The U.S. Census Bureau has released elementary and secondary school finance data for fiscal year 2007, and I’m pleased to see one publication has already covered it and done a computation or two.  My contribution is summarized in the attached three spreadsheets. The numbers are available, and anyone is free to interpret them.

My main finding is that FY 2007 is the year that New York City public school spending, very low a decade earlier, went over the moon, soaring to an extreme high of $19,336 per student (all future figures on that basis), compared with the national average of $11,556. It is almost as high as the Downstate Suburban average of $20,120, and is far above the average for New Jersey ($18,094) and Massachusetts ($14,422). Even adjusting downward for the higher general wage rate here (in the private sector excluding the Finance and Insurance sector), New York City came in at $14,129, still a solid 22.3% above the national average and just below the Downstate Suburbs ($14,767) and New Jersey ($14,876) though well below Upstate New York ($15,632). That adjustment cuts Massachusetts to $12,764. For instructional spending alone NYC is now higher than any of those areas, meaning that funding is no longer an excuse for any educational deficiencies in the city – far from it. From FY 2002, the last budget before Bloomberg, to FY 2007, however, New York City’s extra spending did not go to administration, no matter what you hear, nor for the most part to higher teacher pay or smaller class sizes. It went to soaring spending on debts and employee benefits such as pensions and retiree health care, a shift the city had in common with other areas. Contract spending also rose.

Gatemouth and Domestic Partner had met Major Publishing Couple four years ago when Dybbuk first started pre-school. While Gate and DP maintained a fierce competition to see which of them could more effectively squander their considerable talents, the two halves of MPC each ran a major national magazine that had still managed to prosper in the age of the internet.

MPC Jr. suffered from what the pre-school Director had mis-diagnosed as shyness; her prescription was friendship with Dybbuk, who served as the school’s Mayor and Social Director. In making the match, she sternly warned DP not to be put off by the MPC’s celebrity status, which was most analogous to cautioning a nymphomaniacal size queen not to be intimidated by the prospect of pulling a train with Roddy McDowell, Milton Berle and Forrest Tucker.

DP and Mrs. MPC became regular breakfast buddies, and DP successfully convinced her to abandon her burgeoning editorial career in favor of becoming a part-time yoga instructor, with an occasional bit of freelancing on the side.

Let me call your attention to a post on The Housing Bubble Blog and a comment made in response. A 30-something person is dismayed when a couple in their 50s/60s buys a house, rents it out, keeps the rent and stops making mortgage payments, leaving their tenants at risk of eviction. “I’m frankly disturbed by the situation. I think it’s really shady for someone (in this situation) to be taking money from a renter and not put it toward the mortgage. Every month, they have been taking that money knowing they are not using it to make their house payments. I just think it’s wrong and puts the renters in a bad position…I can see why they would want to do this to help themselves, but again, it’s affecting the whole neighborhood. As far as how I feel personally/morally about the whole situation (and the fact that this is happening all over America) is that people really disappoint me.”

Now these circumstances are specific, but the response of one commenter could apply to much else in this era. What happens when most people, and particularly younger generations, realize they are getting robbed and start thinking like this?

The Manhattan Bridge opened for subway service in 1915, and from that point to the early 1980s carried more Brooklynites to work in Manhattan than any other piece of infrastructure. In the 1950s, engineers recommended that tunnels be built to take the subway trains off the bridge and eliminate the stress of having heavy trains pass over it and flex it. Then in the 1970s, with a huge share of the city tax base dedicated to debt and pensions, the parts of the bridge that allowed it to flex were left to rust and corrode, leading to cracking and deterioration. As a result, half the bridge was closed to subway traffic for nearly 20 years, severely degrading subway service around the southern rim of Brooklyn, from Bay Ridge and Sunset Park in the west to Sheepshead Bay, Midwood, and Flatbush to the east. While at City Planning, I produced data that showed that these neighborhoods had a falling share of people commuting to work by subway, and falling income, relative to other areas of Brooklyn that did not rely on the bridge. Somehow no Brooklyn politicians ever noticed all the extra time required to get work, and the extra crowding. For the limited number of people who matter it wasn’t an issue. SUV parking was more important. A whole generation passed with many people never knowing what subway service in Brooklyn was supposed go be like.

Proposals to connect the BMT tracks from DeKalb to the Rutgers Street Tunnel (which carries the F), to reduce the traffic over the bridge and provide an alternative in case of future outages, were scrapped because of the massive prices contractors charge the MTA. Eventually, the bridge was fully reopened to subway traffic. But as the person who was then identified as the only one in favor of that project, I was not happy to have an architect I’ve corresponded with over the years call my attention to this video.

It was widely reported today that New York State and New York City have agreed to pay the federal government $332 million and $100 million respectively, to give back money fraudulently billed to Medicaid for school health services. By billing Medicaid, the school districts involved saved money, because the federal government covered half the cost. According to the settlement, the state gave false guidance to the school districts on what could be billed to Medicaid.

The question I have is this: why is New York City the only local government contributing to the settlement? If all the fraud was in New York City, and much of it will be paid for by state taxes collected elsewhere, then residents elsewhere in the state have something to complain about. But what if school districts throughout the state used this ruse to shift costs to the federal government? Then New York City residents are paying other people's share. Anyone want to guess which is more likely?

Does anyone out there have any doubt that the United Federation of Teachers wants every last dime of our ever rising tax burden to go the early retired, leaving the school system to collapse, that the New York State legislature is on their side, and that Mayor Bloomberg is going along with it to advance his personal agenda (which charitably may be described as saving the universe by having himself rather than someone worse – like the rest of the pols — in charge)? Put this quality MSM reporting together, and think about what it must mean. Yet another retroactive increase in income for retired teachers passes the same day a State Senate vote on Mayoral control is promised. That vote doesn’t happen, and Mayor Bloomberg asserts that appeasing the State Senate is like appeasing the Nazis.

On Thursday, July 16, Party designating petitions were filed at the New York City Board of Elections.

The following is a report listing the upcoming contested Primaries, based on the petitions filed. The list will be modified as candidates withdraw and/or removed from the ballot. There also may have been some errors made in compiling the list.

I am including some commentary where I know something about the races. I apologize to all candidates who I might be shortchanging in my description or lack of a description of them. I encourage anybody who knows more about these candidates to add something via the comments.

There are those who might have read my little thought experiment on what would have happened if the federal government had allowed the free market to work itself during the recent financial crisis, and concluded I have lost my mind. As reported by the Wall Street Journal, however, former Treasury Secretary Hank Paulson testified to Congress that things could have gone down pretty much as I described, and that he didn’t say so at the time because he didn’t want to cause panic and make the crisis worse. “If you have a situation where a banking system is frozen and money can’t move between financial institutions, what ultimately happens is that every business, even businesses that seem to be solvent and small businesses across America, will not be able to fund their inventory. They won’t be able to meet their payroll.”

Right. Every company in the United States goes bankrupt. Their stocks are worthless, their bonds are near worthless, mutual funds and pension funds are near worthless, the public employee pension funds are worthless, state and local governments can’t borrow, their tax bases shrink, and they are broke as well. In the short run, another Great Depression, with soaring unemployment (even compared with what we have now) and “people in the streets.” In the long run, however, the free market, and the abuses of power, that have made everyone more and more unequal for 30 years, would have rebooted, and everyone would have ended up equal again, with no one having a piece of paper that said they were entitled to the benefit of someone else’s work in the future. “I didn’t spend a whole lot of time thinking about that because I knew it was going to be very bad, and I never wanted to experience very bad.” Compared with where things are going, bad for whom Hank?

It’s almost a month since Michael Jackson died (June 25th, 2009), and yet the news media’s obsession with this individual ceases to wane. Day after day we are inundated with news items about some aspect of his life and legacies; sometimes sordid tidbits emerge about things more speculative in nature than factual. And lately, a few New York politicians have waded into to the news stream with their condemnation of the deceased as a pedophile (Rep. Peter King for example). Well; was he? 

Was Michael ever convicted in criminal court of pedophilia? The answer is no. But then that doesn’t say that he wasn’t one either. Many criminals have beaten back criminal charges against them even when it was ostensible that they had indulged in criminal activity. In Michael’s case, I don’t believe we have enough info in order to condemn him as such. And remember this: a man is innocent until proven guilty in a court of law (for whatever that’s worth). 

When I wrote an item about Hiram Monserrate ludicrous rationale for voting to put the Republicans in charge of the State Senate,

http://www.r8ny.com/blog/yoda/how_dumb_does_hiram_monserrate_think_we_are.html

I hadn’t planned to have series of posts with the same theme but the hacks, thugs & thieves in the State Senates have given me so much material, I feel I must.