A recent article in The Economist magazine contained data that was so alarming I had to look into it further. According to the article, U.S. median household income adjusted for inflation fell 7.1% from 1999 to 2009. In several states, including Rustbelt Michigan, Indiana and Ohio and previously booming Sunbelt North Carolina and Georgia, the decrease was 12.9% to 21.3%. This, of course, was not a fair comparison, since 1999 was a near peak economic year and 2009 was a severe recession year. So I downloaded recent Census Bureau data – the readily available data was for the average of 2008 and 2009 – and compared it with data from another weak economic year, 2003 data from the Statistical Abstract of the United States. This is still not the right comparison, because the median household income in 2009 is apparently lower than the 2008 to 2009 average. But it does make for another interesting comparison. From 2003 to 2008/09, median household income in the U.S. was basically unchanged. But in New York State, it fell about 5 percent.
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Most Are Celebrating Thanksgiving, But for Bloomie It’s Already Black Friday (The Gateway)
|Even Gasbags are Stealing My Stuff Department:
Gatemouth (11/10/08): If Bloomie had picked Michelle Rhee, that would have been an act of guts, vision and audacity; this is merely an act of "arrogance," a trait he usually attributes to his betters.
ON BLOOMBERG AND BLACK: EDUCATING BROWNS, REDS, YELLOWS, BLACKS AND OTHER COLORS OF THE RAINBOW (Part One).
|I have been told that presently the NYC public school system has close to 1.25 million students. I am also told that only around ten per cent of these students are white; and that the vast majority are Negro and Hispanic; with significant East Indians and other Asians: in other words black and brown, and yellow, and red all over.
The Gateway (Just When You Thought it Was Safe to Go Back to Ground Zero Edition)
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The Sponsors of the Young Men’s Islamic Association proposed for the Holy Mother Coat Factory are seeking a 9/11 Recovery Grant.
My first thought is that an old friend has reappeared on the scene to rescue me from one more column leading with a bunch of sarcastic comments about Cathie Black.
Defusing the Koreas Time Bomb
|The latest flare up between North and South Korea has led the New York Times to say that the reason China props up the North is that it does not want an American ally, the South, on its border. In light of this and South Korea’s poor treatment of President Obama during his recent visit there indicating that South Korea is feeling its oats perhaps it is time to evaluate a new strategy for the peninsula.
The Gateway (Gatemouth Keeps on Blacklisting Edition)
|Cathie Black, fiscally responsible?
Death Awaits You
|Looking to get away, do some international travel to escape the realities of modern life? Want to see some exotic places, places of historical or cultural value. Great, we have a list of 79 countries you can visit. The only problem is that if you are gay you just may be put to death in some of these countries just for being gay. Kind of makes what the film Midnight Express did for Turkish tourism a walk in the park compared to many of these places.<
Actuary John Bury’s Detailed Look At NYC Pensions
|As I noted previously, John Bury is an actuary turned newspaper commentator and blogger in New Jersey, who has published detailed analyses of the upcoming pension disaster. He is non-partisan, for example noting in New Jersey that a large part of the problem is the fault of past taxpayers who did not pay enough in, not just public employees taking too much out.
In his latest post, he does some calculations on individual New York City public employee pension funds, and finds that the fund for NYC teachers is the worst funded of all, with a "drop dead" date of 2019. This doesn't mean that pensions won't be paid. It might mean that property taxes will be raised so high that all the properties would be seized, and former homeowners would become tenants of the pension fund (and not rent regulated tenants either). And it might mean that public education is de facto eliminated as money is shifted to pay the pensions. In any event, read Bury's post, look at his numbers, and remember this pension enhancement a little over two years ago. One that was supposed to cost nothing.
BLACKLASH!!! [The Gateway (Commissioner of Weights and Measures Edition)]
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Administration caught off-guard by Blacklash
Local Government Spending: Education, Police, Medicaid
|If you followed my compilation of 2007 Census of Governments data, you know I try to come up with reasonable comparisons by adjusting for the varying level of population and income in different places (by measuring government revenues and expenditures as a percent of personal income), and the differing structure of local government in different places (by aggregating data at the county level). Even so, comparisons aren’t perfect because some places have more government services than others. There are some places that have professional fire departments, while others rely on volunteers. There are some places with free municipal solid waste collection, some with contracted out solid waste collection, and some where people have to hire and pay for their own collection services. Some places have public water, sewer and transit, and others do not.
What every place in the United States has, however, is police and public education. This post uses data from the Governments Division of the U.S. Census Bureau to examine the relative level of spending on these services as a percent of personal income, with some discussion of Medicaid from other data sources mixed in.