Category: News and Opinion

A little over a year ago, I wrote on this blog about my theory of the electorates.

For those of you who missed it, there was a rare matter of fact statement of fact in the Washington Post last week. As a result of the recession Social Security payroll tax revenue is falling, and “the trust fund's annual surplus is forecast to all but vanish next year — nearly a decade ahead of schedule — and deprive the government of billions of dollars it had been counting on to help balance the nation's books.” To balance the nation’s books? You mean there aren’t trillions being saved in the Social Security “trust fund?” “The Treasury Department has for decades borrowed money from the Social Security trust fund to finance government operations. If it is no longer able to do so, it could be forced to borrow an additional $700 billion over the next decade from China, Japan and other investors. And at some point, perhaps as early as 2017, according to the CBO, the Treasury would have to start repaying the billions it has borrowed from the trust fund over the past 25 years, driving the nation further into debt or forcing Congress to raise taxes.” Isn’t this what I said two years ago here? (And other thoughtful people have said over and over again for two decades, but been largely ignored).

“The blame for this disaster lies with state Senate Majority Leader Malcolm Smith, who lacked the vision and leadership to usher a viable rescue plan through his house.

The blame lies with Brooklyn Sen. Carl Kruger, who led the charge against tolling the East River and Harlem River bridges as a crucial source of funding.

When this department last looked in upon Jonathan Tasini, he had just lost a Democratic Primary campaign for US Senate run on the premise that Hillary Clinton was insufficiently liberal (and that Ned Lamont was barely an improvement). As I’d predicted back then, the punch line of his joke of a crusade was that Tasini ended up getting most of his votes from right wing reactionaries.

The extremely close election in the 20^th Congressional District has partisans on both sides predicting their candidate will win after all the paper ballots are counted. Each side seems to have already determined who received the most votes among the 6,000-10,000 paper ballots that none of them has seen.

Observant readers are used to some inconsistent ideas among newspaper columnists, pundits & editorial pages.

The U.S. monthly employment and unemployment totals have been in the news in recent months, mostly for startling declines in the former. The employment numbers are compiled by state departments of labor, based on surveys of businesses, and then aggregated by the federal Bureau of Labor Statistics. They are based on the unemployment insurance tax records, but that information doesn’t come in until long after the surveys, when all the taxes are paid. Every March the past survey data is “rebenchmarked” back to what it should have been based on the unemployment insurance tax data that had arrived afterward. It is very difficult for the survey to completely identify a big short run changes in the economy, not the least because those doing the surveying can’t know how many new businesses have started recently, and are thus not included in the list of businesses to be surveyed. This year’s rebenchmarking, as shown by the attached spreadsheet, produced some stunning revisions.

As someone who’s done more than his share of grousing about the Albany Bi-Partisan Iron Triangle (see also here, here,here, and here, for starters), I should be glad that any NYC daily is at long last taking an interest in a town where they haven’t managed decent day to day coverage for my entire adult lifetime, but today’s Daily News’ “State of Shame” is really a title better applied to the organ which published it, as well as to its competitors in mediocrity (in fairness, I should note that, as inadequate as the News' Albany coverage is, it does a decent job on its blog).

I was asked yesterday why there is suddenly so much talk, in publications like the Wall Street Journal, about the unearned privileges and exploitations of the “political class?” And why there is so much populist posturing by Washington Democrats against executives at companies such as AIG, from which they were accepting campaign contributions in large denominations just a year or two ago? Let’s review. For 30 years, two kinds of people have been getting richer. Top executives who sit on each others’ boards and vote each other an ever larger share of private sector wealth. And today’s senior citizens, the richest in history, particularly retired public employees, and public employees who do not deign to do their jobs, who suck up a larger and larger share of public sector resources as a result of their control state legislatures and Congress, in the absence of contested elections (which are no longer permitted for such offices).

Everyone else has been getting poorer, but this has been covered up in two ways. By having their losses postponed to the future — in the form of lost pensions and health benefits that aren’t so important when one is young and healthy. And by having people go deeper and deeper into debt so their spending doesn’t decline with income. But today the cover up is no longer possible. The standard of living of most Americans is dropping severely, their taxes are rising, their public services and benefits are being cut, and their paper wealth is disappearing. Neither the political class nor the executive class is willing to give anything back, but they do want to deflect blame. So they are pointing fingers at each other.

I sense that most of us who are active in New York City’s political arena have ambiguous feelings about the need for a public advocate, and I base that on years and years of conversations on this topic with fellow activists. Even people who aren’t very “political” have waded in on the longstanding debate over the utility of this office, and its role and function in city government. In fact, there have been times when the generic conversation(s) appeared to be abolition of this office, and the saving of millions in staff salaries and OTP. Even Mayor Bloomberg has had choice words for the office, and he has at times joined the debate to give his most afforded opinion -negative of course.