(Published 2/21/2012)
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The Gateway (Holiday Crusade Edition)
|Gatemouth's Holiday Appeal: Stop City cuts to Runaway and Homeless Youth.
Perhaps there are more worthy cuts to fight (though I'm hard pressed to think of any), but most of them (if they exist) have some potential powerful constituencies to fight for them.
Unemployment Insurance Extension: Where Did the Money Go?
|There are some who object to the federal unemployment insurance extension, which will keep money coming for the long term unemployed, because it will add to the deficit. But employers pay a federal unemployment insurance tax in addition to the state unemployment insurance tax. When there is no federal unemployment insurance extension, which is almost all the time, the states pay for the unemployed, not the federal government. Those federal unemployment insurance taxes just go — somewhere. A trust fund? Like the Social Security Trust Fund? Was that "lock box" opened too for spending on other things? Or did the federal UI fund run out, perhaps because the tax only covers the first $7,000 of wages? I haven't heard anyone ask about this.
The Gateway (Corrections and Leaks Edititon) [UPDATED]
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Unable to resist a pun, yesterday I ran the following item:
City Pensions: Read It And Weep
|I've noted that what motivates me to write here is the unsaid, the facts that are unrevealed and non-decisions that are not discussed because doing so is not in the interest of those in the game. When the unsaid is said, that is no longer necessary. So rather than write something, I'll just link something you should read. Actuary John Bury is up to 46 city pensions plans in 25 cities in his analysis, and the NYC situation looks really bad.
It appears to me the only way for the teacher's pension to get out of the hole would be to go pay as you go (or something close to it) for several years, shifting at least $1.4 billion per year and perhaps more (depending if the early retirees from the 25/55 deal are fully reflected here) from the classroom to the retired. That would require not only drastically increasing class sizes, cutting extra curriculars, sports and student services, but also possibly knocking a year or two off the education most NYC children receive. A repeat of the 1970s, in other words.
Maybe, just maybe we should give Cathie Black a chance
|I Concede the way Cathie Black was rolled out as Schools Chancellor will make her job all that much harder. Granted! No one can argue that.
Black comes in with some elected officials and parents screaming bloody murder that she does not meet the qualifications for the job. That she is not an educator. How could the mayor just do this?
A poem entitled: “ONE DAY” (translated from Spanish to English).
|It was written by a young Otto Rene Castillo: a Guatemalan born writer -now deceased.
One day
the apolitical intellectuals of my country
will be interrogated by the simplest of our people.
They will be asked:
“what did you do,
when your nation died out slowly;
like a sweet fire, small and alone?”
The Gateway (Giving Thanks That the Weekend is Over and I Can Stop Driving to Jersey Edition)
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Seven year old Dybbuk to his Aunt: You should find someone; it can be a man or you can be gay, but you should find someone. Either way, you can still have children.
As John Sebastian said: And then I know that all I've learned, my kid assumes.http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5qTAy5RU_m4
Fade to Black
|Some people have wondered about my indifference to the new schools chancellor. Perhaps because I’m not an educator myself, I don’t see any of the educational controversies being debated as being nearly as good or bad (depending on your point of view) as the financial disaster that is coming:
1) The end of federal stimulus money for education, this year.
2) The state budget crisis.
3) Past pension underfunding in the good years, based on an excessively optimistic (bubble level) rate of return assumption.
4) Fifteen years of retroactive pension enhancements, with a massively costly unfunded one for NYC teachers just two-plus years ago.
Other places are facing the same problems. But with lower tax burdens and lower debt levels than NYC. And our bills acre coming due right on schedule.