Crain’s New York Business just released its annual rankings of New York City’s largest employers.

The top six are:

1. The City of New York (152,836)
2. New York City Department of Education (121,255)
3. Metropolitan Transportation Authority (66,240)
4. United States Government (52,800)
5. New York City Health and Hospitals Corporation (36,964)
6. State of New York (26,500)

That’s 430,095 government employees in the five boroughs alone. That doesn’t take into account government employees in the Albany Capital Region or in New York’s towns, villages, cities, and 57 other counties.

How about this for some perspective: New York City has more government employees than Buffalo (pop. 261,000); Atlanta (pop.420,000); Miami (pop.400,000); Cleveland (pop.397,000); Pittsburgh (pop.306,000), or Minneapolis (pop. 383,000) have people.

Another bit of perspective, corporate giants like Verizon (11,100) and Time Warner (10,337) ranked 22nd and 25th on the Crain’s list, respectively.

If government is the answer, what was the question again?

I like girls. Always have. But never more so than now.  And it’s got nothing to do with being a father of three of them or their ability to charm the socks off me. It’s their attitude, particularly their professional attitude.

Whatever vitamins were put in the water for girls in the 1980’s and 90’s has had its intended effect. Because the young women coming into the workforce today have got it going on. It’s impossible not to notice.

This is the time of year when old farts like me are asked by friends to meet with sons or daughters graduating from college and preparing to enter the workforce.  The young men are fine, but the young women I meet with, on balance, are clearly a step ahead. They are confident, organized, and alert. They are, as my father would say, crisp.  And those qualities are undiminished upon hiring. The best employees and co-workers I’ve worked with in the past decade have been young women, hands down. The boys will work ’til midnight to get the job done, but the girls will have had it done by 6 pm — the day before.

Maybe it’s always been that way. But I suspect not. Something tells me it has everything to do with the positive reinforcement girls of this generation were infused with growing up, all that girl-power stuff that made a lot of us cringe at the time.  Whatever it was, it worked.

Another thing I’ve noticed: There doesn’t seem to be any of the gender friction in these  women, the type so prevalent in the 70’s and 80’s.  I take that as the truest sense of professional arrival and assuredness. I know glass ceilings still remain, but no way they last. Not with this crop of talent emerging.

These are subjective and highly generalized observations, I know, but the evidence is out there to reinforce them.  Young women now attend college and graduate school in far higher numbers than men. Fifty-eight percent of all undergraduate degrees were awarded to females in 2004, and that trend grows stronger every year.  Seventy-four percent of female high school graduates are attending college today, according to the U.S. Department of Labor, but just 62.8 % of males. As a result, women are dominating or playing an equal role in fields like law and medicine that were the exclusive domain of men when I was a kid, which wasn’t really that long ago. The days of Archie Bunker asking for the “real doctor” seem more like three centuries ago than three decades.

The only advantage that men have over women today in the workplace, as I see it, is that our careers are not cut short by child-bearing. And many women who can afford to mercifully realize that children are so much more important and enriching than a job and stay home to raise them.   If it were not for that, we’d be finished, in more ways than one.

One wonders what long-term sociological effects all this will have — with birth rates, work schedules, life planning, etc. But in the short-term, it should put young men on notice.  Find some of those vitamins, take them, and step  up your game, lest you end up with only two career choices, chef or fashion designer.

Oh the irony.

This ought to freak out the public employee unions.  Sandy Springs, GA, a suburb just north of Atlanta, has outsourced its workforce — all of it.  Every department, every job (except police and fire who are in a defined contribution plan). That means it has no long-term debt.  Zero pension liabilities.  Nada. All it has to do is meet its payroll every year, and it’s doing it.

Interesting.

I cannot for the life of me get this video loaded, so I’m attaching it as a link.  It is broadcast via Reason, the libertarian monthly magazine.

Ought to get some notice I think.

Special thanks for the heads up to a friend in White Plains.

When did Ed Koch start sounding like Barney Frank?

I walked to the train this morning with a neighbor whose son just enrolled at a great SUNY school. He had been accepted at a number of top private universities;  he had even been offered scholarships to attend them. But with the costs of those schools exceeding $40,000 and $50,000 per year, there was just no way. The debt he would have incurred over four years would have been life hobbling.

The student comes from a hard working, two-income middle class family. Both parents went to private colleges and both are highly-skilled professionals. But their children won’t be able to go to private universities. They simply cost too much today.

SUNY schools are excellent. There is nothing this newly enrolled young man will be unable to achieve by matriculating at the one he will be attending. But it is striking to me that, for so many parents like my neighbors, the opportunities for their children already have become more limited than the ones they had.

I went to an event last night with a Montana congressman deeply involved in federal education issues. He talked  with concern about the dramatic increase in Pell grants next year — scholarship funds to families with lower incomes. They will be jumping from something like $14 billion to $49 billion, despite the federal deficit.

I don’t know this for sure, but I suspect my neighbors would not qualify for Pell. Their gross income — never mind the expenses they face living in a Northeast suburb — would put them over the threshold. But that same income almost assuredly qualifies them to help pay for private university schooling for other people’s children.

This couple lives in Westchester, the county with the highest property taxes in America. So they get socked there.  They clearly make enough money to pay federal income taxes — almost half of all Americans pay none — and they pay all the cumulative nuisance taxes that have made New York the worst ranked tax climate in the country. What they have left over is insufficient to pay for a prestigious private education for their son.

It burns me up when highly organized groups like New York’s Working Families Party use the middle class moniker on rally signs in Albany and elsewhere to call for higher taxes and more spending.  They purport to be the middle class’s champion, yet they are systematically destroying it.

In five years, my neighbor’s son will sit for a job interview. One hopes he nails it. Because the next candidate interviewed may have Yale on his resume, paid for by the SUNY student’s parents and others in similar circumstances.

It is social engineering at its worst. And the middle class is paying for it.

Runaway cigarette taxes in New York — a pack can cost upwards of $14 in New York City now — is causing lots of unintended consequences — like this converted ice cream truck in Connecticut which sells nothing but cigarettes now. The smokes therein used to be sold across the street at a store in Porchester, NY, but the bodega owner stripped bare his shelves of tobacco products and moved them across the street into the lower-taxing Nutmeg State to save money.

Something tells me this isn’t going to work out for the guy in the long term, but he does show initiative.

The deficit and taxes. Those will be the key issues in 2012. (If it turns out to be something else, we’ll be in bigger trouble than we are now.)

It became official the moment President Obama announced that he’ll be releasing a deficit reduction/tax increase plan, on the heels of Republican congressman Paul Ryan’s. The President’s people clearly realize the issue has become unavoidable. America is looking at an existential debt crisis a decade or two out, and we can no longer avoid addressing it.

This can’t be the conversation President Obama wanted to have.  He is a government interventionist – he sees government as  a force for good – and talk of drastically paring it is not in his wheelhouse.  But taxes are.  And that’s where we can expect the President and his party to focus.  They will seek to drive a wedge between the “wealthy” and the “middle class.”  (Republicans will focus on spending and corporate tax cuts to spur long-term job growth.)

It is the most familiar argument in America. The Democrats will say the “wealthy” don’t pay their fair share.  Republicans will argue they do – and that money in the hands of individuals is better invested than money in the hands of bureaucrats.  The difference this time, though, will be the inclusion of questions about Medicare and Social Security. Will Americans be willing to sacrifice benefits and work a few extra years to help save their country?  That is certain to ratched up passion over this quadrennial debate.

Here we go again. Ginned up class war.  Just like last time…and the time before that.

Mass Grave in Mexico

If there has been a national conversation about radically suppressing marijuana usage in this country, I haven’t heard it. I followed the medicinal marijuana debates in the last election cycle, but I’m not aware of any concerted effort to urge Americans to “put down the pipe.”

That’s unfortunate, because every day we are seeing the effects of American pot smoking on our Mexican cousins — kidnappings, beheadings, and political assassinations.  Mass graves are now being uncovered, no different in effect from the ones we saw in the killing fields of Cambodia, just miles from the border.

This is all over drugs.  Drugs routes to America.  And although it includes cocaine, methamphetamines, and designer drugs like ecstasy, it mostly about old-fashioned cannabis sativa.

Some Americans won’t stop smoking pot for anything.  They are either addicts or too young to understand the peripheral consequences of their actions. But lots of Americans who are neither young nor addicts presumably still smoke the stuff.  Can’t they put it down for a while, or for godssake grow the stuff in their basements?

What American pot smokers are doing to Mexico is unconscionable. This needs to become a national issue – here in the U.S. Innocent victims buried in the Mexican desert deserve at least that.

All talk in Washington now is on the debt ceiling.  Lawmakers may have cobbled together a budget deal late Friday, but that was small potatoes. The big question will come in mid-May when a vote is needed to allow the nation to borrow more money. Will the House Tea Party Republicans dare hold up that vote to demand systematic fiscal reforms?

Denying the country additional credit would roil worldwide markets, hike interest rates, halt military and social security paychecks, and shut down government services. As drastic as that would be, Republicans should be prepared to do it. But on one condition: demands on President Obama and Senate Democrats must only be about fiscal reforms.  Differences on social issues should be left out of this fight. They would be a fatal distraction in the debate.

Debt will destroy America as we know it.  Washington is stealing from our children on a daily basis – in mind-blowing sums – and it’s wrong.  There may never be a better opportunity than now to draw the line in the sand.  The budget battle we just saw was over $38.5 billion.  This fight will be about trillions, including cuts to the sacred cows of Medicare, Medicaid, and Social Security. Winning this fight – and it must be won for the sake of the next generation – will require using every ounce of leverage available.

It will be called “blackmail.” Media criticism will be excoriating. And some members of Congress will lose their jobs over it next cycle.  But it needs to be done. This is what the Tea Party conservatives came to Washington to do, and they should do it – as long as they keep the focus on fiscal issues.  Throw the kitchen sink into this fight and huge numbers of Americans will never trust the Republican Party again.  This is a conversation about unsustainable debt, not abortion, gay marriage, or prayer in school. Those debates can be had another time.

Focus, focus, focus. Fiscal, fiscal, fiscal.

Every revolution needs a color these days, and Libya is no exception.

Repeat bombings by NATO pilots on rebel armor and fighters – the ostensible good guys – has, by necessity, forced a color scheme into this conflict.   It is pink – the color rebel fighters are painting the roofs of their vehicles to ward off errant ally air raids.

We’ve seen the Yellow Revolution and the Orange Revolution.  Now we have the Pink Revolution.

The only problem? Gaddafi’s soldiers can probably get their hands on pink paint, too.