Category: News and Opinion

With Friends like this, who needs enemies?

Former Mayor Rudy Giuliani went on TV yesterday as a surrogate for presidential contender Mitt Romney — that part is expected, but Giuliani wasn't drinking the Kool Aid. Giuliani seemed to pump himself up more than the presumed GOP nominee.

Legislation introduced by State Senator Tom O’Mara and Assemblyman Dean Murray would require New York-based websites to “remove any comments posted on his or her website by an anonymous poster unless such anonymous poster agrees to attach his or her name to the post.”

The bursting of the housing bubble seems to have awakened some people to some realities about housing. Housing isn’t a household’s largest investment, it is a household’s largest expense, and one of the expenses that is easiest to cut. A house or apartment is a place to live, and it doesn’t make sense to lock oneself in by buying one unless one’s personal and career circumstances are very settled and they are likely to stay in one place indefinitely. Moreover, young people are the buyers of houses, while older people (and today financial institutions collecting money for wealthy bondholders) are the sellers. Young people can take back many of the financial disadvantages that older generations have foisted on them, in lower wages, higher future taxes, and future reductions in public services and benefits, by paying those older generations and financial institutions rock bottom prices for housing (and stocks). Holding out until the cost of their housing is perhaps 10 or 15 percent of their income, rather than stretching until it absorbs half. And if older generations are unwilling to sell cheap, then more jobs will be created by the young moving to new housing units in new types of neighborhoods, rather than merely paying up for the existing oversized housing in auto-dependent neighborhoods that prior generations have chosen.

And yet not everyone has absorbed those lessons, and there is no guarantee they will stick. There was a housing bubble in the late 1980s too, but only in the Northeast and in California, and many of my peers were financially crushed as it deflated, particularly those who had purchased apartments with the expectation of selling for more and buying their permanent residence later. At the time I thought a lesson had been learned and the bubble would not be repeated. Wrong. Moreover, the federal government has been going $hundreds of billions into hock, money younger generations will have to pay back, to keep the price of housing – and the value of paper wealth backed by houses — from falling further. So what to do about it? <

Least significant announcement of the day: "Ulrich supports the minimum wage."

Even if Ulrich was in the Senate, he'd never get the opportunity to vote for it, as long as his Party still controlled the Senate.

I really didn’t want to touch this race; however, some of my advisors convinced me to say something about it or be branded a chicken/lol. 

You see near every time I write something about Charles Barron I get these strange (and often inane) calls or e-mails, from different folks with different strokes.  And it doesn’t matter if I write something critical or something positive. They are out there and they are watching. 

Poor Cory–he thought his worst nightmare this year was that his Oxford buddy, Rabbit Schmuley, was running for Congress as a Republican.  

I would like to make an announcement.

From the beginning, something about Dr. Robert Mittman did not add up.   

Conventional wisdom and recent polling indicates City Council Speaker Christine Quinn is the one to beat in the 2013 race for mayor, but it may not be that simple.

Quinn by all accounts, is the front-runner now, but the race, about a year and a half away, is a lifetime in the world of politics.