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My favorite NYTimes story of the week was the piece in yesterday’s paper about adding a tax on “bad” food. Soda pop, french fries, chips, “bad” food gets an excise tax and that will make poor people buy brocoli instead.
It was classic Times. “Better living through new taxes”.
taxes in NYC are highest in the USA. And yet we are the city that is perpetually broke, that cannot even build a little waterfront park without additional income from new real estate development to “maintain” it.
I don;t know anything about medicaid but I know that highway repair jobs that could be done in a couple of weeks in any other civilized city take months and even years in NYC. Have you driven up the Harlem River Drive lately? Unbelievable conditions due to the rebuilding of a minor bridge to the Bronx which is now going on its fifth year. How about the BQE and Gowanus Expressway? These are not roads to be proud of in the supposed financial capital of the world.
And then there is the MTA. Hopeless, the head of that agency was so right to get the heck out and get triple the salary in Hong Kong – a rich city, rather than staying and seeing the complete collapse and default of the NYC transit system in what has become the city where there is never any money for anything.
I will stop now. It is time for lunch and thinking about life-affirming things.
I have to agree with benson about the enormous fraud and corruption in NYS.
And then there is the waste! It’s depressing to even think too much about it.
Dave, train accidents can happen anywhere. At least they built a fast-speed train.
I have heard that “relax it will get done” line before, usually preceding some catastrophe.
My bigger issue is why bother having a debt ceiling if when you reach it you vote to increase it? Doesn’t that seem a little counter-productive?
Dave, I truly believe that what we are seeing in DC is a for-real meltdown. I hope you are right that all will be resolved at the eleventh hour, but I thought that was yesterday at 4:00.
Dave the carmegeddon thing was amazing! that is how things should get done in a first-world city.
In NYC we have been having carmegeddon on the Gowanus for the last twenty years.
there we agree.
the idea of a debt ceiling should be to try to avoid reaching it. i have some ideas: do we really need two wars? can’t we make do with one?
And do we really need so many people in Congress? How about cutting the number of representatives in half?