Now Mario Cuomo is calling for a Constitutional Convention — of the New York State legislature.
And you thought I was some kinda crazy radical. Got some interesting company over hear at the crazy radical table, I’m telling ya!
Here’s the thing. When the crooks have taken over all the good real estate on the Monopoly board, sometimes the only rational response is to grab the nearest edge & tip the whole thing over :-)
Especially when dumping the board is sanctioned in the rules. A totally legal temper tantrum :-)
Nobody really knows, as is once again made abundantly clear, this time in the aftermath of Joe Bruno’s ethics indictment. Here’s James Odato, writing in the Albany Times-Union:
Dollar amounts on state financial disclosure forms, which are not published on the Internet, exist as only broad ranges of value — and even those vague range values are withheld from the public. Descriptions of income or gift sources are allowed to be similarly opaque.
Public officials in New York are not required to disclose conflicts of interest. Such conflicts, when they are discovered, are actionable only if ethics officials, who operate in secrecy, deem them to be “significant.” And state prosecutors cannot bring criminal charges under the state’s ethics laws without a referral from an ethics panel, which consists of members appointed by the very politicians they regulate.
Even if prosecutors clear those hurdles and bring charges, a violation of the ethics law is only a misdemeanor, not a felony.
We pay the highest taxes in the country. Our revenue per capita ratio is one of the highest in the country. Yet Albany is out of money, and is preparing to tax us even more.
How can this happen? Because the Empire State has been hijacked by thugs.
“There is no watchdog,” said Blair Horner, legislative director for the New York Pubic Research Interest Group. “You’ve had an astonishingly long list of lawmakers getting into trouble. We haven’t reached the tipping point yet.”
Horner said it isn’t surprising Bruno didn’t take ethics oversight seriously: The ethics panel, chosen by him and Assembly Speaker Sheldon Silver, has never charged any lawmakers with wrongdoing.
Of course it hasn’t.
Good on Gov. Paterson. NY State is facing a $2 billion budget shortfall, but so far, he’s resisting calls to raise our taxes. Even on the evil rich.
“[T]he higher we tax even the wealthy, the more we lose population and the less job creation there is,” Gov. Paterson said in an interview Friday. “We’re pretty resigned to the fact that we’re going to have to do this with spending cuts.”
We’re already losing population, of course. Especially here in Upstate New York, where the economy-killing tax structure (we have the highest taxes of any state in the country) is even harder to shoulder because there’s less wealth here to start with — which precipitates a downward spiral, as those of us who haven’t left yet must shoulder larger and larger shares of the tax burden.
In a press conference Wednesday, the New York State Association of Counties presented county population estimates from the U.S. Census Bureau for the period of April 1, 2000, through July 1, 2007. Culled from examinations of local birth and death rates, as well as migration within the state, and international migration, these estimates paint a bleak picture for much of upstate.
“Of the 33 counties that lost population since the last census, 32 are upstate,” said Jeffrey Osinski, NYSAC’s director of research and education. He added that only three of New York’s counties grew at a rate exceeding the national population growth rate of 7.2 percent.
As a whole, New York had a population growth rate of 1.7 percent, ranking the state 43rd in the nation, he said. Five counties, all of which are upstate, grew less than 1.7 percent since 2000, Mr. Osinski said. Thus, 38 counties either lost population or grew at less than the state’s overall 1.7 percent rate.
“State and county leaders are concerned about our flat growth,” said Stephen J. Acquario, NYSAC’s executive director. “The fact that 38 of our counties either lost population or have grown at less than the state rate … is a troubling trend. If it continues, we will have fewer taxpayers to pay for an increasing number of services at a time when our property taxes are already too high.”
Exactly. And of course, the people who leave first are the ones who can afford to — young people, educated people, people who may already own a second home somewhere else, people whose earning power is on the way up. The sort of people who make a region prosperous if they decide to call it home.
But here’s the punch line. From the WSJ article I linked in my first paragraph (published in yesterday’s print edition):
New York’s governor blames the state’s current shortfall, in part, on its failure to better manage revenue during the years of soaring Wall Street profits. “What’s actually more embarrassing than the fact that we have such a huge deficit now, when bonuses are down and capital gains are down, is the fact that when there was…wealth, we overspent,” says Gov. Paterson.
Yeah. I’ll say it’s “embarrassing.”
That’s what happens when “we” are spending other peoples’ money though, isn’t it, guvnor.
You got it, New Yorkers: a bloated, paraciticistic bureaucracy that taxes us rapaciously one day, then gives a bit back (aka pork projects, STAR rebates) the next with a nice wet “see all we do for you?” kissy kiss.
Apparently it works for most of us most of the time. But what about now, when the economy is stumbling?
We’ll soon find out: as the WS Journal reported a few days ago, New York is one of many states facing a huge tax shortfall.
A spokesperson for Paterson is out there softening us up with the words “fiscal crisis.”
The Albany Times-Union piece lists some possible solutions. Guess what they cite at #1? Raise taxes, of course.
Once you’ve fed it and fed it and fed it, you can’t cut it off — it won’t let you.
Good thing the government’s in charge of keeping us happy and healthy and entertained! Such a deal, such a deal!