Room Eight is closed to new posts. The existing archive will remain up for the immediate future.
If you were a Room Eight writer and would like access to an export of your content, please contact the editor.
This site is not affiliated with or collaborating with any other news or opinion site.
On Tuesday, I had lunch with a consultant, who I’ll call Wiseman, and yes, he’s actually a composite, but all dialogue is guaranteed verbatim.
Lunch was pretty uneventful til we got to the topic of the State Senate Dems.
WISEMAN: Everyone wanted them to lose, and when I say everyone, I mean every one. Except for the Senate Dems themselves, and even a few of them.
A recent poll shows New Yorker are against all spending cuts and tax increases. These traditional telephone polls, in my view, are probably skewing older — toward Generation Greed, the one that ran up the debts and promised itself benefits for seniors it refused to pay for.
The only budget cut New Yorkers favor, according to the poll? Lower wages (but not retirement benefits) for state (lot local government or non-profiteer) workers. Of which there are relatively few, and which have absorbed a substantial share of the cuts already. The state has a $9 billion budget deficit I read, although that is likely an underestimate. According to employment and wages data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics, state workers earned a total of $12.3 billion in 2009, down slightly from the year before. That is actually down, not a diminished pace of growth.
Give Jeff Klein credit; in the battle between him and John Sampson to see who can most quickly surrender every last vestige of the moral high ground, Klein, against all odds, has managed to keep pace.
The latest edition of City Hall News has a front page article about Mayor Bloomberg being criticized over Cathy Black, the Citytime scandal & the snow.
http://www.cityhallnews.com/newyork/article-1737-weathering-the-storm.html
Pushing back against the idea that Mike is being criticized more now than in his first two terms is Deputy Mayor Howard Wolfson:
My ambivalence about Lieberman is reflected in my extremely reluctant endorsement of him in his 2006 primary, followed by my even less enthusiastic endorsement of primary winner Ned Lamont in the general
Back in 72, shortly after when Sarge Shriver agreed to undertake the thankless job (not his first) of being the replacement bottom half of the worst landslide losing ticket of the 20th century (and becoming the centerpiece of a nasty National Lampoon parody for his troubles) he was campaigning in Youngstown, Ohio, the buckle of the Rust Belt, with
It's hard, under the circumstances, to work up the motivation to write about the same things I've written about over and over, going back to a time when it wasn't too late to do something about it. Is it then technically impossible to avoid a repeat of the 1970s for public services, with higher taxes and the needy not being cared for (then senior citizen bag ladies abandoned by those younger, now younger people raped by the same people who are now older)? It is worse than being technically impossible. It is technically possible — with a decade of blood, toil and shared sacrifice — but politically impossible with Generation Greed still in change and fully vested under the deals they have made with themselves.
This city was almost destroyed in the 1970s, but the debts and pensions were paid. Taxes were paid in exchange for nothing. The infrastructure fell apart. Multiple generations of NYC children were not educated. How many members of the state legislature lost their jobs? Well, this time the destruction will be state wide, and in lots of other states too, so you may not be able to flee to the suburbs and leave and smoking ruin behind. Perhaps the folks elsewhere in New York will figure out a way to throw the bastards out without putting the other bastards in.
First Keith Olberman was dropped from Sunday Night Football, and now has signed off of MSNBC at the end of his contract.