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So it turns out that “unexpectedly,” the city and state budgets are not balanced and we will have to accept some combination of paying more, getting less — or having the problem swept under the rug and paying more and getting less later with interest. Word came out after Election Day, and after I guess the folks in charge thought was a decent interlude.
Just remember this next year. Compared with what’s coming next year at this time, this is nothing.
One of the arguments in support of the creation of New York City Campaign Finance Law was that by providing funds to insurgent candidates and limiting the amounts that could be contributed, City elections would become more competitive.
With the huge number of incumbents getting re-elected since the law came into effect, most of us have doubted that the argument held much water. But this year, a case can be made that the law did help level the playing field and made our elections more competitive.
We all know that five incumbent City Councilmembers were defeated in the Democratic Primary. But those were not the only surprisingly competitive Council campaigns we had this year.
Once the wealthy have earned (or at least gotten) their net worth into the nine-figure league, a question arises as to what to do with it. Some turn to philanthropy, and some to purchasing or funding the arts, but many try to relive their boyhood by buying professional sports teams. These owners want to win, and if the labor market is allowed operate freely, pay such high salaries to attract the most gifted players that the teams end up operating at a loss, and become very expensive toys. Which is why wealthy sports team owners in the NFL, NBA, NHL and Major League Baseball have all come up with the same solution to restrain themselves – a salary cap to keep those labor costs down.
It seems we Americans have the same problem with our business executives. The executive pay consultants they hire to decide what to pay each other advise that they have to pay each other more and more, or the limited number of great players in business will go elsewhere. Even at financial firms whose leadership has bankrupted them, and extorted government bailouts, it seems that pay has to be kept at astronomical levels, levels that ensure that other workers, consumers, and investors will get less and less. As far as I’m concerned, the United States needs to impose on the executives, collectively, the same solution they always impose on others when they get the chance. We need an executive salary cap. Particularly since, unlike in sports, the pre-salary cap market for talent isn’t free, and most of the players earning massive salaries in business aren’t great.
Some Vampire (not Empire) State apologists are crowing about a ranking of state fiscal distress by the Pew Charitable Trust that purports to show that there are states in worse shape than New York, based on the size of their budget gaps and cuts. What that organization failed to consider, however, is that New York has the highest state and local taxes in the country, as a share of its residents’ personal income, save for (in some years) Alaska and Wyoming, where most of those taxes are on oil extractions not residents or businesses. You can see this for FY 2006 in the spreadsheet attached to this post. (New York does not have the worst financial reporting – other states are holding up detailed data from the 2007 Census of Governments). Those states in more trouble than New York could get out of it simply by raising their tax burden to New York’s levels. In FY 2006, New York’s state and local taxes absorbed 15.9% of the personal income of NYC residents, and 13.4% of the residents of the rest of the state, compared with 11.4% in California, 11.7% in New Jersey, 10.1% in Arizona, and a national average of 10.9%. Those states have budget crises because they have resisted tax increases; New York has already imposed them from already high levels.
Eight years ago, this was the political landscape in the U.S
There was a Republican President who was elected with 47.9% of the popular vote.
Republicans controlled the US Senate 51-49 and the House of Representatives 229-206.
Democrats had just been elected Governors of New Jersey & Virginia, after eight years of Republican governors.
Today, the situation is –
There is a Democratic President who was elected with 52.9% of the popular vote.
Democrats control the US Senate 60-40 and the House of Representatives 258-177.
Now it can be told.
Last year, I used my Election Day vacation in an effort to help make Malcolm Smith the State Senate Majority Leader;
Having seen how that worked out, this year I used my day off to take care of my sick son Dybbuk and his new puppy, Cerebus.
But, in earlier times, my election days were far more exciting.
On an unseasonably warm Tuesday in March of 1998, NYS State Senate Democratic political operatives undertook a stealth operation of unsurpassing deviousness.
Meeting under the cover of darkness in the parking lot of an unassuming dinner on the Sunrise Highway, we were deployed by Frank Nemeth into the most Democratic election districts of a previously Republican Nassau County Senate District recently vacated by the death of the late Norman Levy.
I can’t find the quote, but I remember a health care executive saying it after cost cutting followed anyway in the wake of the health care reform defeat under Clinton. The health care industry, including the Greater New York Hospital Association and Local 1199, worked to defeat reform. The industry, at the time, had been given an unlimited budget and was exceeding it. With that sweet deal no wonder, given the amoral self interest of those organizations, that they opposed any change, regardless of how poorly the system served others. But managed care followed, and for a time at least, the income of health care workers was cut, if they could collect what they were owed at all. And today? Those who benefit from the system as it is continue to oppose health care reform. They’d better beware.
On Friday, three days after the his Marist Poll was shown to be off by a significant margin in the New York City Mayoral Election for the second election in a row, poll director Lee Miringoff claims an unreleased poll was actually right!
A Marist poll completed the day before the election but never made public showed “a continuation of the trend we saw in the previous week” with “Democrats and African-Americans coming home,” said pollster Lee Miringoff.
In the film “Chariots of Fire” a rich man of Jewish origins sets out with a goal in mind and proceeds to dedicate all of his considerable resources, both material and from within, to its achievement.
Any resemblance to the current Mayor of the City of New York are unintentional, for my point is a different one.
In an effort to achieve his goal of Olympic Gold, Harold Abrams hires the world’s best track coach. The coach makes clear that his services are worth the considerable sum which Abrams is willing to pay, but also acknowledges it may not be enough.
Sam Mussabini tells Abrams he can improve his game, but “I can’t put in what God’s left out.”
The post-election recriminations and spins are underway, with some spinning Bloomberg weakness in a narrow victory and some decrying Democratic divisions in a narrow defeat. My question is simply this: does the Democratic establishment in this city have any capacity for self-examination? In a city where the vast majority of voters are registered Democrats, where voters waited in line to vote for Barack Obama one year ago, the people have recoiled from electing a Democrat as Mayor, the only other elected office most pay attention to, for five consecutive elections.
But this goes back farther, because a reading of The Bronx is Burning shows that former Mayor Ed Koch gained election in 1977 by running against the Democratic Party establishment, both its machine/public employee union wing and its non-profit wing. He subsequently gained re-election by running as a Republican as well as a Democrat. That means that candidates opposing the New York City Democratic Party establishment have won eight of the last nine elections, a streak interrupted only by former Mayor Dinkins, gaining the votes of tens of thousand of people who gladly vote for Democrats from anywhere else. Will any Democrat give a reason for this that is not just an excuse? How do you explain a record of one win in nine tries, a wining percentage of 11.1%, .111 expressed as a batting average, 1/11?