficient government on Long Island for its loss of competitive advantage compared with places such as Fairfax County, Virginia, I thought I’d compile some public employment and payroll data to see how these places compare with Fairfax, similarly affluent suburban counties around the country, a few other affluent suburban counties in the region, and U.S. average. Based on this data, we find that though the counties differ from each other to some extent, Nassau, Suffolk and Westchester counties all have high taxes in large part due to an unusually large number of unusually well-paid public school and police employees. Public employment is also relatively high in amenities such as parks and recreation and libraries. It is also likely, however, that these counties suffer from the effects of being fully developed and aging communities, with current residents paying rising bills for Medicaid-financed senior services, and for debts, pensions and retiree health benefits inherited from the past. In other words, they are facing the same difficult transition that New York City did in the 1960s and 1970s.

While doing research on the job, I came upon an article in San Francisco publication reporting, based on federal survey data, that the City by the Bay had the highest rate of illicit drug use in the United States. Naturally, this made me curious about New York City, so I followed the link back to the source and found out the following. About 8.13% of Americans had used an illicit drug including marijuana in the past month, compared with 9.16% in New York State, 9.13% in New York City, and 13.4% in Manhattan. New York treats those possessing small amounts of marijuana relatively gently. New York is also the home of the infamous Rockefeller Drug Laws. While 3.64% of all Americans had used an illicit drug other than marijuana in the past month, just 3.15% of New York State residents and 3.13% of New York City residents (but 4.04% of Manhattan residents) had. I’m not an expert on drug use and criminal justice, but does this mean we sort of got what we wanted? That is smoke pot if you must (but in NYC not tobacco) but don’t do something worse? And are the Rockefeller Drug Laws filling the jails with affluent people from Manhattan? Find the detailed data, which also shows very low hard drug use in Queens and has details for sub-state areas upstate, here.

On Capital Confidential, I find this quote: “We’ve racked our brains to find a single example of the use of the education formula to harm an individual municipality…Never before, never before, has a community been singled out for harm."

Read my prior post, and download the spreadsheets attached to this one.

What do you call the decision in the 1995-1996 budget to cut state school aid to low-spending, high needs NYC while increasing it to the rest of the state? What do you call the decision to NYC's share of total state education funding, including STAR, in the wake of 9/11 in exchange for granting the city permission to increase its own debt and taxes?

“I'd gladly pay you Tuesday for a hamburger today,” the character Wimpy often said in the Popeye strip. The payment never came. There is much I could praise in the New York State budget recently agreed to, in its precedents and, to a lesser extent, even the way it was adopted, which bad as it was better than in the past. Unlike the Daily News or New York Times, however, I will not write about anything I agree with until my question is answered. Including school aid that is called school aid, back door school aid (STAR), Spitzer's new checks, and all CASH to be spent IN A GIVEN FISCAL YEAR to fund, or to offset local funding for, elementary and secondary education, what was NYC's share of total state spending last year, and what will it be this year? In his initial budget Powerpoint presentation, Governor Spitzer said it was 37% last year and proposed to be 37% next year, with Long Island's share also unchanged at 14.1% (despite a “school aid” shift) because of all the money that area would get from Spitzer's checks. So what was the final result? The Governor and others are going around the state talking about everything else.

Checking in with the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid datamart, I find that all the states have now reported Medicaid information for 2004. In fact a few, including New York State, have already reported data for 2005. Now I am at least able to fully tabulate Medicaid spending by type of service for 2004, and the overall bottom lines are these. New York State’s spending per Medicaid beneficiary was $7,910, 70.4% above the national average and 23.7% higher than the average of surrounding states (PA, NJ, CT, MA, VT). With 6.6% of the nation’s population, New York accounted for 8.5% of its Medicaid beneficiaries, a difference only partially explained by the state’s above average poverty and elderly population. New York State residents accounted for 7.6% of U.S. personal income in 2004, according the Bureau of Economic Analysis, and 8.6% of national earnings in the Health Care and Social Assistance industries. The state, however, accounted for 14.5% of national Medicaid expenditures that year. The details by type of service are in the attached spreadsheet, and are described following the break.

Now that the Steamroller has been shown that it may be necessary to remove some of the base course before a road’s surface course can be smoothed over, I’ve downloaded some detailed annual average data for 2005 to show why New York’s health care industry is so expensive. As I showed in this post – it isn’t because most health care workers, aside from hospital and nursing home workers represented by Local 1199 and perhaps some top administrators, are overpaid once the cost of living and overall wage levels are adjusted for. They are by and large either fairly paid (nurses) or underpaid (physicians, home care workers). The problem is there are so many of them in particular categories and, perhaps, in New York Medicaid is paying for services for the non-poor that elsewhere others do without or pay for themselves.

Perhaps familiarity breeds contempt, and perhaps I’ve been too hard on them, but it appears that not everyone shares the dim view of New York State Assembly Speaker Sheldon Silver and New York State Senate Majority Leader Joseph Bruno that most editorial boards, think tanks, and blog posters in New York State have. While researching for another post I came upon a press release from the National Conference of State Legislatures. Evidently, Silver and Bruno will be honored for their exemplary work at the group’s Annual Meeting in Boston August 5th to 9th. The press release cites the recent improvement in the way the legislature operates, including two on-time budgets in a row (now three), along with their “commitment to democracy, sound public policy, and an efficient legislative process.” The group’s website is here http://www.ncsl.org/, but if you have trouble finding the press release I have additional florid praise after the break. All I can say is take this with a grain of salt: this is an organization of and for state legislators and their staffs, and may have just wanted to do the two men of the room a favor in the wake of the Brennan Center report and other indignities.