Public Policy in New York City and State by Larry Littlefield
It has been a little more than 16 years since I loaded up my first post on Room Eight, a group blog, after being asked to do so by Ben Smith, then of the New York Observer, later of the Daily News, Politico, Buzzfeed, the New York Times, and now something else. At the time Tom Suozzi was running for Governor, [ ]
When it comes to state and local government in New York, the primary subject of this blog, it is now reasonable to be unreasonable. Because after decades of being reasonable and fair minded, willing to pay more in taxes and accept less in services while being supportive of the “heroes,” we find that we have been [ ]
The Supreme Court, while also having ruled that abortion is up to the states, nonetheless ruled that regulations for carrying firearms are not up the states. Someone other than a complete cynic might had expected a little more consistency one way or the other, though one might say the new inconsistency is a mirror image of [ ]
As everyone who has gotten their information from New York’s local media over the past 20 years is aware, the New York City schools and its unionized teachers owe the children of New York City nothing, because the schools are underfunded and understaffed, and teachers unsupported by the rest of us, leading to large class [ ]
Human beings are social animals. We didn’t come to dominate the planet by overcoming lions, tigers and bears on our own as individuals. We did it by working together, helping each other, learning from each other, sharing in groups large and small. We need each other, and our institutions from the smallest (the family) to the largest (the [ ]
Governments enact rules to force people to do and not do things, or force them to pay taxes and use the money to do things for them. You have the political power, the monopoly of legitimate violence, and the economic power, using incentives to made it harder to do one thing and easier to do another. That’s [ ]
What would I have spent my career doing if I had stayed at the New York City Department of City Planning, instead of leaving 21 years ago? Nothing good, based on what I know, and it’s a good thing I got out when I did. New York City is gradually becoming a giant co-op board, with different [ ]
Imagine it’s 10:30 am on a typical weekday during the school year. At that time New York City is paying 211,843 members of the NYC teachers’ retirement system (or was a couple of years ago). What are they doing? If you made a pie chart, what would it look like? How many are retired? (We know that, it was [ ]
Have you seen all those ads from candidates for Governor? I can’t seem to avoid them. You turn the channel and you run into another one. I’m here to tell you that if you are just a regular person living their life, what is said on the commercials doesn’t matter. What matters is: Who paid for them? What, during [ ]
A public chief executive has three jobs: policy, management, and leadership. With leadership being using one s influence as a public figure, in competition with celebrities and marketing influencers, to change what people voluntarily do on their own, rather than what the government forces them to do or does for them. For state and local government, the [ ]