This article I wrote appeared on the Newsmax.com web site on Thursday, June 29, 2023.
Archive for June 2023
Woke Winning Its War on the West – By George J. Marlin
June 30, 2023Strange But True – By George J. Marlin
June 27, 2023The following appeared on Monday, June 26, 2023, in the Blank Slate Media newspaper chain and on its website, theisland360.com:
Lately there have been strange happenings within New York’s body politic. Here’s a sampling:
Every three hours a person in New York City dies from drug overdose. There were over 2,600 such deaths in 2022 and over 1,300 so far this year.
What is the City Health and Mental Hygiene commissioner’s plan to address the crisis? In early June, Commissioner Ashwin Vasan unveiled a street vending machine that contains among other things “safe smoking” crack pipes and lip balm.
Items procured from the machine are free of charge. The city expects to include syringes in the future.
“The pretense,” the New York Post notes, “is that this will slow or stop the surge in overdose deaths, along with other grim side effects of drug addiction.”
Do you honestly believe free drug paraphernalia will combat drug abuse?
My guess: the free products will only further enable drug uses.
Speaking of drugs, the sales tax revenue the Hochul administration projected from the legal sale of marijuana is missing the mark by a mile.
According to a report commissioned the New York Medical Marijuana Operations, “the current state of the cannabis market in New York is an unmitigated disaster.”
The study concludes that “state cannabis laws are too restrictive for legal weed vendors while allowing an illegal market to flourish.”
While there are merely 15 legal dispensaries open at the present time, there are at least 1,400 illegal ones in New York City and hundreds more statewide that are not reporting sales taxes.
What’s being done to crack down on the illegal vendors? Very little. There is more talk in official circles than action.
Shoplifting in retail stores is out of control. Struggling shopkeepers have been forced to expend scarce capital to install plastic anti-theft cases.
I wasted 10 minutes the other day in a New Hyde Park drugstore waiting for a worker to unlock a shelf that contained the toothpaste I wished to purchase!
In New York City there were 13,798 reported retail thefts in the first quarter of this year.
Thieves locked up are slapped with non-bail-eligible misdemeanors if they stole less than $1,000 in merchandise.
The results of no-bail in 2022: 327 people were responsible for 30% of the 22,000 shoplifting arrests.
Nallely De Jesus, owner of Associated Supermarkets in the Bronx, has written, “But the sad truth is too many workers have been attacked, too many stores have been robbed, and too many customers have been placed in danger, which is why we need the state to step up with tougher penalties for recidivist shoplifters who attack retail workers.”
Will Albany legislators act on her plea? Don’t hold your breath.
Assembly speaker Carl Heastie, supports amending “Sammy’s Law” to drop New York City’s speed limit from 25 mph to 20 mph.
However, the speed restrictions are often violated by state legislators.
The Post recently reported, “Speeding appears to be a way of life for the lower chamber. City Records show at least 125 traffic violations, overwhelmingly for speeding, by vehicles with Assembly-affiliated license plates.”
Speaker Heastie’s car with a NYA-1 plate has been hit with speeding violations at least 11 times, the Post reported Monday.
My question: Were taxpayer dollars expended to pay the fines?
The self-righteous former mayor of New York, Bill de Blasio, who claimed he always “put the public interest first,” was slapped with the biggest fine ever leveled by the City’s Conflict-of-Interest Board.
De Blasio has to fork over $155,000 in penalties and another $320,000 in reimbursement charges for using New York police officers for personal reasons.
The 40-page report released by the board lists de Blasio’s many abuses.
For example, cops were ordered to move his daughter’s personal effects from a Brooklyn apartment to her new residence in Manhattan.
Police officers were used as chauffeurs for members of the de Blasio family.
On one occasion, cops picked up de Blasio’s brother at an airport and drove for two hours to drop off the sibling at a New Jersey address.
The Conflict Board concluded that de Blasio, time and again, ignored ethics guidelines and used police personnel during his ill-fated presidential campaign for political purposes.
De Blasio, as well as Speaker Heastie and his Democratic colleagues, apparently subscribe to the adage “rules for thee but not for me.”
I will report more strange but true political happenings in future columns. Stay tuned.
CUNY: Militancy, Beyond Left Ideology – By George J. Marlin
June 15, 2023This article I wrote appeared on the Newsmax.com web site on Thursday, June 15, 2023.
N.Y. Public Housing: Progressives Dream, Tenants Nightmare – By George J. Marlin
June 10, 2023This article I wrote appeared on the Newsmax.com web site on Monday, June 5, 2023.
Gov. Hochul’s Flawed Financial Plan – By George J. Marlin
June 9, 2023The following appeared on Monday, May 29, 2023, in the Blank Slate Media newspaper chain and on its website, theisland360.com:
With the ink barely dry on Gov. Kathy Hochul’s budgetary fiscal plan, newly released data reveals there are already flaws in her tax revenue assumptions.
A report made public by State Comptroller Tom DiNapoli in mid-May disclosed that tax receipts in April were $4 billion less than the governor’s budget division had projected.
Total personal income tax collections came in at $7.5 billion, not the expected $12 billion, while business taxes came in $300 million higher than anticipated—$1.5 billion vs. $1.2 billion.
“After the historic spike in tax receipts in April 2022 amid record-high capital gains” Ken Girardin of the Empire Center for Public Policy has written, “budget officials had expected PIT [personal income tax] receipts to fall by 17% from April 2022 to April 2023, but the actual drop appears to have been 49%.”
This means that budget deficits projected to be $5.1 billion in fiscal 2025 and $8.6 billion in fiscal 2026 are too low and will have to be significantly revised.
And growing operating deficits mean reserve funds will be consumed to balance the governor’s bloated, record-breaking $230 billion budget.
There are additional problems with the governor’s fiscal plan that have been identified in the “Enacted Budget Report” released by Comptroller DiNapoli on May 18.
While the amount deposited in the statutory rainy-day reserve funds has grown to $6.2 billion, those balances as a percentage of general fund spending are well under the national median.
DiNapoli quotes a Pew Charitable Trust analysis that determined New York’s statutory rainy-day reserves would fund the state for only 25.2 days, while the national median for the 50 states is 44.5 days.
Also, the bulk of the state’s additional reserves, which are projected to grow to $19.5 billion, are described as “informal reserves” as opposed to statutory ones, which “are governed by statutory requirements, including terms and conditions for withdrawals and mandatory repayment provisions.”
In other words, the “informal reserves” are legal slush funds that can be tapped into at any time by the governor to fund favored projects and programs.
Then there is in the budget the continued reliance on “backdoor borrowing” to pay for $21 billion in capital spending.
“Back door borrowing” evades voter approval at the ballot box. The debt is issued by public authorities, “further adding to the states already high debt burden and utilizing limited remaining capacity under the state’s debt caps.”
Total state-supported bonded debt authorizations will increase to an astounding $222 billion during the 2023–2024 fiscal year.
In recent years tens of billions of dollars spent on various vendor contracts were approved by the governor’s office without any oversight from the comptroller’s office whose job it is to “validate that a contract’s costs are reasonable and its terms are favorable to the state and … ensure a level playing field for vendors.”
Readers may recall that in 2022, Gov. Hochul gave a $650 million no-bid COVID home test contract to Digital Gadgets Incorporated, whose owners and family members had written checks to the Hochul campaign treasury totaling $330,000.
Although Gov. Hochul signed into law on December 30, 2022, legislation to restore Comptroller DiNapoli’s “independent oversight to review certain SUNY, CUNY and Office of Government Services contracts,” the budget continues to authorize state spending without protections, such as competitive bidding and state comptroller review and approval of contracts before they become effective.
Such unsupervised spending this year will be about $5 billion. This includes “a $4.2 billion Office for People with Developmental Disabilities appropriation”—whatever that is.
Finally, the comptroller notes that the governor’s budget “continues to include problematic provisions with respect to accounting standards that have the potential to distort the appearances of reported receipts, distributions, and liabilities; and obscure the picture of true spending growth.”
Gov. Hochul’s budget contains inaccurate tax revenue projections, borrowing abuses, accounting gimmicks, no bid contracts and lax oversight.
So much for Hochul’s promise that she would have the most transparent and straight-shooting administration in the state’s history.
streetcornerconservative.com 