Category: News and Opinion

New York Explained (In One Chart)

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We had a bunch of unemployed young adults hanging out in a park who were demonized by the press until they were cleared out by the police. We have a state budget that the Governor says is falling apart. We have a nexus of public employee unions and politicians, the political class, that starts yelling about Goldman Sachs any time anyone brings up the deals they have relative to other people. They desperately want to blame the ongoing collapse of public services on inadequate taxation of millionaires. You have an executive class that hates, Obama, the Dodd-Frank act, and Occupy Wall Street for raising the issue of executive pay, particularly on Wall Street, and calls anyone who wants to talk about it a “socialist” who doesn’t want to get a job, presumably including their own investors.

It’s getting nasty out there, and among the angriest people are those who have in fact become much better off over the past 20 years while most people have become worse off. Here in New York, I’ve found a way to show who’s who and what’s what in one chart, which is linked here (I hope). It shows trends over 20 years for three groups of people – the executive class, the political class and the serfs, along with a couple of causal indicators. I suggest printing it out before reading the rest of this post. You’ll see two lines that track each other almost exactly. One is payroll per worker in the Downstate New York financial sector, adjusted for inflation. The second is the total payouts from the public employee pension funds of the City of New York. Both have soared, relative to what most people earn, and for the same reason – self dealing by powerful insiders at the expense of everyone else.

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