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The Dataway: Trends in New York’s State and Local Budget Priorities from FY 2002 to FY 2010

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I’m going to repeat the style I used to discuss public employment this year, and toss off some comments on trends in public finance rather than provide, yet again, an exhaustive number-laden description. I assume there are many Room Eight readers who have read these over and over are as bored with it as I am, but I’ll keep doing it as long as New York’s public agencies – the City Comptroller, the State Comptroller, the Independent Budget Office, etc. do not.

There is much in our relative situation that doesn’t fit the propaganda narrative that the public employee union and contractor interests that control most of our state and local politicians wish to hear. Notably the high tax burden here, which raises questions about what is being provided in return, even among those who would otherwise be inclined to be “pro-government.” Thus to the extent you see government finance data discussed, in its totality rather than selectively only when favorable, it is generally the right wing Manhattan Institute and its Empire Center doing the talking. But the facts don’t fully fit the right wing narrative either. Notably the fact that the high taxes cannot be entirely or even primarily explained by the minority immigrant urban poor. And the fact that costs deferred from the past do explain a great deal of the excess burden, given that somehow since 1980 “conservative” has come to mean “buy now pay later.” But on to an attempt to say the unsaid and, unusually for me, say it briefly.