Category: News and Opinion

In  Part One, I wrote skeptically about the efforts of a group of “Reform” political clubs from  portions of white Brooklyn calling themselves “The Brooklyn Reform Coalition”’ to  form a coalition to clean up the County’s Democratic politics.

Well, the predictions were wrong. Rather than doing a meaningless cosmetic cleanup to fool the press, the Senate Republicans redistricting plan doesn't even bother. Even the Fidler testicle survives. 

And, if my eyes don’t deceive me, if even makes some areas (like south Williamsburg) a bit uglier than they were in the original map. Even the Fidler testicle survives. Can't wait to hear Michael Benjamin singing its virtues. Document Drop: Senate Redistricting Proposal www.nydailynews.com

For awhile, it looked like GOP State Senate candidate David Storobin was leading a charmed life.

It’s time to conclude my overview of U.S. federal finance for this year, and for a while, with a discussion of the national debt in the context of all our other debts, and the values of those who are running them up. One spreadsheet with data and charts on federal revenues, expenditures and debts from the 1970s to the present, previously linked in this series, is here. A second, new spreadsheet, on U.S. debts of all kinds from 1952 to the present, is here. I suggest grabbing these spreadsheets and printing out the charts in the latter before reading on.  In prior posts, I showed how U.S. federal taxes as a percent of GDP had fallen to the lowest level of my working lifetime, and of the current political era, by fiscal 2011, at just 14.4% of GDP. And federal spending had soared to the highest level in recent history, at 25.3% of GDP. As a result, over the past five years the federal deficit has soared to levels unheard of for a half century, and the total federal debt as a percent of GDP has jumped to levels not seen since the aftermath of World War II.

Some of this is the result of the Great Recession and the response to it, and may pass. But some of it is merely a culmination of a “buy now, pay later” era that has gone far beyond the finances of the federal government. As a result, the United States is at risk of financial disaster. The biggest difference between us and Greece is that, for the moment, other countries and the people within them are willing to lend to the U.S. federal government at zero percent interest. On the assumption that the government will impose whatever harm is necessary on younger generations in the future to pay them back.

It was announced last week that a group o

The New York Times had an article on Sunday about the ongoing fiscal crises and service cuts that are wiping out public services throughout the state, in large part due to past debts and pension costs. But the Times doesn’t tell the why straight. First of all, pension costs are much lower as a share of payroll in the rest of the state than in New York City, and the pension plans for the rest of the state are better funded. No one wants to talk about how much worse off NYC is. Second, in mentioning reasons the Times mentions the stock market decline of 2008 but not the bubble that preceded it, nor the retroactive pension enhancements. The Times doesn’t want to mention the retroactive enhancements because the older generations it cares about made out like, well, bandits, younger generations are being sacrificed, and that is what the Times favors. And the News and the Post, and the legislators and the Mayor and the Governor and the unions. Governments are not going broke because of low stock prices, because stock prices are not low. They are high, relative to dividends paid, and temporarily inflated by Fed policy.

“These municipalities will not recover when the economy recovers,” said Richard Brodsky, a former assemblyman who is advising Yonkers. “Everybody was complicit in this tsunami, and now it’s landing, but not in Washington or Albany,” he said. “It’s in places like Yonkers, where the choice is between school kids and safe streets.” Wrong. Everyone who was around you working the system in Albany was complicit. You were complicit. Wall Street was complicit. The one percent were complicit. The retired and soon to retire public employees were complicit. The unions were complicit. They made out. Others are victims, irrevocably. You did the deal Brodsky, and you benefitted. Celebrate, you have no right to commiserate! There is one thing we cannot tolerate, just cannot. We cannot tolerate the idea that it was a mistake. It might have been a mistake when their predecessors did it, in the 1960s, leading New York City public services to collapse in the 1970s. But this time, they knew exactly what they were doing. And by the way, slashing benefits for new public employees will not stop public services from being gutted. In fact, they’ll probably just end up being retroactively enhanced again, with not enough money having been set aside, by the next set of Brodskys.

McCain Enable 

CHARLES BARRON: I think the first thing we got to do is stop calling the judge ‘Master…Trying to draw us back on the plantation. So I’m going to say ‘judge,’ because we have no master”

DAVID STOROBIN: The public has strong feelings about sex crimes and sex offenders, especially those involving children.