On Capital Confidential, I find this quote: “We’ve racked our brains to find a single example of the use of the education formula to harm an individual municipality…Never before, never before, has a community been singled out for harm."

Read my prior post, and download the spreadsheets attached to this one.

What do you call the decision in the 1995-1996 budget to cut state school aid to low-spending, high needs NYC while increasing it to the rest of the state? What do you call the decision to NYC's share of total state education funding, including STAR, in the wake of 9/11 in exchange for granting the city permission to increase its own debt and taxes?

“I'd gladly pay you Tuesday for a hamburger today,” the character Wimpy often said in the Popeye strip. The payment never came. There is much I could praise in the New York State budget recently agreed to, in its precedents and, to a lesser extent, even the way it was adopted, which bad as it was better than in the past. Unlike the Daily News or New York Times, however, I will not write about anything I agree with until my question is answered. Including school aid that is called school aid, back door school aid (STAR), Spitzer's new checks, and all CASH to be spent IN A GIVEN FISCAL YEAR to fund, or to offset local funding for, elementary and secondary education, what was NYC's share of total state spending last year, and what will it be this year? In his initial budget Powerpoint presentation, Governor Spitzer said it was 37% last year and proposed to be 37% next year, with Long Island's share also unchanged at 14.1% (despite a “school aid” shift) because of all the money that area would get from Spitzer's checks. So what was the final result? The Governor and others are going around the state talking about everything else.

Here’s a challenge for readers of Room 8.

Guess which Presidential candidate is quoted as saying the following soft-headed comments about how the US should deal with Islamic terrorists? Who is sounding like Jimmy Carter or some other appeaser?

We want to do business with them. We would love to have them all wired and part of the Internet buying American products, and then we'll buy their products. And then we'll have the kind of issues we have with China and India, like we used to have with Japan. But those are good issues to have. That's America, that's what America is about."

In the end, he says, victory in the terror war may come down to commerce. "Technology has transformed the world," he told the executives. "Part of the way we're ultimately going to win the war on terror is through that technology. We're going to win the war on terror because, yes, we have to be militarily strong, we have to consider defending ourselves, but ultimately we overcome terrorism when those parts of the world that haven't connected yet connect to the global economy."

Checking in with the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid datamart, I find that all the states have now reported Medicaid information for 2004. In fact a few, including New York State, have already reported data for 2005. Now I am at least able to fully tabulate Medicaid spending by type of service for 2004, and the overall bottom lines are these. New York State’s spending per Medicaid beneficiary was $7,910, 70.4% above the national average and 23.7% higher than the average of surrounding states (PA, NJ, CT, MA, VT). With 6.6% of the nation’s population, New York accounted for 8.5% of its Medicaid beneficiaries, a difference only partially explained by the state’s above average poverty and elderly population. New York State residents accounted for 7.6% of U.S. personal income in 2004, according the Bureau of Economic Analysis, and 8.6% of national earnings in the Health Care and Social Assistance industries. The state, however, accounted for 14.5% of national Medicaid expenditures that year. The details by type of service are in the attached spreadsheet, and are described following the break.

Now that the Steamroller has been shown that it may be necessary to remove some of the base course before a road’s surface course can be smoothed over, I’ve downloaded some detailed annual average data for 2005 to show why New York’s health care industry is so expensive. As I showed in this post – it isn’t because most health care workers, aside from hospital and nursing home workers represented by Local 1199 and perhaps some top administrators, are overpaid once the cost of living and overall wage levels are adjusted for. They are by and large either fairly paid (nurses) or underpaid (physicians, home care workers). The problem is there are so many of them in particular categories and, perhaps, in New York Medicaid is paying for services for the non-poor that elsewhere others do without or pay for themselves.

Perhaps familiarity breeds contempt, and perhaps I’ve been too hard on them, but it appears that not everyone shares the dim view of New York State Assembly Speaker Sheldon Silver and New York State Senate Majority Leader Joseph Bruno that most editorial boards, think tanks, and blog posters in New York State have. While researching for another post I came upon a press release from the National Conference of State Legislatures. Evidently, Silver and Bruno will be honored for their exemplary work at the group’s Annual Meeting in Boston August 5th to 9th. The press release cites the recent improvement in the way the legislature operates, including two on-time budgets in a row (now three), along with their “commitment to democracy, sound public policy, and an efficient legislative process.” The group’s website is here http://www.ncsl.org/, but if you have trouble finding the press release I have additional florid praise after the break. All I can say is take this with a grain of salt: this is an organization of and for state legislators and their staffs, and may have just wanted to do the two men of the room a favor in the wake of the Brennan Center report and other indignities.

A few years ago, around the time I needed to buy new alarm clock radios, clock manufacturers began installing something I didn’t ask for and didn’t particularly want — an automatic adjustment for daylight savings time. Resetting the clocks twice a year was something of a ritual, and not one I minded, though I preferred the old spring date of the third Sunday in April, which corresponded to the leafing of the trees in New York. But now we have a war, created in part by our dependence on foreign oil, and a potential long-run environmental disaster also tied to our use of fossil fuels, yet our leaders, statesmen that they are, feel they are in no position to ask anyone to make any sacrifices for the greater good at all. So they could only agree on one, “no sacrifice” energy saving measure. Again changing the dates for beginning and end of daylight savings time.

The New York State Department of Labor has released Current Employment Survey data for February, and it seems various publicly funded entities around the state pretty much figured what the state budget would bring. New York City's local government cut another 1,600 jobs over the year to February 2007, while the state as a whole added 6,300, meaning the rest of the state added 7,900. In New York City, meanwhile, home health care employment rose by 5,400 from February 2006 to February 2007, and hospitals added 1,300 dues payers and campaign contributors. Er, service providers.

The City of New York expects to end the current fiscal year with a $4 billion surplus. That means that a few years ago, the city took in about $4 billion more than it spent. Under the current four-year plan, the city will have balanced budgets in Fiscal 2008 and Fiscal 2009, and then Mayor Bloomberg and Speaker Quinn will depart. Does that mean the City of New York plans to spend what it takes in during the next two years? No. The City is planning to run a deficit for the next two years, spending more than it takes in while drawing down the $4 billion. As a result, catastrophic tax increases and service cuts are baked right into the plan, but not for two years. And, to make matters worse the State of New York, seeing that $4 billion sitting there and plans to hand it out inside New York City like it is free, has decided to spend half of it itself — outside New York City — by shifting state money to the city’s disadvantage. And Bloomberg and Quinn, by proposing all kind of goodies, are egging them on.

All I want to know is this. Last year NYC received 37% of state school aid plus back door school aid such as STAR. Including Spitzer's new checks, what will the share be this year? Spitzer's proposal was 37% for NYC, same as last year, and 14.1% for Long Island, same as last year. If those figures change, that should be the only story. THE ONLY STORY. The rest is PR.

Remember, NYC residents pay more than 40% of all state taxes paid by state residents. Forget the city's share of business taxes. After 30 years of harm to New York City's children, Governor Spitzer proposed that New York City's taxpayers would be required to pay more for education in NYC, and also have more money redistributed to the rest of the state, where the children are better off.