The Latest

Stop and Frisk

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I normally don’t comment on topical, symbolic issues like this, preferring instead to write about issues that I myself raise, issues that I know more about. And I’ve pretty much given up writing about solutions, because I have come to realize that solutions based on my assumptions – that everyone has equal value and the future and those who will live in it matter, for example – are not what politicians are looking for. And yet so much nonsense is being tossed around on the subject of “stop and frisk” that I feel compelled to comment, because those throwing the nonsense are in effect pretending that their pandering is cost free and will not result in losses elsewhere. This is the usual free political free shot – pander to one constituency, and blame any responsible suckers for the associated consequences.

Several facts need to be considered. According to the Statistical Abstract of the United States, New York City’s overall crime rate, once well above the U.S. average, is now well below U.S. average, although the city remains above average in the one crime that it seems to specialize in – robbery. In March 2002, according the U.S. Census Bureau, the number of New York City police officers was 2.9 times the U.S. average relative to population, and in FY 2011 it was still 2.81 times the U.S. average. In 2010, according to the 2012 financial report of the New York City Police Pension fund, there were 34,600 active members working, earning an average of $100,127. And 44,630 retired members, receiving an average of $40,200, free of state and local income taxes, with automatic increases each year. In the January 2006 Financial Plan from the NYC Office of Management and Budget, FY 2006 judgments and claims against the NYPD were projected to total $101 million. In the February 2013 Financial Plan, the estimate for this fiscal year is $180 million. I’ll discuss these facts and others at “Saying the Unsaid in New York.”

Yes or No in Debates.

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It's my contention that "Yes or No" questions can be quite effective in debates.  

It proved to be a tough night a few years ago for Gifford Miller when he stalled on a question of whether he would send his kids to public school.  Another Weiner showed he could hit such questions out the ballpark. 

Then there was a few years ago when such questions showed Bloomberg's personality. 

Has Andrew Cuomo Stopped The Pataki Local Government Boom?

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One of the ironies of recent history is that although politicians from the rest of the New York State routinely accused New York City of draining their communities through wasteful government spending and a welfare culture, a charge dating back to the administration of Mayor Lindsay and the annual tin cup pilgrimage to Albany, the reality has been nearly the reverse. During the Pataki Administration and after, in fact, local government employment in the rest of the state soared. Even as the independent economic base of Upstate New York, Long Island and the Lower Hudson Valley – in manufacturing, corporate headquarters and high tech companies such as IBM and Grumman, withered away. During the darkest days of the New York City economy, someone like Bella Abzug might have suggested making up for lost private sector jobs by just giving people more government jobs, so they could have unlimited health insurance and early retirement pensions, and making someone else pay for it. But the rest of New York State has seemingly tried to actually pull that off, burdening the remaining private sector employers there, New York City, and – through debts and deferred pension costs – the future. This trend was relentless and seemed to go on and on regardless of economic cycles.

Starting in 2009, however, it shuddered to a halt and began to reverse. Have the policies of Governor Andrew Cuomo stopped the trend? Has the burden on the private sector in the rest of the state reached breaking point? Or have the costs from the past finally caught up with the local government growth machine? You can review the data on "Saying the Unsaid in New York."

The Gateway (Kangaroo Court Edition)

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Because even a stopped clock is right twice a day, Andrea Peyser's whine about left opposition to Quinn is not without an occasional salient point,  but to assert as Peyser does that "Quinn…once enjoyed the uniform support of the city’s vast left-wing cabal," is to indulge in Bizarro-world delusional revisionism.