Touch a nerve and the email really piles up.
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Touch a nerve and the email really piles up.
Six of the eight largest snowstorms in NYC history have taken place in the past 15 years. Three of the top eight have taken place in the past 12 months. Two of the top eight have taken place in the past month. And last summer was the hottest in NYC history.
Pehaps the guy who suggested that I stop kvetching about the financial damage to public services, benefits and the infrastructure caused by Generation Greed — because global warming and rising oil prices will make it seem like a walk in the park — has a point.
On Tuesday, I had lunch with a consultant, who I’ll call Wiseman, and yes, he’s actually a composite, but all dialogue is guaranteed verbatim.
Lunch was pretty uneventful til we got to the topic of the State Senate Dems.
WISEMAN: Everyone wanted them to lose, and when I say everyone, I mean every one. Except for the Senate Dems themselves, and even a few of them.
A recent poll shows New Yorker are against all spending cuts and tax increases. These traditional telephone polls, in my view, are probably skewing older — toward Generation Greed, the one that ran up the debts and promised itself benefits for seniors it refused to pay for.
The only budget cut New Yorkers favor, according to the poll? Lower wages (but not retirement benefits) for state (lot local government or non-profiteer) workers. Of which there are relatively few, and which have absorbed a substantial share of the cuts already. The state has a $9 billion budget deficit I read, although that is likely an underestimate. According to employment and wages data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics, state workers earned a total of $12.3 billion in 2009, down slightly from the year before. That is actually down, not a diminished pace of growth.
Give Jeff Klein credit; in the battle between him and John Sampson to see who can most quickly surrender every last vestige of the moral high ground, Klein, against all odds, has managed to keep pace.
The latest edition of City Hall News has a front page article about Mayor Bloomberg being criticized over Cathy Black, the Citytime scandal & the snow.
http://www.cityhallnews.com/newyork/article-1737-weathering-the-storm.html
Pushing back against the idea that Mike is being criticized more now than in his first two terms is Deputy Mayor Howard Wolfson:
My ambivalence about Lieberman is reflected in my extremely reluctant endorsement of him in his 2006 primary, followed by my even less enthusiastic endorsement of primary winner Ned Lamont in the general