The Hayseeds blog, No. 270 for the week starting August 17, 2008.
August 3, 2008
Hayseeds No. 269
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Hayseeds No. 270
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Hayseeds No. 270
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They are still deciding if leasing a newer building would actually save the city money.
Apparently now if a FOIL request is complicated and requires over two hours of use a government employee to get the data out of a computer, they can charge you additionally for the time that employee took to retrieve the data, rather then just the cost of the media.
More! More! More! Says Governor Paterson who continues to believe that the sky is falling and that our state must take drastic measures to keep the budget from getting too much out of whack.
He is proposing some drastic cuts to the state budget including:
# $250 million from 6% to local assistance
# $132 million from postponing some legislative programs agreed upon during this year’s budget
# $100 million discretionary funds
# $505 million Medicaid
# $50 million CUNY (SUNY will already be hit through Executive branch cuts)
Now just to get the legislature to go along with that. I don't think it's going to happen, especially the big local assistant cut that will force property taxes up.
This is interesting:
The Assembly has long recognized that New York, like the rest of the nation is facing difficult economic times. For more than a year, I and my Assembly colleagues have warned that our state was entering a period of economic decline as a result of failed federal policies. We forecasted the recession and called attention to potential weaknesses in the state's revenue stream. In January, the Assembly advanced a plan to address the subprime mortgage crisis and in June, we acted on a plan to help homeowners pay their winter heating bills.We will review the proposals advanced today by the Governor and will continue to work with the Governor and with our colleagues in the Senate to address the challenges brought on by the current recession.
...
He has picked up another big endorsement.
For menacing with a weapon. We don't know the details, but certainly doesn't sound good at least for her.
That's what Governor Paterson is proposing to fix the so-called state fiscal crisis or possible future crisis.
Officials in city government fear that a 6% cut in state aid could greatly hurt much of the progress that city has made in recent years at improving the quality of life.
So your phone will keep working.
The lighthouse near the Crown Point/Champlain Bridge is being spruced up for the quadricential of Champlain's voyage down the lake.
This is pretty good, as seen on The Albany Project:
I've always been quite impressed with Steck and I have been doing a far bit of volunteering for his campaign. He really is great guy, abit one of many in this primary race.
Silly politics from downstate.
The Working Families Party will be attacking the governor's tax cap proposal on TV starting this morning.
He says he wants even the legislators to give up pet projects in their backyard, that often go to meaningful causes.
Kind of like cutting funds to Cooperative Extension Association In The State Of New York, Displaced Homemakers Association, Center For Disability Services, Inc., Community Caregivers, Inc., Northeastern Association Of The Blind At Albany, Inc., Western Turnpike Rescue Squad, Inc., and so forth to provide basic services to the groups they represent.
Pork in only sense of cutting funds from the people who need them most.
He has some interesting things to say on WAMC's Capitol Connection this week.
Capitol Connection #832
Host Alan Chartock is joined by New York State Comptroller Tom DiNapoli. They'll talk about the fiscal challenges facing the state in the years ahead and what should be done to fix the problem. As the sole trustee of the state pension fund, DiNapoli talks about how the fund is performing and about investing in less-traditional investments. They'll also talk about the home mortgage crisis, the '08 elections and much more.
I don't agree with everything the Comptroller has to say, but he makes some pretty good balanced points in this half hour interview.
It turns out that merging government and creating larger agencies can often be more costly and wasteful then any savings that is seen by eliminating duplication of services.
I got an email about this interesting candidate for Congress.
This sounds interesting and will be going on this weekend in Fonda. I may stop by on Friday night for a bit.
This book by James K Galibraith sounds interesting.
People ain't that excited about the GOP convention this fall.
That book today and yesterday on The American Prospect.
It's happening tonight.
Capital District Alliance for Universal Healthcare, Inc. sponsoring 21st CD candidates' night.
Contact: Robert Propp, MD, chair, 518-482-0420
Location: First Unitarian Universalist Society, Emerson Hall, 405 Washington Avenue, Albany.
Note: Parking across the street in the SUNY lot. 2-3 minute opening followed by q & a led by a moderator, followed by questions from the audience.
I'm going.
The website opposed to property tax cap.
This YouTube is great.
His latest attack is on health care.
All of his signatures where thrown out by the County Court.
The swift boaters are back.
Fred LeBrun is upset that the state didn't give the city a big enough welfare check.
They say it will raise property taxes.
Glad to see we are taking such good care of the mentally ill or not.
Rent control politics in NYC.
He says they don't serve a public purpose or lack sufficent information to ensure they serve a public function.
That's an idear floated by some.
They are banning fast food resturants from poor neighborhoods:
A NEW weapon in the battle against obesity was rolled out last month when the Los Angeles City Council decided to stop new fast food restaurants from opening in some of the city’s poorest neighborhoods.
Skip to next paragraph
David McNew/Getty ImagesEven in a country where a third of the schoolchildren are overweight or obese, the yearlong moratorium raises questions about when eating one style of food stops being a personal choice and becomes a public health concern.
The Sisyphean struggle against poor diets has included booting soda from schools, banning trans fat and, more recently, sending New Yorkers into dietary sticker shock with a law that requires calorie counts be posted on menus, right next to the prices.
But this appears to be the first time a government has prohibited a specific style of restaurant for health, rather than aesthetic, reasons.
Great.
On 21st Congressional district healthcare debate that I attended last night. If he hadn't asked I probably would not have even thought much about blogging about it. And so here it goes.
I think we all agree that having health care is important, particularly after a catastrophic illness or terrible accident. You drop an ax on your foot, you want to be able to go to the doctor and not bleed to death or get gang green over what should not be a life threatening mistake. Many of us will admit that part of our job choice has to do with health insurance, and that the need for this expensive insurance leaves us stuck working for big corporations or the state.
The forum was about H.R. 631 that basically would remove the age restriction from Medicare and provide similar services to all minus the co-payments and with a higher payroll tax. People could buy additional insurance on top of “Medicare for All” but almost anything you'd want theoretically would be covered by H.R. 631. And all the children would small and be happy with the program.
Not surprisingly, all of the liberal Democrats (Steck, Tonko, and Brooks) smiled and said, sure we'd love to support H.R. 631. Steck said he'd fight for it – as a junior congressman within the body of 434 other members. I love his idealism and his fresh view of politics. Tonko argued for more pragmatic steps, certainly too pragmatic to keep an audience happy who wants their members to be talking about bold liberal moves that have no chance of happening. He seemed like a tired old politician, abit a great liberal from another era.
The conservatives (Sullivan and Valaquez) attacked H.R. 631 as being creeping socialism, depriving money from the military, and generally unaffordable when so much of government depends on borrowed money. No surprises there, although Joe Sullivan rants about abortion and the need to spend more money on defense seemed a bit off topic.
I doubt that any of the Democratic congressional candidates (all three liberals) would vote much different on the issue of health care. Health care is not that much of an issue of passion for me, but I do respect Phil Steck's idealism, and I think it's important we discuss this issue – as I'm sure once again the health care question will become an important one should I get sick or change jobs.
The city is planning to record license plates of all going into mid-town Manhattan to keep track of people.
Not sure at all where I stand on this one.
Not all of us pay taxes:
Two-thirds of U.S. corporations paid no federal income taxes between 1998 and 2005, according to a new report from Congress.
The study by the Government Accountability Office, expected to be released Tuesday, said about 68 percent of foreign companies doing business in the U.S. avoided corporate taxes over the same period.
Collectively, the companies reported trillions of dollars in sales, according to GAO's estimate.
...
Okay, maybe not so good. People must be really desperate to borrow money like this. The idea of paying $18.98 to borrow $100 for a week is scary, and paying $46.28 to borrow $100 for a month is even worst. Yet, poor people have to get money often at such usury rates.
It appears that a group of retards from the NYS Association for Retarded Children (NYS ARC) are upset about a new comedy movie called Tropic of Thunder for calling a person retarded. The movie sounds pretty crude for sure—but it's a comedy. So be it.
I don't understand why people have such a problem with words. Piss, fuck, cunt, ass, shit, piss, bullshit—and let's add to that list. Let's throw piss-ant into the list too. They are words, and once your ego is no longer offended, we kids can grow up and realize they have no impact on anything.
It's actually good to be desensitizing the population. That makes the words less offensive. Read the previous paragraph a few dozen times, and you'll start to feel better.
We need a vigorous debate of the issues of the day. Sometimes name calling is just plain fun. And it's not like the word retard is that taboo—at least until the political correctness people get to it. People get services from the NYS Office of Mental Hygiene and Mental Retardation, and the Association of Retarded Children, and those agencies still retain their names. So be it.
In today's Daily News, Governor David Paterson has an editorial discussing why New York needs to change it's culture of big government and spending, and become a lean and mean state. He says we need to do it before things get really bad, and we need to cut even more.
New York is running out of time to address its budget crisis, but in the coming days we have a real opportunity to fundamentally change the way our state government responds to financial challenges.
Like many other states, New York is in danger of seeing its credit downgraded by rating agencies, and its deficit balloon to nearly $7 billion or more - a point where we will have no option other than massive layoffs and reductions in services like those now being imposed in states like California. But these problems will be manageable if, rather than delaying our response, we take action now.
All too often, government fails to deal with this kind of challenge. It's always easier to wait and to hope that revenues will increase in the short term, or that we can solve our problems by adding new taxes or borrowing additional funds. That's exactly what happened in many past fiscal crises, and today we are saddled with debt that depletes the hard-earned tax dollars the people of the state entrust to government.
It's a full court press before the special session on Tuesday. Not that anything really will happen in an election year, but it's great to see the governor telling the world how he views things.
While he is prevented from lobbying the legislature for two years, he can lobby the executive branch. He claims he just doing it as a precaution to ensure nobody suggests that he is violating state lobby law with any statements or actions he might take.
Dan Cantor on the The Albany Project argues that the problem is not property taxes, but all of the levels of government we have and the fact that property taxes are the only type of taxes that local governments can levy without legislative approval.
No, actually the problem is that we provide the Cadillac-style of government. One with a V-8 engine, 4-wheel drive, power windows, air conditioning, and can tow that 8,500 lb yacht without straining. We believe in Pre-K education, providing services and meaningful work to the mentally disabled, ensuring the elderly get the services they deserve, and good quality roads.
You have every right to move to another state, if you don't think government should be providing these services. Don't expect that your disabled child will be getting special services in Utah, or that the roads will be as smooth there. Some people don't like all those accessories, and they can choose to live in a more bare bones, conservative state. Otherwise, enjoy spending lots of money in taxes.
Despite China having 1/4 of the world's population, issues of poverty and poor planning by the Chinese government, have left the games very poorly attended with empty seats visible to the casual observer of Olympics on the media.
The idea is prevent courts from trying to reveal the identity of anonymous bloggers or their sources, much like media in New York State is protected from having to reveal their anonymous sources in many cases of whistle blowing.
Albany plans to fix up some of it's public housing projects with new facades and better amenities.
That's what the Times Union argues for in this morning's paper. They feel if recipients don't use their money fast enough, they should give it back to balance the general fund.
The state claims that New York City is failing to use the state voter database to ensure that voter registrations are accurate.
Bartle Breese Bull, the foreign editor of Prospect magazine, argues that probably are spending too much money in Afghanistan now that the American interest is lacking in that country, years after the terror attacks and Taliban was wiped out.
NYSUT and the teachers union are less then happy that many state senators voted for a tax cap, which they feel would limit education spending, by allowing voters the power to defeat an school budget with excessive growth.
Yesterday, Aileen Gunther's bill was signed by the governor, ending the common practice that put both patient safety at risk and forced nurses out of the business. The bill is A.11711 / S.8637 for those wanting to read it.
Those are some the best compensated employees on the state payroll. That said, many of them are highly paid doctors and researchers that bring millions of value into the state.
Between now and labor day, they will be having increased patrols to stop drunk drivers. The idea is to prevent the death by people driving under the influence.
That's what The Journal News reports about her tour to promote this relief through tax credit to help people pay their big tax bills.
Galef and a handful of anti-tax advocates visited homeowners in Ossining and Garrison yesterday to promote the "circuit-breaker" property-tax relief bill that could save several thousand dollars for middle-income homeowners in Westchester and Putnam counties. Legislators in Albany will be looking at a number of tax bills on Tuesday, and Galef said the "circuit breaker" proposal was the most effective in the bunch.
AdvertisementThe bill would give tax credits to homeowners in the Hudson Valley, New York City and Long Island once they hit a certain threshold - paying more than 6 percent of their income in property taxes for a household earning $120,000 or less. For such a household, a tax credit of 70 percent of the average above the 6 percent would be applied. A similar formula is modified for households earning up to $250,000.
Galef said New York and New Jersey residents pay the highest taxes in the country, and Westchester, Rockland and Putnam property owners bear the highest tax burdens in the state.
"This is a major problem, and we need to correct it," Galef said on the front lawn of an Ossining homeowner, "We don't want to be on top of the charts. I'm trying to encourage my colleagues in Albany to get behind this bill and get it moved. ... This will help the taxpayers who need the help the most."
It would be great if they passed this relief.
His pursuit of the tax cap has made him friends with conservatives, alienated unions and education groups, and totally changed the balance of power in interesting ways. This is certainly a story to watch to see how it plays out.
They will continue to provide rescue helicopter services across the region, over the initial objections of Colonie Supervisor Paul Manhan. A more detailed evaluation decided the service was beneficial to continue participating in.
They are opposed to seeing the state tax people who are illegally going on reservations to buy cigarettes without tax. Hopefully, this time the governor will get the Indians to pay up, and not illegally compete with legal vendors of cigarettes and gasoline.
Soundpolitic finally got up his article about Tuesday's debate by the people running for the NY 21 Congressional seat up on the Albany Project blog. I didn't get much out of the debate, see my previous notes.
