Category: News and Opinion

Should New York’s Nurses Be Crying?

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With 1199 S.E.I.U. United Healthcare Workers East and the Greater New York Hospital Association running commercials attacking Governor Spitzer’s relatively small increase in Medicaid spending, and these commercials featuring nurses, I became curious how New York City’s nurses, and other health care workers, were faring relative to their colleagues elsewhere in the country. Curious enough to download and compile Occupational Employment Data from the New York State Department of Labor and U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics. After their nearly 20 years of ruthless pursuit of unenlightened self-interest with total indifference to other priorities and needs through naked political power, nothing I could find here would make me feel better about these interest groups. If the employment level, adjusted for population and overall employment, and average annual pay, compared with the average overall, for workers in health care occupations were above average, I would be upset that the rest of us were funding these excesses through higher Medicaid spending. If they were below average, on the other hand, I would be upset that we were paying so much more for Medicaid and yet our health care workers were understaffed and underpaid. And if they were about average, I would be outraged that Medicaid, a program for the poor, was being overcharged so private health insurance for the wealthy could carry less of the load. So they are guilty. But the data can help show what they are guilty of. It is attached, and described below.

One Way on Park Slope’s 6th and 7th Avenues: Not What I Would Choose

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DOT is proposing turning 6th and 7th Avenues in Park Slope into one way streets, like 8th Avenue and Prospect Park West, and narrowing 4th Avenue from three moving lanes in each direction to two. A look at the map shows the potential borough-wide rationale. Vehicles from a huge swath of southern Brooklyn funnel into Ocean Parkway and the Prospect Expressway, and currently have two main options heading to and from the Downtown Brooklyn area and the free East River bridge: Prospect Park, which some advocates want closed to vehicles, and 4th Avenue, designated for most of Park Slope’s new housing. The Prospect, however, also has a direct exit from/entrance to the south at 8th and 7th Avenues. The former is a one way street with timed lights and, therefore, higher traffic capacity. But 7th Avenue is not, and since one-way Prospect Park West does not have easy access to the Prospect/Ocean Parkway, it is a poor substitute for 7th Avenue. Other rationales have been discussed, but I suspect diverting some traffic and making 4th Avenue seem more like a pedestrian-friendly street and less like an industrial arterial is one of them. It may also be that the extensive studies of closing Prospect Park to traffic in recent years led DOT to try to come up with an alternative. I’ll warn the reader that I am not a traffic engineer, and know less about this subject than the topics I usually post on, but what it’s worth my opinions are below.

The Fire Contract: Better than the Last One

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All I know about it is what I read in the newspaper, but it appears the new firefighter contract is better than the prior one. Some of the more recent damage to new hires is undone, though it some of it will come out their pockets in other ways. They'll still be behind those with seniority by the wage increases in the last two contracts, however. Moreover, there will be bonuses for pay in tougher jobs, something I agree with. The problem with merit pay is that not all managers will handle discretionary increases correctly in a public sector context, especially in titles where workers must work independently and the quality of their work is hard to judge. But some jobs have inherent merit, and if someone is capable of doing them (or if they are dangerous), compensation should be adjusted accordingly.

For Clarification Purposes

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I love this website (Room8); to me it’s about serious political involvement and education. It’s about finding out what’s going on in NYC politics mainly, but it is also about finding out what’s going on politically-on both national and international stages. It is a rather informative political website. I am proud to have been one of the pioneer contributors to the building of this site.

When the founders Ben Smith and Gur Tsabar invited me to become one of the pioneer bloggers (along with about a dozen others selected), I raised my concern about the anonymous commentors who had a penchant for attacking me on a purely personal level, whenever things got hot in the kitchen so to speak, on other political blogs wherein I openly participated. To build this site, I accepted that anonymous commentors were necessary.

Social Security: What Should They Do

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Thus far, I have laid out a moralistic tale on Social Security, with prior generations collecting extra payroll taxes from the young, promising benefits, and spending the money or cutting their income taxes, and borrowing on top of it. That, however, is only one of the problems with the program as it now exists, and on a going forward basis it isn’t even the most important problem. The main problem is that people are living longer. When social insurance for old age was first enacted, and the retirement age was set to age 65, that was also the average life expectancy. That’s why Social Security is actually called Old Age Survivor and Disability Insurance (OASDI) — one is taking out insurance against living to an old age. The average life expectancy for women (relevant because Social Security pays survivors even if they did not work), however, was already 73.1 years in 1960, and was 80.4 in 2004. Moreover, people used to work longer than they do today. In 1940, 66.9% of men age 65 and over were in the labor force, working or looking for work, according to the Historical Statistics of the United States. In 1890 that figure was 68.3%, but in 1985, it was just 15.5% for single men and 16.8% for married men. If people are going to live longer, they are either going to have to work longer as well, or they are going to place an unreasonable burden on the young.

Post-election analysis (40th City Council District) – Finale (Part Two)

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A funny thing happened on the way to part two of this column: it died. Beyond finishing up my post-election analysis with some political gems, I had hoped to bring some nuggets of insight into what has been happening to this district in the past 16 years; but at the last minute I realized that there is a level of futility to all this. Most of the residents-and also most of the voters- of this district are really not interested in any of this. Political issues aren’t really salient to their everyday lives. This is why our inept black-elected officials aren’t held accountable.

Look, I didn’t just come to this realization today; I have been aware of voter apathy and “citizen-civic-irresponsibility” for decades. I am no virgin to politics; I have been involved in politics all my life. Contrary to my detractors, I have been fuelled to political activism, not because of money, glory or power, but because of my roots and also because of my idealism. So instead of sending my editors a column on this past election, I sent them instead one month’s notice. Yes, in one month I will be leaving Room8.

Social Security: What Will They Do To Us Next?

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The extra Social Security money that was collected in the past was spent in the past and used to offset lower income taxes, and in a decade or less there will be no extra Social Security money. After that point, if currently promised benefits are to be paid, taxes will have to rise and/or federal services and benefits will have to be cut. Or should I say, cut by even more than will have to be the case in any event, as we have been living beyond our means, and running federal deficits, over and above the additional payroll taxes theoretically owed to Social Security. Given that, what are our elected officials likely to do? I see four likely scenarios, each of which involves offsetting the benefit older generations have gotten by spending the extra payroll tax collections over the past 24 years with pain for future generations down the line. The only difference is in the details, and they way that pain would be disguised as an “everybody wins” solution.

Which Malanga Is Right?

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Last week Steve Malanga, from the Manhattan Institute on this blog and in the New York Post made the case that Rudy Giuliani really was a real conservative, despite abortion, gay rights and gun control.

In the Post, Malanga wrote of Rudy:

He ran New York with a conservative's priorities – and delivered reform to a degree unprecedented in modern U.S. history.

Social Security: Where Did All The Money Go?

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As the previous essay shows, despite collecting far more in payroll taxes than was required to pay Social Security benefits over the past 24 years, the federal government was deeper in debt in 2005 than it had been in 1980. All the additional Social Security taxes, and then some, were spent, meaning that despite the $1.86 trillion in the Social Security Trust Fund, the retirement of the Baby Boomers, and those after, will either have to be cut back or paid for a second time. To determine where the money went, the subject of this post, the entire federal budget in 1980, before the Social Security Amendments of 1983 and the Reagan Administration that authored them, and in 2005, the most recent year, must be compared. I have tabulated federal revenues and expenditures, by category, per $100,000 of GDP to show how large a part of the economy each category was then, and is now. Some of the results are not a surprise. Higher payroll taxes, which fall hardest on the middle class and poor, have been used to offset lower income taxes, which fall hardest on the affluent, and soaring health care spending has also soaked up a larger and larger share of federal funds, as is has for the State of New York. And some of the results are a surprise, at least to me, at least in their extent if not their direction. Federal spending has fallen as a share of GDP in virtually every other category aside from health care – and overall.