Bankrupt State?
December 23rd, 2008
Mayor Bloomberg likes to say we’re not about to return to the days of the 1970s fiscal crisis, but writing in The Daily Beast, John Avlon is not so sure. A dire fiscal crisis looms, he thinks, only this time it’s the state — not the city — that could go belly up.
Nothing that the state’s deficit has doubled to $15 billion since August, Avlon, a former aide to Rudolph Giuliani who also worked on the 1996 Clinton campaign, credits Gov. David Paterson for “trying to walk the fiscally responsible talk…, but government budgets have become a beast that is almost impossible to tame.”
The reason for the bleak picture: New York’s dependence on Wall Street. “Investment banks that have been the engine of the city’s tax revenue for decades have disappeared entirely or morphed into restricted new entities,” Avlon writes. “We’re not facing a cyclical downturn; we’re facing a fundamental alteration of the facts of financial life in New York.”
Looking for solace? According to Avlon, things in California are even worse.
By Gail Robinson on December 23, 2008, 11:39 amIn category: Albany, Economy, Public Finance | 2 Comments »


December 23rd, 2008 at 3:25 pm
In a bankruptcy, all parties have to share in the losses according to a set of rules.
In New York State, however, vested interests get to keep unaffordable deals that younger generations will never see. Services collapse, taxes soar, and bag ladies die in the street, but debts and pensions get paid.
Bankruptcy, or something like it, would be preferable. Generation greed has sold our future three times over, and includes just about everyone holding an “elected” position in Albany.
December 27th, 2008 at 2:19 pm
The rule of law, the thing that distinguishes a republic from a dictatorship, requires that contracts be honored and constitutions be observed. My family and I have not benefited in any way from the bubble of the last decade: indeed, we’ve been forced to move twice at great inconvenience and expense because our landlords sold our homes to profit from soaring real estate prices. That’s the law. That’s the way it is. And I accepted that.
I am also a career civil servant who has worked hard for over thirty years at a succession of increasingly boring jobs. I’ve stuck it out because I was promised that I could retire at fifty-five with a pension and benefits and, with that support, start a new career elsewhere. I contributed extra money to the pension system so that I could do that.
That pension and those benefits are guaranteed to me by the State Constitution. And I insist that the law which has been so often enforced against my wishes and interests in defense of another’s superior property right now be enforced in defense of my property rights, earned over more than three decades. That’s the law. That’s the way it is.