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So, here’s the story. I’m no longer getting up every morning looking for a couple of items (I set six as a minimum awhile ago) for filler for the Gateway, so the real items don’t go stale before I get a piece up, and I’m no longer looking to have an on the record remark about every little thing.
One of the ironies of recent history is that although politicians from the rest of the New York State routinely accused New York City of draining their communities through wasteful government spending and a welfare culture, a charge dating back to the administration of Mayor Lindsay and the annual tin cup pilgrimage to Albany, the reality has been nearly the reverse. During the Pataki Administration and after, in fact, local government employment in the rest of the state soared. Even as the independent economic base of Upstate New York, Long Island and the Lower Hudson Valley – in manufacturing, corporate headquarters and high tech companies such as IBM and Grumman, withered away. During the darkest days of the New York City economy, someone like Bella Abzug might have suggested making up for lost private sector jobs by just giving people more government jobs, so they could have unlimited health insurance and early retirement pensions, and making someone else pay for it. But the rest of New York State has seemingly tried to actually pull that off, burdening the remaining private sector employers there, New York City, and – through debts and deferred pension costs – the future. This trend was relentless and seemed to go on and on regardless of economic cycles.
Starting in 2009, however, it shuddered to a halt and began to reverse. Have the policies of Governor Andrew Cuomo stopped the trend? Has the burden on the private sector in the rest of the state reached breaking point? Or have the costs from the past finally caught up with the local government growth machine? You can review the data on "Saying the Unsaid in New York."
In my opinion, it was a very smart political move by Anthony Weiner as he "tests the waters" for a possible campaign for Mayor.
It sometimes seems as if Mike Bloomberg is actually a conspiracy, put on earth as proof that the preposterous right wing fantasies about liberals wanting to create a mommy-state, which impairs all our personal freedoms, are really true.
I really did not intend for the Levin/Pierson Council race to become a cause célèbre in this department.
Back in 2010, the Daily News published an article where Vito Lopez
Because even a stopped clock is right twice a day, Andrea Peyser's whine about left opposition to Quinn is not without an occasional salient point, but to assert as Peyser does that "Quinn…once enjoyed the uniform support of the city’s vast left-wing cabal," is to indulge in Bizarro-world delusional revisionism.
Some days you just gotta hear a song about the Charles River.
A back of the envelope comparison between the average income of those living in metro New York and the average price of existing houses that sell here shows the standard of living is quite low. Housing prices soared during the housing bubble, and didn’t fall back to normal in the New York area to the extent they did in most of the U.S. Unregulated rents are up. Those who purchased houses years ago at lower prices, or have lived for years in rent regulated or subsidized housing, are less affected. But for young people looking to move out on their own, and for people seeking to come here from elsewhere in the U.S. and all over the world, the personal standard of living is relatively low by U.S. standards, and going down. That is the bad news.
And, according to one theory, the good news. Because people keep coming here anyway, and something must be drawing them, something that offsets, for the moment, that low personal standard of living. A full discussion of this, with a couple of spreadsheets, may be found on Saying the Unsaid in New York.
[Posted on Room Gate 4/18/13]