Author: Larry Littlefield

The New York State Department of Labor has released Current Employment Survey data for February, and it seems various publicly funded entities around the state pretty much figured what the state budget would bring. New York City's local government cut another 1,600 jobs over the year to February 2007, while the state as a whole added 6,300, meaning the rest of the state added 7,900. In New York City, meanwhile, home health care employment rose by 5,400 from February 2006 to February 2007, and hospitals added 1,300 dues payers and campaign contributors. Er, service providers.

All I want to know is this. Last year NYC received 37% of state school aid plus back door school aid such as STAR. Including Spitzer's new checks, what will the share be this year? Spitzer's proposal was 37% for NYC, same as last year, and 14.1% for Long Island, same as last year. If those figures change, that should be the only story. THE ONLY STORY. The rest is PR.

Remember, NYC residents pay more than 40% of all state taxes paid by state residents. Forget the city's share of business taxes. After 30 years of harm to New York City's children, Governor Spitzer proposed that New York City's taxpayers would be required to pay more for education in NYC, and also have more money redistributed to the rest of the state, where the children are better off.

The New York Times had an interesting article about a month ago. The newspaper reported that for the first time since the Great Depression, senior citizens over age 75 are relocating from the South, from places like Florida, to the North, to places like New York “after losing spouses or becoming less mobile.” The migration means that seniors can avoid paying high New York taxes when they are healthy and wealthy, and then come back and claim New York’s more ample senior benefits, when they grow wise enough to see the value of extensive public services.

As one demographer put it “the South, and Florida especially, has been a magnet for yuppie elderly: younger seniors with spouse present and in good health. These are a catch for communities that receive them, because they have ample disposable incomes and make few demands on public services.” On the other hand, “the older senior population, especially after 80, are more likely to be widowed, less well off and more in need of social and economic support.” By not providing that support, states like Florida and Arizona take the money and dump the costs back to New York and the Midwest, where the federal share of Medicaid is low. “Many northern states seem to have better senior services than Florida,” that demographer told the Times.

In its ongoing effort to preserve an unjust state education finance system, the State Senate must rely on deception, because under no set of consistent principles would New York City receive even the level of state education funding Governor Spitzer has proposed, let alone what it has received in the past. If the State Senate accepts that places whose children have greater needs deserve a higher share of state school aid, New York deserves more. But if argues that better off places deserve more money based on the share of state taxes they pay in, New York City also deserves more. If it argues that those with high taxes deserve more aid, New York City, among the highest-taxed parts of the state, still deserves more. And if it continues to hold that whoever spends the most deserves more state aid, through back-door aid like STAR, then it is hardly adhering to purported Republican principles. In any event, Governor Spitzer hasn’t proposed giving NYC more money as a share of the total; the State Senate is demanding that it receive less money. So to justify the unjustifiable, the State Senate endlessly repeats two deceptions, but last week let slip a truth.

If you downloaded my tabulation of 2006 local government employment data from last week’s post, and saw that New York City had one instructional employee for every 8.9 students, you might have had the following thought: if all of these were teachers, they were with the children all day (like Catholic School teaches are), and if they didn’t take any sick days, New York City could have a class size of NINE. Or, perhaps six for special education, and ten for general education. In that case, teachers could hold class in their living room right in the neighborhood where they and their students lived, like the local home-based child-care provider or piano teacher. Without all the educational overhead, those teachers could then be paid more, and could earn additional money from parents to watch some of the kids after school. You may have thought of this now, but someone else with clout in Albany had thought of it already: state law would make this educational option illegal.