To the many peeps who have contacted or tried to contact me, enquiring as to why I haven’t written a column here for the past seven weeks: I’ll be back real soon.<.......> I had to take a lil hiatus in order to clear my head a bit. I also had to consider a couple runs for public office. I went to Trinidad for a brief visit (as a pre-requisite to possibly participating in the election campaign down there later this year) and for a little R&R. <....>

Today, I decided not to run for Congress in 2008 (it’s too late to start this/ especially as it relates to fundraising), but I am considering a run for the City Council in 2009; I will finalize that decision next year. There are talks afoot to do a wide ranging challenge of various district-leaderships (Dems.) in many boroughs during next year’s presidential excitement; so far these ideas are inchoate. There are many people who are rather disenchanted with the leadership of New’s York’s democrats and want to mix it up a bit. If those conversations mature then who knows what I’ll do next year; but I am definitely not running for Congress (11th) then, unless I hit the LOTTO soon/ lol. <....>

Yesterday wasn’t the best day for the New York Post’s Fred Dicker, who supposedly is the best-informed Albany reporter around.

Some may recall (though I’m sure Dicker hopes not too many) that he wrote a column in May predicting doom for Assembly Democrats if they tried to pass a bill legalizing gay marriage.

Here’s part of what Fred wrote –

Many insiders predict a significant number of the Assembly Democrats – and possibly a majority – will oppose the measure, led by conservative-oriented upstate and suburban lawmakers and a large number of African-Americans and Hispanics, many of whose constituents strongly oppose gay marriage.

New York’s MTA recently announced, to great acclaim, that it would “save the fare” for another year, continuing a political game that has gone on as long as there has been a subway system in New York. The long-term results of that game have been terrible. To prevent increases, money has been borrowed and maintenance deferred, until a crisis point is reached and the fare goes up anyway – by a massive amount, generally in a recession when people can least afford it. In the city’s history the typical fare increases have been 20%, 25%, 33%, 50%, even 100% (from five cents to ten cents). It is only during the 1984 to 1994 period that somewhat smaller increases – of 11% or less – were the norm. Deferred fare increases have been paid back with interest, one reason the pay-per-ride subway fare has in the end risen faster than inflation – by 45% from 1904 to today in real dollars. (see attached chart). Think about it – all those populist heroes defending the working people and middle class by fighting fare increases over all the years delivered a 45% increase in the cost of a subway ride adjusted for inflation over a century! There really is a sucker born every minute. In contrast U.S. postage stamps and inflation have gone up by about the same amount over the past century. Postage stamp increases have been smaller, with the latest at just two cents (5.1%), but more frequent – and generally not subject to grandstanding my members of Congress. In New York the game goes on, but according to the blog DCist, a transit board member in of all places Washington D.C. has proposed ending the game there once and for all.

Readers of this site may be interested to find out what life is like in New York City, as told to the rest of the country by the Associated Press. “Allison Weiss Brady, 36, a venture capitalist and philanthropist who is on the board of her family foundation, said she likes to be practical when buying handbags preferring to buy bags in basic colors. Still, she spends $20,000 per season on accessories and typically spends $5,000 per bag, much more than the $2,000 she used to spend a few years ago…Nadine Absolam, a 32-year-old Brooklyn resident, says she likes to have the trendiest designer items, but she said it's getting harder to come up with the cash. ‘My first priority should be my bills. But these designers bring out so many hot items that you must have these things,’ said the Pilates instructor. ‘I am always late with my bills.’ Absolam spends about $1,000 in clothing and accessories per month, about half of her monthly salary.” The Mayor and City Council hear your pain ladies. Among all the public priorities in this over-taxed, debt-ridden city and state, they decided an elimination of the city’s tax on clothing was one of them.

Before resuming my diatribe, let me say there is much to like in the city budget.

The current state policy, which the State Senate seems want to push farther and farther, is to provide more state education funding to school districts that spend the most money, New York City excluded, and then to make New York City pay for it through back door “tax relief” aid for everyone else. No accountability is expected for the added funds. My solution, as I’ve stated in the past, is to have a cap on spending per student at 25 to 33 percent above the national average (adjusted for the cost of living). Not a cap on the increase, keeping existing spending differences in spending as they are forever, as certain cynical, selfish, nasty, dishonest, greedy, immoral, unethical people have often proposed. A cap on the total. Below that cap, no school budget referendums would not be required. Above the cap, one dollar of state education funding would be taken away for each dollar in excess.

I didn’t notice until now, but new data from the New York State Department of Taxation of Finance was released in May for the share of New York State income taxes accounted for by each county. And while for older data I rely on the New York State Statistical Yearbook, which wasn’t published every year, it appears that the 41.3% of income taxes paid by full-time state residents that were paid by New York City residents in 2004 is the most since the early 1970s. The data can be found here. New York City residents accounted for $8.9 billion of the $21.6 billion in state income tax receipts paid by full time residents that year, or 41.3% of the total. Moreover, as New Jersey and Connecticut residents account for $2.8 billion of the $3.8 billion in state income taxes paid by non-residents, I doubt the majority of those non-residents worked in Watertown. Getting back to full-time residents, New York City residents accounted for 40.2% of the returns, 40.7% of the income, and 41.3% of the taxes. The city’s share of the population was somewhat higher, since it has a much higher poverty rate than the rest of the state, and thus presumably more people not filing returns.

As promised, I have attached a spreadsheet with FY 2005 per-child spending by category (instructional wages and salaries, operation and maintenance of plant, etc.) for every school district in the state. In high-cost downstate New York, the figures have been adjusted downward to account for higher wages and costs here – those which received adjustments are identified by an asterisk. The spreadsheet also includes the original data downloaded from the U.S. Census Bureau that I used for the per-capita figures; the census data includes even more detailed categories I chose not to break out. The data, aside from the big city school districts, is sorted by county (in alphabetical order from Albany to Wyoming) followed by school district name. Although my knowledge of the rest of the state is probably greater than the average Brooklyn resident, I have elected to provide the data without comment. While I’m not sure how many people from outside the city read this blog, if you do please look up the data for your school district and let me know what you think of it. Why are things the way they are? Unfortunately, this data came out after the school budget votes this year. But that means this will be the most recent data available when the budgets come up again next year.

For years, pundits inside the city and out have demanded that New York City reduce its high level of wasteful spending outside the classroom, with some asserting that if only New York City’s non-instructional spending were at typical levels it would have plenty of money for teaching. There was perhaps no greater falsehood ever spread in the city’s fiscal debates. Instead, it is the rest of New York State that stands out in its sky-high non-instructional spending relative to the national average, while New York City has always been low. In fiscal 2005, non-instructional spending totaled $3,423 per student in New York City, or $2,554 if the cost of living is adjusted for, well below the national average of $3,400. The Downstate Suburbs (also adjusted for living costs), Upstate New York, and New Jersey (adjusted as well) far exceeded national average at $4,221, $4,350, and $4,449 respectively. The U.S. Census Bureau data on expenditures per pupil may be found in the spreadsheet attached to my previous post here http://www.r8ny.com/blog/larry_littlefield/per_student_revenues_and_expenditures_in_fy_2002_and_fy_2005_a_little_good_news_and_lot_of_bad_news_for_n . A more detailed discussion, including a discussion of changes from FY 2002 to FY 2005, follows.

Through the 1990s, New York City’s per student public school revenues and expenditures were below the national average if adjusted for the cost of living using the modest method I prefer (see the end of the prior post). In Fiscal 2002, however, NYC’s spending per student was $10,882 in cost of living-adjusted $2005, above the national average of $10,084. Unfortunately, the city’s public school revenues per student were only $9,435 at the time, well below the national average of $9,879, as the city borrowed with abandon and kept taxes low during former Mayor Giuliani’s second term. With Mayor Bloomberg making education a top priority, by FY2005 an additional breakthrough had occurred as the city’s revenues per student, adjusted for the cost of living, reached $11,564 that year, above the national average of $10,339. That, I suppose is good news. Almost everything else I discovered about changes between FY 2002 and FY 2005, however, is bad news, with much of it based on decisions made before FY 2002, or subsequently by former Governor Pataki and the New York State legislature. Through FY 2005 Mayor Bloomberg’s fiscal imprint was, in reality modest.

In FY 2002, thanks to 2.5% inflation-adjusted decline in the personal income of New York City residents according to the latest estimates from the Bureau of Economic Analysis, New York City’s elementary and secondary public school spending rose to 4.57% of that personal income, within rounding error of the U.S. average of 4.63%. I thought, and not for the first time, that the city’s public school spending might actually exceed the national average as a share of income in some subsequent year. But it was not to be. As in the early 1990s, government budget reductions lagged the reduction in the tax base, but once they kicked in and personal income began to recover, the city’s public school spending fell as a share of personal income. As I showed earlier based on another data source, the city’s share of state education funding (direct and back-door funding under programs like STAR) was also cut. Meanwhile, spending in the rest of the state stayed at sky-high levels relative to personal income. In fiscal 2005, New York City’s elementary and secondary public school spending had fallen to 4.28% of city residents’ personal income, 7.5% below the national average and 33.7% below the average for the rest of New York State.