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You have to give it to Andrew Cuomo. The guy is disciplined and not taking the smear bait of Carl Paladino.
Paladino is throwing everything he can at Cuomo, but Cuomo is turning the other cheek. He’s not going down in the mud with Paladino. (At least not as of yet, and signs are Cuomo is not going to do it.)
As shown the spreadsheet attached to my previous post on local government revenues, New York’s state and local tax revenues were 47.0% above the U.S. average in New York City as a share of its residents’ personal income, 26.8% higher in the Downstate Suburbs, 17.5% higher in Upstate urban counties, and 24.0% higher in Upstate rural counties. The next few posts are about expenditures, and seek to identify the higher spending associated with those higher taxes. If the reader has not done so already, they can follow the link above, download the spreadsheet attached to it, print out the “Print Tables” worksheet (it will print on six pages) and follow along.
The data show that compared with local governments in other places, New York City spends more on housing and community development, public hospitals, social services, and aid to the state for Medicaid, along with police and correction. Mass transit and solid waste spending are also high in the city, but then many places do not have municipal solid waste collection and few have a transit system as extensive as New York. City residents are also burdened by huge pension and debt costs, cost shifted from the past with no current public services in exchange. In the rest of New York State, meanwhile, public school spending is sky-high relative the income of those who reside there. The specifics follow.
During the overheated press coverage of the so-called Ground Zero Mosque, some cynical observers of the press (like me) said this was a classic “summer story”. That is, a minor event or controversy that gets enormous attention in the media because there is less real news happening in August. Previous examples include shark attacks and Chandra Levy. Others said no, this is a major issue that will resonate with voters in November and affect American relationships around the world.
It is the salaries that shock the most.
Six Hundred Grand and change for an Executive Director?
The one thing people who know Vito Lopez acknowledge first is that he is parsimonious. He runs the party’s operations on less money in a year than his predecessor had spent on one of his gold bracelets. One of Clarence Norman’s socks probably costs more than vito’s entire wardrobe.
WARREN COHN: WHO DAT gonna stop the goldrush tonight!!! As far as my race…My opponent is currently up 85 votes and the race is still too close to call with 300+ paper ballots left to count. If you hear otherwise it is false info, straight from the source – W
Much to my embarrassment, my prior post on this matter, predicting victory in the 50th AD male leader’s race for Warren Cohn, was based on the information that the canvas of voting machines (usually mislabeled as a “re-canvass”) had already been done.
This was not the case.
In last Tuesday’s Democratic Primary elections, two winning candidates for State Assembly were Francisco Moya in the 39th AD and Robert Rodriguez in the 68th. Both are overwhelming favorites to take office as their districts are safely Democratic.
Moya and Rodriguez will join an interesting group of present and former New York City state legislators – those who were unsuccessful candidates for City Council and then were elected to the State Senate & Assembly.
Both Moya and Rodriguez ran in 2009, Moya in a Special Election to replace Hiram Monserrate (the person he defeated last week) and Rodriguez against incumbent Melissa Mark Viverito (in a district that had previously been represented by Rodriguez’ father).
Whenever I endorse a candidate on either the Room Eight New York Politics, or on the Daily Gotham blog-sites, what I am saying is simply that if I had a vote in that race, this is how my vote will go. At no point am I predicting that the person I am endorsing is going to win the race -unless I so specify. In actuality, there are many times I feel strongly that my endorsed candidate will lose the race. I even said so in one of my recent endorsement columns (see comments-section also) regarding one candidate (Nelson Denis).
Thus, it was a bit frustrating (after I did my last two endorsement columns) for me to field a bunch of
e-mails, phone calls, text and verbal messages, plus subtle warnings from various individuals: including electeds, their minions, staffers, operatives and the like. In fact, I had intended to write a follow up column explaining at length, the reasoning behind my endorsements: but alas, I did not. I hated all the bitching that was coming my way, and I felt another column would only exacerbate the situation. And you all know that I am a non-controversial kinda guy. Right?
We are in a situation in which wages and prices may be stagnant for some time to come. So a property tax cap that merely limits increases to 2.0% per year would mean higher and higher property taxes compared with the incomes of the people who were paying them. Worse, because of the pension enhancements of recent years, pension spending is set to soar. A property tax cap that exempts pension spending and debts, like the one in New Jersey, is no cap at all. It is a fraud.
What the leaders of the state legislature are going to want, I would imply from recent comments in the press as quoted below, is to defuse the issue while having taxes continue to soar, as the pay and benefits of those who keep the in office continue to rise, and the standard of living of everyone else who isn't a senior citizen continues to fall. What will be offered is symbolic change, a "victory" for the new Governor. But it won't take long for people to see that nothing has changed, and to become even more confused, angry, and open to demagoguery.
The Rules changes being proposed by New Kings Democrats at Brooklyn’s Democratic County Committee Meeting fall under the category of well intentioned, but lame.
A slyer leader would finesse the whole thing by including all this stuff in his changes and avoiding the confrontation the “reformers” are just aching to have. What real difference would these rules changes make anyway?
Why not propose instead getting rid of Vito's the five personally handpicked At-Large members of the Executive Committee? Why not propose that members of the Executive Committee who openly endorse nominees of another party against a Democrat forfeit their positions by operation of the rules (though that might lose one the Barron families votes)?
Now, those would be real reforms.
Local government is where the rubber meets the road in the public sector, the level of government were most public services are directly provided. This post compares local government revenues for the United States, New York State, different parts of New York State, and selected other states in Fiscal 2007, the year of the most recent Census of Governments conducted by the U.S Census Bureau. The attached spreadsheet contains data for revenues, and for expenditures and debts — which will be discussed separately to keep post lengths reasonable. The data is for all local governments in a given area added together, to adjust for varying local government organization in different places. The measure of revenues, expenditures and debts, for the most part, is the amount per $1,000 of the income of area residents. This adjusts for the level of per person income, and the level of population, in different places. It may be understood this way: New York City spent $9.18 for every $1,000 city residents earned on its police force. So for every $1,000 earned by city residents, they may have spent $250 on housing, $120 on food, $30 on utilities…and $9.18 on the police as part of their taxes. Other adjustments have been made to make the comparison between places as fair as possible. If the reader hasn’t already, he or she should read this post with background data and data on state governments.
The data show in FY 2007 (as in past years) local government revenues absorbed a much higher share of area residents’ income in all areas of New York State, compared with the U.S. average, the average for New Jersey, and selected other states: Connecticut, Massachusetts, California, Illinois, North Carolina and Texas. The difference in revenues was accounted for by relatively high local taxes –sales taxes, individual income, corporate income, and other non-property taxes (such as real estate transfer taxes) in New York City, and high sales and property taxes in the rest of the state. Although state taxes are only modestly above average in New York, in part because local governments receive majority of sales tax revenues here, the combined state and local tax burden as a share of personal income was 47.0% above the U.S. average in New York City, 26.8% above average in the Downstate Suburbs, 17.5% above average in Upstate Urban counties, and 24.0% above average in Upstate Rural counties.