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Two Mistakes New York Didn’t Make

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Sometimes incompetent government has its advantages. I was asked to research the convention center situation while at City Planning in the 1990s, and found out pretty quickly that the problem wasn't the size of the Javits Convention Center. It was the number, cost and availability of hotel rooms and the lack of transit airport access. And yet the city and state decided to go full speed ahead with a doubling of the size of the Convention Center. Fortunately, they were unable to pull it off. Meanwhile, other state and local governments overbuilt convention center space, and are desperately trying to attract a shrinking number of conventions by cutting prices and losing money.

Other state and local governments have also placed much of their hope for economic salvation on casinos, but while New York has pursued gambling at race tracks, it has consistently failed to make a deal to allow casinos elsewhere. Meanwhile, casinos elsewhere are running into financial problems, and pretty soon state and local governments will have to cut the financial benefits they get from gambling to attract gamblers, while still dealing with the social costs.

The Signature Collectors

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The current city elections have brought the usual tales of candidates who wanted to run for office, but were kept off the ballot by New York State’s ballot access laws. As someone who once became fed up enough to run against my state legislator myself, I can tell you that those laws are designed to prevent elections, and make it exceedingly difficult to get on the ballot and speak your piece. The number of signatures required to get on the ballot for a primary against a major party opponent is large, and the time in which one is allowed to collect them is short, particularly for someone who has a job. Independent candidates, seeking to run in the general election when everyone shows up, require three times as many, collected in even less time. Minor party candidates, including Republicans in most of New York City, require fewer signatures, but must get the signatures of five percent of all party members in a district. I can tell you from experience that the election rolls include many former voters who have either died or moved, meaning one must in fact get the signatures of ten or 15 percent of those who are actually there, and it takes half an hour to get each signature. And then, after all that effort, candidates are routinely thrown off the ballot for formatting errors.

Yet some pretend that all the requirements designed to prevent contested elections are not unfair, because incumbents have to meet the same requirements. Or do they?

Does Governor Paterson Believe His Children Will Live In New York State?

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Or would he advise them to live elsewhere? That isn’t a liberal or conservative question. I’m open to argument on whether everyone should pay more into the community and get more out, or pay less in and expect less — although I’m more and more leaning toward the latter, moving away from a prior tendency toward the former, the more hopeless it seems. Because younger generations will be putting more in AND getting less out. And no one will say so. Not on the national level, where Medicare beneficiaries and public employees with government health care oppose universal health care because “we can’t afford it.” And not at the state level.

The Truthful Actuaries On Pensions

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Is everyone reading Pension Tsunami?  Then you know enough about what is coming that you don’t have to hear it from me. But let me summarize a few articles from one of the places being hit first, so others who haven’t been reading can be prepared to face what is coming. Much of the recent discussion in California centered on an admission by the chief actuary of CalPERS, the California public employees pension fund, in a seminar sponsored by the Public Retirement Journal, that California’s defined benefit pensions are “not sustainable,” as reported on a blog by a pension expert.

“We are facing decades without significant turnarounds in assets, decades of — what I, my personal words, nobody else’s — unsustainable pension costs of between 25 percent of pay for a miscellaneous plan and 40 to 50 percent of pay for a safety plan (police and firefighters) …unsustainable pension costs,” he said. “We’ve got to find some other solutions.” The head of the League of California Cities told the seminar that “pension benefits are ‘just unsustainable’ in their current form and difficult to defend politically” to non-public employees. Another actuary pointed out “that two-tier plans do not save much money, even after several decades” because “costs from the untouchable high-benefit first tier, a vested right protected by contract law, continue to grow” and motivation to enact lower tiers for new hires are “political in nature,” attempts to pretend existing public employees have contributed shared sacrifice when they haven’t. The reaction is a Tsunami all its own.

The Democrats on Energy: A Possible Disgrace

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The route to power in the era of Generation Greed has been to promise something for nothing, and to provide handy rationalizations to feed the entitlement of those receiving it. So Republicans have handed out tax breaks and promised to cut “spending,” but in fact have increased spending on everyone other than the poor, minorities, immigrants, and those living in older central cities. And so the Democrats promise fiscal and environmental sustainability, without any sacrifice or any inconvenience for anyone other than “the corporations” or “the rich.” In the end both parties sacrifice the future, and the children and grandchildren who will live in it. For Democrats and the environment, you saw this in former Vice President Al Gore’s run for President in 2000, when he did his best to hide his environmental credentials. And now you see it in the debate over an energy policy, in which the Democratic Congress may be poised to do to President Obama’s number one priority, self described, what a previous Democratic Congress did to former President Carter’s number one priority: energy.

I believe this is not only a crime but also a blunder, because politics are changing. Not everyone in Generation Greed is greedy, just the majority of those who make the most noise. And everyone younger is having their future destroyed by inaction, not just in an environmental sense, which not everyone can agree on, but in a national security and economic sense, because of the effect of our dependence on foreign oil. I believe a key moment in the last Presidential campaign occurred when candidates Clinton and McCain proposed the usual pandering give away – suspending the gas tax – and President Obama called it what it was. Apparently the Democrats still need to learn what that meant. So, apparently, does President Obama.

The Waterfront Commission: Beware the Backwater

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As a shorthand, when describing why data on local governments has to be aggregated at the county level to be comparable, I generally note that whereas in other locations a single county may have a county government, municipalities and townships, school districts, and other special districts, New York City only has two local governments: the City of New York and the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey. But Census Bureau data actually includes a third local government for New York City: the Waterfront Commission of New York Harbor. I generally don’t bother to mention it, or include it within my tabulations, on the grounds that it is too tiny and meaningless to bother with. I never knew what it was, but I figured that it was just some backwater with no useful function where sinecures were provided for political hacks.

A new report alleges pretty much what I had assumed, but also alleges the Waterfront Commission has an actual function. According to the New York Times it “portrayed the agency as a patronage-laden favor bank where staff members took cars for personal use, a boat that was bought with federal money to fend off a ‘waterborne attack’ was used primarily to ferry V.I.P.’s during Fleet Week, and friends got friends jobs with high salaries and little work.” But it also asserted its corruption and incompetence left us vulnerable to terrorism. That I’m not so sure of. I’ll bet anything worth doing is actually done by someone else.

Report on Petition Challenges – Who Is Now Running!

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I attended most of the recent hearings on petition challenges at the New York City Board of Elections.

Some cases will now be heard in court. So the list I will be posting of the remaining Primary contests may change.

This year, it seemed to me, that there were many less challenges involving “technicalities”. Most candidates who were removed from the ballot simply did not file enough signatures from registered voters. A few candidates from the major Parties (Ruben Diaz, Jr., Leticia James + others) lost minor Party cross-endorsements over incorrect filing of paper work.

A number of candidates actually remained on the ballot even though the Board reported that they did not have enough signatures because of “technical” violations in the objections submitted by their opponent.

Special Tax Deals: A Little Good News

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One of New York’s cycles of ever-increasing unearned privilege and injustice is the granting of special tax exemptions, exclusions, and benefits every time the economy is up (when doing so doesn’t require immediate and thus obvious sacrifices by those who don’t matter), and increasing tax rates every time the economy turns down (due to “circumstances beyond our control”). This bi-partisan policy is politically efficient: it shifts the cost of government to those who matter less, and forces them to pay for services and benefits for those who matter more.

Recently, however, there has been a partial retraction. The special $400 check to those rich enough to be able to own their homes is gone. And the special double income tax for the self-employed is gone for those earning $100,000 or less. I’ll give credit to the Freelancer’s Union and Councilmember Yassky for reducing the Unincorporated Business Tax, and remove blame from Mayor Bloomberg for the $400 check, accordingly.

See Me and Tracy Down By The School Yard

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You can assume from the title of this piece that I may be running out of titles/lol, after hundreds of columns here. But I try to remain imaginative; don’t I? Even if I may not be creative enough for my Room Eight quarterblack Howard Gatemouth. 

The title is taken from one of the many tunes Paul Simon wrote and sang, and there is a part in it where he says: “my mama turns around and spits on the ground every time my name gets mentioned”; I thought of this line when I saw Tracy Boyland at the NYC Campaign Finance Board (“the schoolyard”) yesterday. (They sure take candidates to school at the CFB; don’t they? But that’s another column). 

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