Category: News and Opinion

Rupert, an angry Irishman took his son to the highest mountiantop overlooking the fishing village he called home, and began complaining in a voice which sounded like Groundskeeper Willie's, but with a different brogue.  

I always know when a column has touched some raw nerves: the phones start ringing almost as soon as the column is e-mailed; long before it even goes public/viral/lol.  And that’s when I usually have to defend my thesis or ”splain” myself like the deceased Lucille Ball. My last column- primarily about the potential Ed Towns v. Hakeem Jeffries congressional primary next year- brought some strange calls and e-mails. So let me expound on some of the things I wrote there and even throw in some other kibbles and bits.

Many people wonder why Republican legislators and Tea Party members are so hard on President Obama. Maybe Frederick Douglass gave us the answer 128 years ago.

From Bloomberg/Business Week: "New York’s 8 percent assumed rate of return on its pension investments is so unrealistic that the city may have to spend even more than the $1 billion it has in reserve for its retirement plans, Mayor Michael Bloomberg said." I can't argue with that. "Officials are waiting for chief actuary Robert North to recommend how much the city can expect to reap on its pension assets, which were valued at $120 billion as of June 30. North hasn’t issued a recommendation in more than a year." Waiting for a miracle.

"Each quarter-point drop in the assumed rate of return would cost New York at least $350 million to be set aside to pay benefits, said Marc LaVorgna, a mayoral spokesman." Wrong! The cost to the city depends on the cost of benefits. Inflating the presumed future rate of return doesn't change the actual cost one cent. It just changes the extent to which you can cover up the cost and shift it to a future you don't care about. Which, along with retroactive pension enhancements in deals between unions and politicians, are the reasons we got in this mess to begin with.

The Voice's front page demonstrates the obsolescence of print media. Rick Perry is sooo September.

After every election, I generally do a few columns about what the results show, trying to find the stories others missed .

As a result, in December, 2010, I was perhaps the only person in NYC who noticed how weakly Anthony Weiner and other Democrats had performed among Orthodox and Russian Jews.

From Wednesday’s nytimes.com

http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/10/05/the-long-stagnation/

Mayor Michael Bloomberg via ABC News: "The protesters are protesting against people who make $40- or $50,000 a year and are struggling to make ends meet. That's the bottom line. Those are the people who work on Wall Street or in the finance sector.” In fact the mean payroll per worker in the Finance and Insurance sector in Downstate New York was $231,822 in 2010, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. For all private workers outside the Finance and Insurance sector, the mean payroll per worker in Downstate New York was $57,806 in 2010, or 30 percent above the U.S. average. An advantage indicative of and cancelled out by a higher cost of living. There used to be a lot of people in finance in NYC who earned $40,000 to $50,000. They were back office workers, who did things like due diligence. What ever wasn’t automated was outsourced following the early 1990s recession, and NYC lost tens of thousands of those “pink collar” jobs. 

From the NY Times City Room, “when asked about the latest budget cuts, Michael Mulgrew, president of the United Federation of Teachers, said that city schools ‘have been cut to the bone’ and were already stretched to their limit.” Actually spending on the city’s schools is going up by a $billion this year and went up by $billions more in the past few years, but it is all being diverted to the retired as a result of a UFT “victory” in a 2008 retroactive pension enhancement that allowed teachers to retire at age 55 after 25 years of work rather than 62 after 30, and other previous pension deals. 

Also from the Times: “Patrick J. Lynch, president of the Patrolmen’s Benevolent Association, warned of projected cuts to the Police Department. “The last thing this city should plan to do for the future,” Mr. Lynch said, ‘is to reduce the staffing of the N.Y.P.D., which has already been stripped to the bone in our local neighborhood precincts.’” According to Census Bureau data I published last week, NYC has nearly 2 ½ times the U.S. average number of police officers relative to population.

Three very successful Republican leaders were and are Governor George Pataki and Mayors Rudy Giuliani and Michael Bloomberg.  Their success is due to their management skills more so than their ideological bearings.  Don’t believe me?   Well I was on the late William F.