Thursday, January 24, 2013
Our priorities are not Obama's priorities
Unfortunately, all 4 of Obama's 2nd Inaugural priorities of (climate change, immigration reform, gun control & gay marriage) do not touch on the 2 top priorities for everyday working people and their children. Obama seems to ignore the 2 priorities of 1) "lessening the crippling $16 Trillion debt that we are leaving our children and grandchildren" 2) improving the economy and job opportunities.
Sunday, January 13, 2013
Cuomo Silent on Repeal of Triborough
In his State of the State speech, Andrew Cuomo failed to mention the most important NY State government reform available to help failing school budgets and town, county and city budgets. REPEAL OF THE TRIBOROUGH AMENDMENT. If we repeal the Triborough Amendment, teacher and municipal unions would no longer be able to collect automatic step raises after their contracts expire. In other words, these unions would be more likely to negotiate new contracts quicker if they know that step raises and other clauses of their old contracts were no longer in effect.
This repeal of the Triborough Amendment would save NY State tax payers millions of dollars. Some of these dollars could be used to keep schools open and children better educated. No other state in the USA has anything like the Triborough Amendment. This amendment contributes to the fact that NY State is last or close to last in Economic Growth.
I wonder why Governor Cuomo avoids this reform which a majority of New Yorkers support? The answer - Cuomo is in the tank for teacher and municipal unions. Also, it is now very obvious that the NY State press and media are in the tank for Cuomo, because our journalists hardly mention or editorialize about Cuomo's avoidance of the Repeal of the Triborough Amendment.
This repeal of the Triborough Amendment would save NY State tax payers millions of dollars. Some of these dollars could be used to keep schools open and children better educated. No other state in the USA has anything like the Triborough Amendment. This amendment contributes to the fact that NY State is last or close to last in Economic Growth.
I wonder why Governor Cuomo avoids this reform which a majority of New Yorkers support? The answer - Cuomo is in the tank for teacher and municipal unions. Also, it is now very obvious that the NY State press and media are in the tank for Cuomo, because our journalists hardly mention or editorialize about Cuomo's avoidance of the Repeal of the Triborough Amendment.
Thursday, January 3, 2013
NY School Commission is Clueless
The commission's proposal is a joke, right? They are proposing more failure for our public schools. Do you know that only 3 states require Masters Degrees of their public school teachers (NY, Mass., and Ohio)? The other 47 states equal or out-perform these states. Advanced degrees hurt the teaching profession. We don't need scholars to teacher our children. We need down-to-earth passionate people who love to communicate with children. Scholars often are not good at communicating with children. Scholars often want more money for academic competence, whereas bachelor level teachers are more likely to love the art and results of teaching at a down-to-earth level. As far as year-round school, this proposal is dead on arrival due to lack of funding. Ask former governor Mario Cuomo. The liberal public school elites have definitely run out of solutions for our failing public schools. Let's try more charter schools and parent school choice via vouchers to allow parents to spend the vouchers to send their children to any public, private or parochial school that they deem best for their children.
Saturday, December 8, 2012
Monopolies don't do well in any kind of business or educaton.
Public Education as we have now in the USA is a monopoly. Monopolies don't do well in any kind of business or educaton. Public Schools are like the old Ma-Bell AT and T telephone monopoly. Remember the clunky phones that AT and T sold us year after year. What happened when the telephone monopoly was abolished in favor of open telephone competition? We have a vibrant competitive advancing telephone business environment which is selling us the products that we want and enjoy, ie. Galaxy, Iphone, Ipad, Razr, etc. This is want we should want for our children........a vibrant competitive advancing education environment .........nothing less. I don't know about you, but holding back our children's education and paying exhorbitant taxes to pay inflated teacher union contracts has got to stop. We need competition through school vouchers in educating our young children, just like we have competition at the college level today via Pell Grants. It is the very same thing.
Friday, November 9, 2012
Kingston's Teachers are over-paid
A Bureau of Labor Statistics report (May 2011) for secondary teachers in the
United States lists Kingston as the 3rd top paying metropolitan area in the
nation for this occupation, with an annual mean wage of $74,970. The 2010 U.S.
Census lists the per capita money income in Kingston at $24,368 and the median
household income at $46,098, with both numbers lower than the New York State
average. Seriously, can this heavy-handed milking of the Kingston Taxpayer continue?
I don't think so. What is the Kingston School Board going to announce in the latest teacher's contract? Let's hear more protest from Kingston's Taxpayers.
I don't think so. What is the Kingston School Board going to announce in the latest teacher's contract? Let's hear more protest from Kingston's Taxpayers.
Tuesday, November 6, 2012
Morally Bankrupt Society
Morally Bankrupt is too polite! What is on TV is sexual perversion with no limits! Also, I believe the perverse TV content and public school health curriculums are designed by people who are purposely pushing this perversion for monetary gain and for spreading the liberal feel good message. For these reasons, our country should return to independent small schools (public, private and parochial) which emphasize reading, writing, arithmetic and morality. In this model, there could be schools setup by liberal parents who want their children to follow the liberal curriculum. However, in this model, these liberal small schools would be in the minority since few parents would choose them for their children. This last sentence is proof that the majority of children and their parents are being held hostage by the liberal public school system in America.
Monday, October 29, 2012
Cuomo Must Lead - Binding Arbitration, Triborough
E.J. McMahon of the Empire Center Think Tank has written the following Oct.29, 2012 NY Post Op Ed piece.
E.J. McMahon
By capping property taxes, Gov. Cuomo has tapped the brakes on local government and school spending outside New York City. He’s also taken steps to limit the growth in the local share of Medicaid over the next few years, and to curb public pension expenses further down the road.
But the governor hasn’t provided the kind of mandate relief local officials want and need most — more flexibility to control their still-spiraling employee-compensation costs.
New York’s second-largest county, Nassau, is already a state-certified basket case, and several others might not far behind. Buffalo is just emerging from a state fiscal-control period, while the next three largest cities — Yonkers, Rochester and Syracuse — face big and growing problems of their own.
AP
It’s not that easy: Cuomo wants local governments to balance their budgets — but will he address the state laws that drive up local costs?
Asked about such problems, the governor last week pointed to his own success in closing the state’s $10 billion budget gap in his first year. "It’s very hard to do, I know it," he said. "But we did it . . . and the local governments have to do it, because raising local property taxes is not an option."
Yes, both the state and its local governments had raised spending to unsustainable levels before the financial crisis and recession hit in 2008. But there are some significant differences between the challenges Cuomo confronted and the budget gaps now facing counties, municipalities and school districts.
While two-thirds of the state budget consists of local aid, an even larger share of the typical municipal or school budget is spent directly on salaries and benefits — for teachers, cops, firefighters, sanitation workers and other employees who deliver basic services directly to the public.
Once they trim away the fat accumulated in flush economic times, local officials caught in a budget pinch ultimately face two choices: Cut services by laying off workers, or reduce the growth in salaries and benefits — which requires bargaining with entrenched public employee unions.
And there’s the rub: The collective-bargaining rules are set by Albany, mainly in the state Taylor Law, which tilts the bargaining table toward unions in at least two key respects.
The first problem for the locals is the Triborough amendment, which requires employers to continue giving "step" raises even after a contract has expired.
At this point, localities desperately need to break completely with the outmoded automatic pay-hike model, but that’d be nearly impossible without repeal of Triborough.
Another Taylor Law provision gives police and fire unions the right to seek compulsory binding arbitration of contract impasses. Enacted as a supposedly temporary experiment in the early 1970s, and renewed ever since, binding arbitration has been a bonanza for unions, driving average police pay well over $100,000 — plus lavish benefit packages — in many downstate departments.
Cuomo has dismissed Triborough reform as a "political nonstarter," since it requires changes to a permanent law— but he can’t dodge the arbitration issue, since that provision is due to expire in the middle of next year.
A straight extender of the law is virtually certain to end up on his desk within the next eight months. Will he bold enough to say no?
If he is, recent history suggests he can make it stick. The renewal of "temporary" laws benefitting unions was long treated as routine in Albany — until Gov. David Paterson broke with the pattern in 2009, refusing to rubber-stamp a continuation of the then-default pension plan for New York City police officers. The Legislature never tried to override Paterson’s veto, and the city can now look forward to significant pensions savings as a result.
Mulling his options on arbitration, Cuomo might also look to New Jersey, which has a similar law (and similarly high police and firefighter pay levels). In 2010, Republican Gov. Chris Christie and Democratic majorities in his Legislature followed up on their own 2 percent property-tax cap by enacting arbitration reforms, including a 2 percent cap on arbitration pay awards. It’s far from perfect — but New York’s local officials would probably welcome it as better than nothing.
So far, Cuomo hasn’t said what he’ll do about arbitration, although he’ll no doubt keep pointing to his own example. "I had to go back and balance my budget myself . . . that’s called life," he said last week.
But as New York’s chief executive, Cuomo also has a responsibility to recognize when the state’s collective-bargaining laws are working against the public interest — and to do something about it. That’s called leadership.
E.J. McMahon is a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute’s Empire Center for New York State Policy.
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Empire Center for New York State Policy | PO Box 7113 | Albany | NY | 12224
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Andrew’s next test
Local governments need help
- By E.J. McMAHON
- Last Updated: 9:51 AM, October 29, 2012
- Posted: 10:37 PM, October 28, 2012
E.J. McMahon
By capping property taxes, Gov. Cuomo has tapped the brakes on local government and school spending outside New York City. He’s also taken steps to limit the growth in the local share of Medicaid over the next few years, and to curb public pension expenses further down the road.
But the governor hasn’t provided the kind of mandate relief local officials want and need most — more flexibility to control their still-spiraling employee-compensation costs.
New York’s second-largest county, Nassau, is already a state-certified basket case, and several others might not far behind. Buffalo is just emerging from a state fiscal-control period, while the next three largest cities — Yonkers, Rochester and Syracuse — face big and growing problems of their own.
AP
It’s not that easy: Cuomo wants local governments to balance their budgets — but will he address the state laws that drive up local costs?
Asked about such problems, the governor last week pointed to his own success in closing the state’s $10 billion budget gap in his first year. "It’s very hard to do, I know it," he said. "But we did it . . . and the local governments have to do it, because raising local property taxes is not an option."
Yes, both the state and its local governments had raised spending to unsustainable levels before the financial crisis and recession hit in 2008. But there are some significant differences between the challenges Cuomo confronted and the budget gaps now facing counties, municipalities and school districts.
While two-thirds of the state budget consists of local aid, an even larger share of the typical municipal or school budget is spent directly on salaries and benefits — for teachers, cops, firefighters, sanitation workers and other employees who deliver basic services directly to the public.
Once they trim away the fat accumulated in flush economic times, local officials caught in a budget pinch ultimately face two choices: Cut services by laying off workers, or reduce the growth in salaries and benefits — which requires bargaining with entrenched public employee unions.
And there’s the rub: The collective-bargaining rules are set by Albany, mainly in the state Taylor Law, which tilts the bargaining table toward unions in at least two key respects.
The first problem for the locals is the Triborough amendment, which requires employers to continue giving "step" raises even after a contract has expired.
At this point, localities desperately need to break completely with the outmoded automatic pay-hike model, but that’d be nearly impossible without repeal of Triborough.
Another Taylor Law provision gives police and fire unions the right to seek compulsory binding arbitration of contract impasses. Enacted as a supposedly temporary experiment in the early 1970s, and renewed ever since, binding arbitration has been a bonanza for unions, driving average police pay well over $100,000 — plus lavish benefit packages — in many downstate departments.
Cuomo has dismissed Triborough reform as a "political nonstarter," since it requires changes to a permanent law— but he can’t dodge the arbitration issue, since that provision is due to expire in the middle of next year.
A straight extender of the law is virtually certain to end up on his desk within the next eight months. Will he bold enough to say no?
If he is, recent history suggests he can make it stick. The renewal of "temporary" laws benefitting unions was long treated as routine in Albany — until Gov. David Paterson broke with the pattern in 2009, refusing to rubber-stamp a continuation of the then-default pension plan for New York City police officers. The Legislature never tried to override Paterson’s veto, and the city can now look forward to significant pensions savings as a result.
Mulling his options on arbitration, Cuomo might also look to New Jersey, which has a similar law (and similarly high police and firefighter pay levels). In 2010, Republican Gov. Chris Christie and Democratic majorities in his Legislature followed up on their own 2 percent property-tax cap by enacting arbitration reforms, including a 2 percent cap on arbitration pay awards. It’s far from perfect — but New York’s local officials would probably welcome it as better than nothing.
So far, Cuomo hasn’t said what he’ll do about arbitration, although he’ll no doubt keep pointing to his own example. "I had to go back and balance my budget myself . . . that’s called life," he said last week.
But as New York’s chief executive, Cuomo also has a responsibility to recognize when the state’s collective-bargaining laws are working against the public interest — and to do something about it. That’s called leadership.
E.J. McMahon is a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute’s Empire Center for New York State Policy.
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