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It’s Nauseating When You Know Otherwise

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Mayor Michael Bloomberg via ABC News: "The protesters are protesting against people who make $40- or $50,000 a year and are struggling to make ends meet. That's the bottom line. Those are the people who work on Wall Street or in the finance sector.” In fact the mean payroll per worker in the Finance and Insurance sector in Downstate New York was $231,822 in 2010, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. For all private workers outside the Finance and Insurance sector, the mean payroll per worker in Downstate New York was $57,806 in 2010, or 30 percent above the U.S. average. An advantage indicative of and cancelled out by a higher cost of living. There used to be a lot of people in finance in NYC who earned $40,000 to $50,000. They were back office workers, who did things like due diligence. What ever wasn’t automated was outsourced following the early 1990s recession, and NYC lost tens of thousands of those “pink collar” jobs. 

From the NY Times City Room, “when asked about the latest budget cuts, Michael Mulgrew, president of the United Federation of Teachers, said that city schools ‘have been cut to the bone’ and were already stretched to their limit.” Actually spending on the city’s schools is going up by a $billion this year and went up by $billions more in the past few years, but it is all being diverted to the retired as a result of a UFT “victory” in a 2008 retroactive pension enhancement that allowed teachers to retire at age 55 after 25 years of work rather than 62 after 30, and other previous pension deals. 

Also from the Times: “Patrick J. Lynch, president of the Patrolmen’s Benevolent Association, warned of projected cuts to the Police Department. “The last thing this city should plan to do for the future,” Mr. Lynch said, ‘is to reduce the staffing of the N.Y.P.D., which has already been stripped to the bone in our local neighborhood precincts.’” According to Census Bureau data I published last week, NYC has nearly 2 ½ times the U.S. average number of police officers relative to population.

Local Government Employment: 2002 and 2010

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If you haven’t already, you should download this spreadsheet linked in the first paragraph of this post and print out the “local output” and “state output” tables, before reading what I have written here. The data shows that according to public employment data from the Governments Division of the U.S. Census Bureau, there were 3,980 full time equivalent local government workers per 100,000 people in the United States in March 2010, about the same proportion as in March 2002. In 2010 local government employment was somewhat higher relative to population in New Jersey at 4,414, and substantially higher relative to population in New York City at 5,135, and in the rest of New York State at 5,084.

New York City’s higher local government employment is explained by the broad range of municipal services provided here, including public water, public sewer, public transit, professional fire protection, municipal garbage collection, and extensive public housing, hospitals and social services for the poor. The city’s local government employment, moreover, was slightly lower relative to population in 2010 than it had been in 2002. Extensive services are much less of an explanation for the high level of local government employment in the rest of New York State, since not all areas of the rest of New York State have all these services. Local government employment in the rest of the state, moreover, has been soaring for two decades, with increase from 4,683 per 100,000 residents to 5,084 just over the eight years in the table.

FASTEN YOUR SEAT BELTS: THE LATEST ON HAKEEM JEFFRIES v. ED TOWNS (PLUS OTHER JUICY TIDBITS)

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Look; I know that an official statement hasn’t been released, so I expect the usual coy denials will be forthcoming when mainstream-media sources dig into this topic later this week.  I am going to put my credibility on the line here: Hakeem Jeffries has decided to challenge Ed Towns for the 10th congressional seat in next year’s primary.

So how do I know? Well……………….…………..ancient Chinese secret/lol.

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