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.
Maybe there is still a bit of Jefferson’s influence hanging around.
From a new Washington Post-ABC News Poll. When asked, “Generally speaking, would you say you favor smaller government with fewer services, or larger government with more services?” 53 percent of respondents picked smaller government, to 43 percent who picked larger.
Came across this article from 2003. It’s a reprint of a piece by Kevin Hasset that was originally published in the October/November 2003 issue of The American Enterprise magazine.
Hassett compares the fiscal health of states that voted for Bush to that of states whose voters when for Gore.
Ha ha ha.
Though the total population of Bush and Gore states are almost identical, the states that voted Democratic account for fully 70% of today’s state deficits; Republican states ring up only 30% of the total. And of 10 ten states with the largest per capita budget deficits (see nearby table), every single one voted Democratic in the last presidential election.
But wait, there’s more!
. . . in the top 10 deficit states (again: all Democratic) tax revenues increased at the dramatic rate of about 5% a year over the last decade.
And more!
. . . the average tax revenue per person in today’s sickest ten states was $2,445 in the last data available–compared to only $1,923 per person in the 10 healthiest states. This blasts out of the water the idea that states get sick because they have been starved of revenue; indeed it shows the opposite.
Hassett doesn’t pick on Democrats alone, mind you. He reserves some sharp words for President Bush, who, he notes
increased spending on just about everything. Three of the five biggest increases in federal spending in U.S. history occurred during Mr. Bush’s first three years in office (the other two took place during World War II).
Something that makes me positively sick to my stomach, btw.
Because those of us who understand that government spending is a hugely, hugely inefficient way to take care of people have no party that even approximates our views. We’re forced to hold our noses and consort with fringey groups that attract only marginal political talent. Ugh.
My only hope is that people will finally wake up and look at the data. It’s right there, if you just look. Increasing taxes should NEVER be the first line solution. We have to tighten our belts. We have to stop running deficits. We have to truly cut the size of government.
Until we can show the maturity and discipline to do those things, our situation is only going to get worse. It might take a generation or two, but we will impoverish ourselves.
No, that isn’t a joke. That’s a New York Times article. Click it and read for yourself.
THE received wisdom about economic life in the Nordic countries is easily summed up: people here are incomparably affluent, with all their needs met by an efficient welfare state. They believe it themselves. Yet the reality – as this Oslo-dwelling American can attest, and as some recent studies confirm – is not quite what it appears.
Even as the Scandinavian establishment peddles this dubious line, it serves up a picture of the United States as a nation divided, inequitably, among robber barons and wage slaves, not to mention armies of the homeless and unemployed. It does this to keep people believing that their social welfare system, financed by lofty income taxes, provides far more in the way of economic protections and amenities than the American system. Protections, yes -but some Norwegians might question the part about amenities.
In Oslo, library collections are woefully outdated, and public swimming pools are in desperate need of maintenance. News reports describe serious shortages of police officers and school supplies. When my mother-in-law went to an emergency room recently, the hospital was out of cough medicine. Drug addicts crowd downtown Oslo streets, as The Los Angeles Times recently reported, but applicants for methadone programs are put on a months-long waiting list.
More:
After I moved here six years ago, I quickly noticed that Norwegians live more frugally than Americans do. They hang on to old appliances and furniture that we would throw out. And they drive around in wrecks . . .
One image in particular sticks in my mind. In a Norwegian language class, my teacher illustrated the meaning of the word matpakke – “packed lunch” – by reaching into her backpack and pulling out a hero sandwich wrapped in wax paper. It was her lunch. She held it up for all to see.
Yes, teachers are underpaid everywhere. But in Norway the matpakke is ubiquitous, from classroom to boardroom. In New York, an office worker might pop out at lunchtime to a deli; in Paris, she might enjoy quiche and a glass of wine at a brasserie. In Norway, she will sit at her desk with a sandwich from home.
So those of you who want our country to abandon our Constitution and go socialist, there’s your template.
Celebrate politicians who call for tax increases.
Call at the top of your lungs for more government “services.”
Beg for more government intervention into businesses and our private lives.
And, if things go really really well, we might one day be as well-off as Norway.
Just to prove I don’t pick on Dems just because they’re Dems.
I’m an non-partisan critic of corruption, hooray!
Vid below a Republican talking. Michigan Rep. Joe Knollenberg.
Subject: auto bailout.
Revealing moment: at 30 seconds in, when Knollenberg objects to Cavuto presuming to call the bailout funding “our” money.
Cavuto: “Where do you draw the line with OUR money?”
Knollenberg: “It is not your money.”
This is what happens, folks, when you build out and fund huge centralized governments. They don’t see themselves as stewards. They don’t see themselves as entrusted with the care of precious and finite resources that belong to the citizens of our country.
They see themselves as elites with a blank check backed by Magic Dollars that they can replenish any time they want by just, ya know, letting the Bush tax cut lapse.
“[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?
Federal power grabs -- many by regulatory agencies that don't answer to voters, others by politicians who are too stupid or corrupt to care about the long term implications of their policy decisions -- are driving up our taxes and eroding our personal liberties.