Tag: Blogs

As anyone reading this is aware, Room Eight has had periodic technical difficulties recently. So for Christmas my older daughter set up an alternate blog for me to use if I wish. So from now on what I post, or try to post, on Room Eight I will also post on the alternate site, in the hope that it will actually be available somewhere. The alternate blog is called “Saying the Unsaid in New York.”

The new site has two advantages. First, the “attachment” function still works, so it will be easier for me to provide spreadsheets with data for the reader’s use. You just click on the link right in the text to download. Second in addition to the ongoing blog, the site allows the creation of “pages” for information that I want people to have access to all the time. In addition to “About” I have created two of them. The “Helpful Background and Greatest Hits” page contains a series MS Word files with posts or series of posts with my basic worldview, the most all-encompassing “foundation” essays I have written. And “The Latest Public Finance Spreadsheets” page contains just that, always available with Background essays on where the data comes from and how I compiled it in MS Word format, the spreadsheets themselves, and MS Word documents with my analyses of them. Much of this was written for and still is on Room Eight.

Is everyone reading Pension Tsunami?  Then you know enough about what is coming that you don’t have to hear it from me. But let me summarize a few articles from one of the places being hit first, so others who haven’t been reading can be prepared to face what is coming. Much of the recent discussion in California centered on an admission by the chief actuary of CalPERS, the California public employees pension fund, in a seminar sponsored by the Public Retirement Journal, that California’s defined benefit pensions are “not sustainable,” as reported on a blog by a pension expert.

“We are facing decades without significant turnarounds in assets, decades of — what I, my personal words, nobody else’s — unsustainable pension costs of between 25 percent of pay for a miscellaneous plan and 40 to 50 percent of pay for a safety plan (police and firefighters) …unsustainable pension costs,” he said. “We’ve got to find some other solutions.” The head of the League of California Cities told the seminar that “pension benefits are ‘just unsustainable’ in their current form and difficult to defend politically” to non-public employees. Another actuary pointed out “that two-tier plans do not save much money, even after several decades” because “costs from the untouchable high-benefit first tier, a vested right protected by contract law, continue to grow” and motivation to enact lower tiers for new hires are “political in nature,” attempts to pretend existing public employees have contributed shared sacrifice when they haven’t. The reaction is a Tsunami all its own.

Recently I sent a note to my editors (Ben Smith and Gur Tsabar) in which I requested a sense of their vision for this site. You see I have observed that Room Eight isn’t attracting new blood or young blood. Out of the original writers in this colony many have left or stopped being productive. Plus, the site sometimes gets bogged down in crappy threads initiated by mischievous commenters. There is a perception out there that this site has lost some of its luster. Also, Ben Smith has lost his focus (understandably so; given his tremendous work for “Politico”, on the current presidential primary campaign); Room Eight isn’t as high on his priority-list as it was before. All this hurts this site.

Am I the only person who thought it strange to see Pat Lynch, President of the POLICE union on NY1 applauding Roger Toussaint saying he’d break the law again?

There are things that happen in this city, that elicit an immediate outcry from black leaders, once they occur. And then there are things that happen, where  these same leaders  stay awfully quiet, when they shouldn’t. Last week we saw this play out once again.

On  East 125th Street in Harlem, a young white male was struck by a car, while running to avoid being robbed and beaten by a group of young kids of color. The young man  subsequently died from the injuries he suffered. He happened to be a student of New York University on his way home.