I read Mr. George Marlin’s comments on taxation. It’s the usual litany of tired complaints. Look: Let’s get something straight from the beginning… no well-off area of the planet is inexpensive to live in. Tokyo, Paris, London, Los Angeles, San Francisco or any major business or job-creating hub can ever be cheap. So, let’s factor this in if we want to have a realistic discussion.
Instead, let’s look to the specific reasons for Nassau’s and New York State’s situation, and stop with the “tax and spend” clichés.
Factor One: Nassau (as does the state) doesn’t get competitive until it changes the way it remunerates its civil service. Nassau could have had that chance. Instead, we got NIFA fobbed on us, of which Mr. Marlin was a long-standing member. So, while NIFA busied itself poring over savings from the elimination of the mounted police ($585,000) that isn’t going to move the needle in a multi-billion dollar budget.
In fact, NIFA was always a grand farce. It gave the illusion of oversight while doing nothing to end the county’s “structured to fail” path. What the county should have done was file for a Chapter 9 bankruptcy, and thus legally allow shredding every union contract, and starting all over with a plausible set of salary and benefits that reflect our actual capacity to pay it.
Mr. Marlin’s piece oddly missed the issue of school taxes. Some people on Long Island pay more to their school district than they pay to the federal government or the state, and not one district has so much as one aircraft carrier.
Of course, if Mr. Marlin would like to advocate that the teachers and superintendents pay the costs of their own health insurance and pensions, we would be far more competitive overnight. With just that one change.
Anybody?
Factor Two: On the state level, there’s a quick and dirty method to save billions at a stroke. Simply move to a unicameral legislature and ditch the massive headcount and duplication the current system allows. Of course, given the way Albany actually works, we could abolish both the Senate and the Assembly, since they never deliberate on legislation, they rubber-stamp it. The new Senate session is already well on its way to 95 percent of its “legislation” being unanimously carried, just as it was last year.
Does this stuff really require elected representatives?
Passed 58-0: Relates to allowing restaurant-brewers to sell limited quantities of their product without the use of a wholesaler.
Passed 45-16: Relates to providing language translation services to accommodate census self-reporting
Passed 42-19: Relates to allowing all state, higher learning, Indian and public institution libraries to be open to the public for providing census-related services.
Adopted J.2689, mourning the tragic death of basketball icon, five-time NBA Champion, 18-time NBA All-Star, and two-time Olympic gold medalist Kobe Bryant.
As far as the decline of the rural areas of New York, this is a national trend and one that probably helped get Trump elected. In America, cities generate close to 75 percent of our GDP, and the layers of opportunity that once existed in these areas are gone forever.
It is no way specific to New York and Mr. McMahon’s mention of it is partisan hackery. No rural area has truly recovered from the crisis, and I presume he’s well informed enough to know that because even I’ve seen the data.
Lastly, Mr. Marlin can look to his own party for stabbing his state in the back by the curtailment of the salt deduction, a change brought about solely by the infantile vindictiveness of his party’s leader. For this year, at least, this was a bigger factor than the Archie Bunker tropes about “crime” at multi-decade lows, “regulation,” and “awful public schools” (Really? Not what I was told!).
If anyone is truly serious about getting our costs in line, they can look at the solutions I mentioned. Anything else is just whining.
Donald Davret
Roslyn
