Joe and Jane Sixpack get all of $13 a week in tax cuts from the Democratic stimulus bill that President Obama will sign tomorrow.
Can’t stimulate much with that.
But the folks who pull the strings in Albany and City Hall – and the unions that pull their strings – get billions.
Can’t stimulate much with that, either.
The stimulus is to send $21 billion for New York’s state and local governments. As a quick fix for the city and state’s respective $4 billion and $14 billion deficits, that should help do the trick.
For this year.
But it essentially just stabilizes the status quo – a decidedly unstimulating state of affairs.
And it leaves New York’s entirely unaffordable public-employee bureaucracy mostly untouched as next year’s deficits approach – with no further “stimulus” bailouts likely.
For the time being, then, the union fat cats will be getting even fatter.
Take school spending. The stimulus directs fully $4.5 billion in extra education money to New York – presumably to offset “devastating” cuts in school aid.
Yet Gov. Paterson’s proposed 2009-10 budget only trims school aid by $698 million – to a sum that’s still 42 percent higher than it was just five years ago.
The chief beneficiaries?
Teachers’ unions.
New York City teachers do well. Salaries top out at more than $100,000 a year – not including generous retirement and health benefits equaling some 40 percent of annual pay.
That would be sweet for 50 weeks of work a year. Yet city teachers put in just 37, which is reflected in reading scores. Moreover, there is one teacher for every 13 pupils in the New York City public-school system – to say nothing of legions of teachers’ aides in the classrooms. No wonder the schools are a cash sinkhole.
But it’s not just teachers.
Bloat abounds:
* State employees, whose average wages-plus-benefits income is set to rise to $92,000 next year, get 12 holidays plus five personal days and up to 15 sick days a year – and four weeks’ vacation after only eight years on the payroll.
That averages to one day off a week, also pretty sweet.
* Most city employees, meanwhile, put in an anemic 35 hours a week.
* And, as the Independent Budget Office reports, the city even underwrites pensions for employees of private cultural institutions and day-care centers.
The list could go on and on and on.
The point is that all of this spending is unsustainable – yet the sudden appearance of federal cash serves only to silence any calls for structural reform.
To recap:
* The cash won’t be there forever.
Lest it be forgotten, Washington is borrowing at levels not seen since World War II to finance the stimulus, and that’s unsustainable.
* New York’s budget deficits almost certainly will endure.
New Yorkers already bear the heaviest combined state and local tax burdens in the nation – and union cats’ paws in Albany are hard at work right now to make the load even heavier.
But, hey, Joe and Jane get 13 bucks.
Maybe they can take in a really stimulating movie or something.