Category: News and Opinion

Watching the Golden Globes one can surmise what the rest of the world thinks of we Americans.  First America’s greatest assets are its movies and so we amuse all the world.  On the other hand we also frighten the world with our trillion dollar military, fundamentalist Christians, heavily armed citizenry and violent street crime.

This post will for the most part complete my overview of Fiscal 2009 local government finance data from the U.S. Census Bureau, for New York City compared with elsewhere, that started with this post. The data is located here, and prints on two pages. The data shows that from FY 2002, the lousy economic budget year before now-Mayor Bloomberg took office, and FY 2009, another lousy economic year with the most recently available data, direct spending by the City of New York (not including its soaring spending on pensions and money sent to New York State for Medicaid), increased from 19.7% of the total personal income of New York City residents to 20.97%. The national increase was from 12.4% to 13.3% of income. New York City pension contributions totaled another 1.7% of city’s residents’ income in FY 2009, up from 0.5% of income in FY 2002, while New York City’s payments to New York State totaled an additional 1.7% of income, up from 1.3%.

Both the numerator and denominator, spending and income, are moving in these percentages. Total private sector wages earned in the city plunged 12.2% from 2008 to 2009 before rising 6.9% from 2009 to 2010, when the city’s employment turned around and Wall Street sparked outrage by resuming large bonuses after having been bailed out. There are growing indications, however, that the amount Wall Street will get to pillage, which New York City and State then get to tax, may be falling back permanently to something like what it was before, say, 1995. Thus, the 2009 situation is likely a “new normal.” Meanwhile the really huge increases in spending as a share of income from FY 2002 to FY 2009 were in the Rest of New York State (from 13.5% to 15.5%) and New Jersey (from 9.3% to 11.7%).

Saturday morning, I discovered that the self described "White Nationalist" hate site STORMFRONT