I couldn’t help noticing while walking to my train this morning something I’ve noticed countless times before.

The sidewalks in front of owner-occupied homes in my town are, for the most part, neatly shoveled and salted, while those collectively occupied remain piled with snow.

This is hardly a groundbreaking observation. Individual responsibility and the inherent failure of collectivism lie at the heart of American conservative thought.

But it got me thinking again about the failed experiment from which the country is now  recovering.

There has been plenty of finger pointing over the collapse of the sub-prime mortgage market, but truth be told, there were a lot of voices on both sides of the aisle advocating for ubiquitous home ownership throughout the 80’s, 90’s, and 00’s. (Remember the Community Reinvestment Act and low-income housing tax credits?)

On the GOP side it was led by Kemp conservatives who saw privatization — rightly I think — as a solution to urban blight. And on the Democratic side it was Chuck Schumer and others demanding equal access to credit in poor neighborhoods.

Both had noble goals, but the result was disastrous.  We ignored two key human elements: group think and greed. Buyers, watching their neighbors get rich, became numb to risk, and profiteers learned how to dump that risk onto other people and get rich doing it.

It’s too bad. Because the idea of private ownership remains appealing, especially while trudging through eight inches of snow.

Could Andrew Cuomo be reshaping the Democratic Party?

If he’s successful, I don’t know how he doesn’t. And that could have a significant impact on the local and national political dynamic moving forward.

A triumphant Governor Cuomo could potentially create a widely appealing fiscally responsible wing in the Democratic Party, a pragmatic wing that has been missing for a long, long time.

That would be a huge challenge for a Republican Party – Northeast Republicans in particular – struggling to regain its historic identity. It would leave Republicans in non-federal elections only social issues with which to compete, and those issues, however ardently felt by conservative voters, are electoral losers.

The whole ball of wax, of course, is young voters.  And with the fiscal challenges they face – they’re stuck with the bill for our orgy of spending and borrowing – fiscal conservatism should, eventually, necessarily even, appeal to them.

Younger voters tend to be socially libertarian. They do not remember a time when abortion wasn’t legal, and a growing majority support Gay marriage. The combination of fiscal conservatism and social libertarianism seems custom-tailored to them.

Lots of Northeast Republicans I know have talked about cutting a Party of this cloth for years – one that is socially neutral and fiscally exacting.  I don’t know a single Republican, though, who expected that platform to come from a Democrat.

It is still too early to tell if Governor Cuomo will succeed in his mission.  He is, right now, nose-to-nose with the powerful public service unions, and it will be all-telling to see who blinks.

If it’s the unions, lots of things could change.

At risk of being repetitive:

A new report from the New York Public Interest Research Group (NYPIRG) identifies New York’s Working Families Party (WFP) as the biggest political spenders in New York State.

You’d never know if from the union-controlled Party’s website.

Here is the WFP in promoting taxpayer-funded elections:

“Public financing of elections can kick the big-money crowd out of politics, and finally level the playing field between working families and powerful corporate interests.”

Who are those powerful interests again?

The excellent NYPIRG report is available for download below.

Copy of Jan 11 Filers

NOTE: Faulty counting at the Board of Elections. Seems the WFP comes in third in spending for January.  The point remains the same.

Something major is awry with higher education in the U.S.  And everyone knows it.  Just like they knew something was wrong with other economic bubbles that screwed up the first decade of this century.

Everyone knew the housing market was out of whack three years ago. People with good jobs couldn’t afford modest homes. Something was wrong.

Ten years ago everyone knew the Internet bubble would eventually burst.  When www.I’llStickAnythingInMyEye.com is valued higher than General Electric, it’s a problem.

Something has been wrong with property taxes. They have been doubling every 10 years and wages are flat. That’s not going to work. Every homeowner knows it.

But bigger than any of these bubbles, perhaps, for parents of my generation and their children at least, is the ever-haunting college question: How on earth does anyone pay for it today?

Something has to give. And eventually it will.

The cost of a college education is bordering on the impossible for most Americans.

Say you’ve got a four-year-old, and you want him or her to go to a top four-year private school. A simple college calculator will tell you what its cost will be: approximately $545,000. (Put away $1,500 a month starting TODAY and everything will be alright.)

Say you have twin four year olds…

Or a family of five.

You might be better off buying lottery tickets than saving.

Public schools cost less.  But their prices are skyrocketing, too, as more students, unable to afford private universities, chase fewer class seats – and government dollars that traditionally supplemented their cost dry up.

There have been a number of studies on why the cost of college has far outpaced inflation – from 1982 to 2007 college costs increased 439% — but none of them answer the simplest questions.

What is education at its fundament? What does it require?

Last I checked, with the exception of medical school or other highly specialized science programs, it requires a.) books, b.) a student, and  c.)  a mentor/teacher – the old Socrates-Plato thing.

The first two parents are providing.  The student and his books are on us.  So what we essentially have to pay for is tutelage.

If the average ratio of student to faculty – these ratios vary widely from school to school – is  around 15-1, how can this cost so much?  How much can a pipe and a corduroy jacket run these days?

Most universities are tax exempt not-for-profits.  They own their buildings, and they have massive endowments from alumni.  So where are these costs coming from?

An interesting school of thought suggests that easy money is at the root of all this.  Universities have been able to charge whatever they want because government loans and other tuition assistance has heretofore matched whatever they demanded. In other words, colleges have had no incentive to lower costs.  Indeed, just the opposite, they have had every incentive to raise them and they have (no dummies in academia.)

But that’s about to come to a screeching stop.

Federal and state governments are broke and borrowing at an historic pace.  They no longer have easy cash to hand out to bright young students, and their borrowing will eventually drive up interest rates, compounding the problem for parents and students.

Something has to give. And everybody knows it.

Or has life in the U.S. become one giant hamster wheel where we work a lifetime to pay off universities, hospitals, and old-aged homes?

It can’t have.  Can it?

Would you trust Gordon Brown with your son’s or daughter’s future?

I wouldn’t.  Nothing against the guy personally, but I don’t want him to have anything to do with my children.

But something tells me that won’t deter the former British Prime Minister who evidently has decided that the G20 should “take the lead” in providing work for young people all over the globe.

Brown, in calling on the G20 to act, reportedly will announce Thursday that joblessness among young people has reached “epidemic proportions.”

As we say in New York, “No shoot, Sherlock.” Although we don’t say “shoot.”

But is the G20 or any of its components the solution?

The only time in history governments have successfully employed young people on a massive scale, we were all pointing rifles at one another.  And that didn’t pay very well.

Addison, Joseph (1672-1719) British writer and politician.

A friend of Addison’s with whom he was accustomed to having long discussions on topics of mutual interest borrowed some money from the author. Soon afterward Addison noticed a change in his behavior; before the loan the two friends had disagreed on a number of subjects, but now the borrower fell in with every line that Addison himself adopted. One day when they were talking on a point on which Addison knew his friend had previously held an opposite view to his own, he exclaimed, “Either contradict me, sir, or pay me my money!”

Something to keep in mind at the White House dinner tonight…

Courtesy of The Little, Brown Book of Anecdotes, Clifton Fadiman, Editor.

Say what you want about the American Left (or say nothing at all), but they understand the power of language far better than the rest of us seem to.

At least in New York.

As the budget season approaches, it would behoove New Yorkers to pay closer attention to what’s going on in Albany – particularly what words get used to characterize legislation, tax proposals, campaign finance laws, and budget modifications.

Chances are half of them are misnomers.

In the Empire State, left-wing organizations like the ACORN-inspired Working Families Party (WFP) are masterful with semantics.  They control the public debate by subtly – not so subtly in some cases – manipulating language to serve their purposes.

The “Millionaire’s Tax” is one obvious example.  The income tax surcharge is levied on couples jointly earning $200,000 per year or more.  But the WFP got out in front of the surcharge, successfully pegging it as the Millionaire’s Tax in the news media.  They did it so well, in fact, that any other description of the tax surcharge would actually be confusing to readers now, including this one.  Which tax are they talking about?

That’s a nice trick.

An even better one:

The WFP, virtually in the same breath, refers to families earning $240,000 – that’s the level of income they think should qualify one for government controlled housing—as “middle class” “working families.”

Check out how the Party breathlessly paints the “affordable housing crisis” on its website:

“The affordable housing crisis in New York City is pushing thousands of working families out of a city they love but can no longer afford.

“Why is it happening? New York City has lost hundreds of thousands of units of affordable housing units through a rent law loophole called “vacancy decontrol.” When a family in a rent stabilized apartment moves out, landlords can often “deregulate” the apartment and charge whatever they want for the next tenants – even double or triple the old rent.

“It means even as the city builds new affordable housing, even more is being lost.  If vacancy decontrol isn’t ended soon, middle-class families won’t be able to afford the city they call home.”

The New York Post ran a great editorial in February 2009 exposing the WFP’s hypocrisy on this.  Families making $200,000 per year are rich millionaires, but families making $240,000 per year are part of the struggling middle class.  Huh? (Please note how vacancy decontrol, a long-considered New York State law, got turned into “a rent law loophole” in the WFP screed.)

“Fair” is another favorite word of the Left.  The “rich” are never paying their “fair share” of anything, even though wealthy Americans pay many multiples of their actual share in taxes.  (Approximately 47% of Americans paid no federal income tax at all in 2009, according to The Associated Press.)

The WFP is an ardent fan of “fair” and “fairness.” I lost count of how many times those words appear on its website.  The pro-union political party has had a couple of iterations of the “Fair Share Tax” and there is bound to be another in 2011.

The slowing of growth in budgets – increasing a budget by, say, 5% a year instead of 7% — has consistently been referred to as “budget cuts”, i.e.,  [mine] “Our working class kids can’t afford more school budget cuts while the Wall fat cats profit off their destruction of our economy, refusing even to pay their fair share of taxes!” (It must be a gas to write for the WFP.)

Public financing of elections would give us “clean elections” in New York, according to the WFP, even though Empire State elections are driven by union money.

Here’s how they put that:

“Public Financing of elections can kick the big-money crowd out of politics, and finally level the playing field between working families and powerful corporate interests.”

The WFP is the big money crowd. (The American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees, a WFP linchpin, spent more than $87 million in 2010 to elect Democrats across the country.)

The name “Working Families Party” itself is a linguistic triumph.  The Party is a 100% front for New York’s public employee unions.  That’s been no secret since day one, if you’ll forgive the expression.  Its sole mission is to ensure that as much taxpayer money as possible,  earned by – you got it – New York’s working families, be spent by state and local governments on WFP members.  All other issues are window-dressing.

Clever use of language is nothing new of course.  It’s called propaganda and it’s been brilliantly employed by the Left since at least the Paris Commune (and by the Right for that matter.)

But there is no better practitioner of propaganda in New York State today than the WFP.

They are a talented bunch.  Don’t trust anything they say.

Republican New York State comptroller candidate Harry Wilson, on whose campaign I worked, talked tirelessly about the chronic underfunding of state pension funds in New York and across America during his campaign.  His warnings – and the warnings of others – are beginning to get picked up across the country as the full extent of the shortfall is slowly being realized.

The former chairman of New Jersey’s state pension fund pegs the cumulative debt among states at $2.5 trillion in today’s Financial Times. Other estimates have debt exceeding $3 trillion and growing.

This is not the regular state debt we hear about all the time – the debt that’s dragging down New York, New Jersey, California, Illinois, Michigan, et al.  This comes on top of that.  This is an extra and massive shortfall that we have a Constitutional obligation to pay going forward.

It is hard to comprehend numbers this large.  But it easy to explain what effect they will have on us.

If not forcefully addressed through public service union givebacks, this shortfall will necessarily mean:

Higher taxes at the state and local level;

Less money for schools;

Cuts in Medicaid spending, and

Massive reductions in discretionary spending, e.g., infrastructure repairs, mass transit, parks, senior services, youth programs, you name it.

Not-for-profits reliant on government support should be at Def Con One.

And yet the public service unions want more.

No good deed goes unpunished.

Take Starbucks.

The socially conscious coffee giant was protested this Martin Luther King Day in New York City by its own employees for the seventh consecutive year.  The disgruntled are members of the so-called “Industrial Workers of the World Starbucks Workers Union.”

The name itself is enough to make you snort a skinny, no-foam Venti latte out your nose.

The radicalized baristas marched from Union Square – a hotbed of Leftist politics when the real IWW operated 100 years ago – to Astor Place, where they issued “demands” to an almost assuredly bemused Astor Place Starbucks store manager.

They included:

• A $1 per hour raise;
• “Fair” performance reviews;
• The rehiring of two fired workers, one in New York and one in Omaha, Nebraska (You can’t make this stuff up), and
• An extra shot of hazelnut syrup after six months of service (okay, that one’s mine.)

Starbucks’ crimes against the proletarians?

• It pays starting employees at Astor Place between $9 and $10 per hour.  (The minimum wage in New York is $7.25);
• It gives employees health and dental insurance – voluntarily.  (The Seattle bean behemoth spends more on health and dental each year than it does on coffee.);
• It pays more for coffee beans overseas than it needs to provide foreign workers better wages;
• It maintains a 401 k plan for employees;
• It contributes to employee college tuitions;
• It  offers financial assistance to employees who adopt children;
• It offers employees stock options, and
• It helps reimburse for employee commuting costs.

No wonder they are getting protested.  What a bunch of jerks.

I so pray Starbucks Astor Place shuts its doors and reopens as a Walmart.

If you liked this…

You’ll love this.

Professor Greene should win a Pulitzer for making this quasi-understandable to idiots like me.