How Blue NYC is Strangling Itself

[Valin]

Via Meadia:

Apr 11, 2015

 

New York City could be facing fiscal death by expensive bus stations. In the NY Daily News, Aaron Renn points out how absurdly pricey New York City’s transportation projects have become—often for very little return. The city will be spending upwards of $10 billion (perhaps more) on a new Port Authority Bus Terminal. Other projects have price tags of $1.4 billion to $11 billion. More:

 

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New York’s transit woes are a portrait of the collapse of blue model in miniature. The factors that Renn argues are causing the high costs are the classic features of that out-dated system: burdensome regulations, cronyism, and corruption. The problems will be hard to solve because they are deeply rooted. Corrupt politics, rent-seeking crony capitalists, organized labor, NIMBY lobbies, administrative incompetence resulting from poorly organized and poorly run bureaucracies: it took a lot of cooks to spoil this broth.

 

But the good news is that studying America’s biggest problems and bottlenecks — like our expensive health care system, bloated higher ed system, collapsing infrastructure — offer us the chance to reform and redesign the outmoded systems that are holding us back. The old ways of doing things aren’t good enough any more; American society needs a new era of reform that can transform a social and political infrastructure developed for the needs of an industrial society to the smarter, sleeker and more efficient infrastructure that our emerging information society desperately needs.

[Valin]

Why Are So Many People Leaving New York?
Harry Zieve Cohen
Dec. 29 2015

Residents fled New York State again in the first half of 2015, according to the Empire Center:

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This isn’t just a New York story. Blue states around the country, like Illinois, California, and Massachusetts, have also experienced large net domestic outflows over the past five years. To varying extents, these losses have been mitigated by foreign immigration inflows (enough, in the cases of California and Massachusetts, to make total net migration positive). Napa Valley’s restaurants still need busboys and New York’s dairy producers still need seasonal farmhands—low-paying jobs in states with high costs of living. But when it comes to stable middle class jobs, these states’ economies often have little to offer people. Without good economic prospects, people look to move to places with lower taxes, better jobs, or cheaper costs of living (or some combination of the three) and so they flock to states like Florida. Telecommuting and the access to global markets made possible by the Internet encourages this migration even more.

When the blue model succeeded, it did so because the private-public partnership delivered a stable income and safety net to millions of people. That system hasn’t worked for years, and residents of the bluest states are realizing it’s time to try something new. How long will it take for Albany and Springfield to get the message?