No sooner had Mayor Bloomberg released his budget than objections were raised by those who, like Bloomberg, cannot bring themselves to challenge the most privileged of the privileged interests. Reported The Daily Politics, Comptroller Bill Thompson, released a statement opposing a proposed sales tax increase as “regressive,” which is to say falling harder on the less well off, and proposing an additional local income tax increase (on top of the state tax increase) on higher earners instead. “Amid this recession, no one should be immune, and we must ensure that any financial burdens are spread more equitably.” No one should be immune? Spread equitably? Well, the New York state and local income tax on public employee retirement income is zero, and for others over age 65 Social Security income and other retirement income up to $20,000 is also exempt from both state and local income taxes, no matter how high the household’s total income is. Bloomberg himself qualifies for tax-free retirement income. Why won’t Thompson, Bloomberg, Quinn, anyone talk about that?

Sales tax opponents “argue low-income people spend a higher proportion of their disposable income on necessities they can't do without, and so get hurt more than the rich when sales taxes are hiked.” Actually, low income people spend a higher share of their income of food and rent, neither of which is subject to the sales tax. Rental property, however, is subject to the property tax, at a far higher rate than one-family homes people like myself are well off enough to own. Perhaps the real problem is that senior citizens, poor or not, might end up paying those higher sales taxes.

Yes I’m disgusted with Mr. Smith and the rest of the State Senate. But remember, HE JUST GOT THERE, and is trying to convince people to vote and act like grown ups and allocate pain after 15 years in which others handed out benefits and shifted the cost to a future they didn’t care about. I’m far more disgusted with those others, some of whom have conveniently left the scene, and our culture of pacifier sucking two-year-olds, which has yet to “change” in New York. Smith deserves blame, but he’s far too convenient a fall guy for others who deserve to be blamed more.

Those who read my posts are certainly aware of my view that as a result of the future-selling and institution-milking decisions of the past 30 years, across the whole range of our institutions from families to businesses to governments, and in every area of policy from debt to pensions to infrastructure to the environment, future generations are going to be worse off than those who came before. Many who I have corresponded with over the years are coming to agree, now that the bills are coming due. There is, however, one possible piece of good news that is being presented as bad news — housing is becoming much more affordable. Not only is the bubble deflating, but housing could become cheaper (relative to income) than it has been in forty years.

JIM “GATEMOUTH” GARRISON (played by his look-a-like, Kevin Costner):  A career speaks a thousand words. Yet sometimes the truth is too simple for some… Arlen Specter thinks he had an open and shut case: a career built on a stubborn dedication to principle over party – but in reality, it is a case of dedication to the principal over party and principles. But, something happened that made that case virtually impossible to prove: the actual trajectory of Specter’s career. The time frame of 45 years since Specter entered politics leaves no possibility of some higher set of values. We are expected to believe that Arlen Specter’s life in politics is like a single bullet which accounts for all the phases of his career. Rather than admit to evidence of this inconsistency, or investigate further, the Press chooses to endorse the theory put forth by an ambitious junior counsellor, turned jaded elderly Senator, Arlen Specter. One of the grossest lies ever forced on the American people, we've come to know it as the "Magic Bullet" theory.

The Magic Bullet called young Arlen Specter had Democratic politics and a legal resume so impressive that Bobby Kennedy asked him to work in the Justice Department on his own pet project, the Jimmy Hoffa investigation, but Specter demurred saying he "wanted to get to Washington on my own steam…not as someone’s bureaucrat." Eventually becoming a top assistant to the Philadelphia DA, the Magic Bullet took a detour to go to Washington as someone else’s bureaucrat, creating from whole cloth the Warren Report’s “Single Bullet Theory” of the JFK assassination.

I was mistaken in my report yesterday about the New York Post. They did print a correction for their ridiculous mistake of confusing the Governor of Alaska, who the paper endorsed for Vice President of the United States with an unknown free lance journalist. Somehow I missed the correction, which was on page 22, above a half=page ad for dental implants and near another ad for sexual enhancement treatments.

The Bureau of Economic Analysis has released Local Area Personal Income data for 2007. I might look into it more deeply once it is available in disk form, allowing more detailed information for more places to be downloaded in one shot. But the most important finding hasn’t changed — New York State’s economic base and tax base are concentrated overwhelmingly in Manhattan. A place that is what it is, and attracts economic activity despite high taxes, wages and real estate costs, only because it sits at the center of a mass transit system that allows two million workers from a metropolitan area of 18 million to concentrate in one place. Without it, Manhattan is Milwaukee and New York State is Michigan or worse. And because of the seeming compulsion of those in charge of our public and private institutions, particularly the state of New York, to extract every ounce of vitality from the future of those institutions and leave them in ruins, that is where we are heading. As this information is not new, if you have been reading posts and downloading the associated spreadsheets I’ve put up here for three years, there is no need to read further. For those who want more details, a summary follows.

Every Presidential Election brings new voters to the polls – voters who have never voted before.

Sunday’s NY Post published a list of what they said was 100 mistakes in 100 days by the Obama Administration.

Putting aside the fact that a policy that the Post editors might disagree with (releasing the torture memos, for example) is not necessarily a mistake, some of what the Post lists is not a mistake by any definition.

Here is some of what the Post calls mistakes –

Politics makes for strange bedfellows they say, and maybe they are right. During the past few weeks I did find two politicians -Charles Barron and Mayor Michael Bloomberg- apparently sleeping in the same bed (politically speaking, of course), and pensively it was a mini-orgy of sorts; one of convenient morality, one lacking in common sense, an immolation of political principles, a flagellation of standards, a confusingly strange devaluation of ethics for self-serving reasons, an unnecessary questioning of professed values, and of course too many meaningless words for radio, television and newspaper reporters -willing be manipulated (and unrepentant too). 

Back in September 2006, I published an analysis of the Republican primary in the 24^th Senate District, which said, in part:

“The retiring incumbent is named John Marchi, and he was a giant. Marchi was elected to the Senate in 1956, before most of us were born; he was the Republican mayoral candidate in 1969 (beating a sitting Mayor in the primary), and again in 1973. In the late seventies, as the Chair of the Senate’s Finance Committee, he helped save the City from bankruptcy. Although I'm pro-choice, I admire Marchi as practically the only genuine right-to-lifer in the NYS legislature: he opposes both abortion AND capital punishment (hardly a popular stance on his island, and one which nearly lost him re-election in 1978). Whether you agree with him or not (and I don't), his opposition to the McBride Principles was courageous in an area with so many Irish-Americans, especially since it conveyed him no political advantage whatsoever. The same holds true with his public pronouncements against the Italian-American Civil Rights League for its mob connections. Once the Island spread into a second seat, Marchi was always generously helpful to whichever Democrat represented the North Shore, and Marchi usually had the decency to distance himself from the worst of the mobsters (some in every sense of the word) running the local Republican Party.”