Subterms
How 8 Mayoral Candidates Plan to Fix New York’s EconomyNew York is facing a financial crisis, mainly because of the pandemic. The next mayor will have to guide the city out of a $5 billion budget gap while helping people and businesses recover from the devastation of Covid-19.Here’s how eight mayoral candidates say they would fund their priorities → More
#masthead-section-label, #masthead-bar-one { display: none }The Coronavirus OutbreakliveLatest UpdatesMaps and CasesRisk Near YouVaccine RolloutNew Variants TrackerAdvertisementContinue reading the main storySupported byContinue reading the main storyHow New Jersey Averted a Pandemic Financial CalamityA $44.8 billion spending plan unveiled Tuesday by Gov. Phil Murphy calls for no new taxes and fully funds the state pension program for the first time since 1996.Gov. Philip D. Murphy of New Jersey released a $44.8 billion budget on Tuesday that shows better-than-expected revenue projections.Credit…Pool photo by Anne-Marie CarusoFeb. 23, 2021Updated 3:07 p.m. ETIt has been five months since New Jersey officials issued warnings about a coronavirus-related financial calamity. The dire outlook contributed to lawmakers’ decisions to increase taxes on income over $1 million and to become one of the first states to borrow billions to cover operating costs.But the doomsday forecast has since brightened considerably, officials said, enabling the Democratic governor, Philip D. Murphy, to unveil a $44.8 billion spending plan on Tuesday that calls for no new taxes, few cuts and tackles head-on a chronic problem — the state’s underfunded pension program — for the first time in 25 years.The governor also said there would be no increase in New Jersey Transit fares.“The news is less bad,” the state’s treasurer, Elizabeth Maher Muoio, said. “I wouldn’t say it’s good, but it’s less bad.”The governor’s election-year financial blueprint relies on better-than-expected revenue from retail sales and high-earners, who have lost fewer jobs during the pandemic than low-income workers and are reaping the benefits of a prolonged Wall Street rally.The $38 billion that New Jersey and its residents have received in federal stimulus funding, a short-term extension of a corporate tax and a $504 million windfall from the so-called millionaire’s tax also helped, Ms. Muoio said.The release of New Jersey’s proposed 2022 fiscal year budget comes as Congress continues to debate President Biden’s $1.9 trillion virus relief package. The proposed package includes considerable funds for states and municipalities as well as grant and loan programs for small businesses.Other states have seen similarly strong signs of an economic rebound even as cases of the virus have spiked nationwide over the last several months and the nation’s death toll surpassed 500,000 on Monday.Earlier this month, the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office concluded that large sectors of the economy were adapting to the pandemic better than originally expected and that December’s economic aid package had helped.Mr. Murphy, who is running for re-election in November, said the spending plan was designed to not only enable the state to scrape through the pandemic, but to help it emerge stronger.“This is the time for us to lean into the policies that can fix our decades-old — or in some cases centuries-old — inequities,” the governor said Tuesday in a budget address, which he delivered virtually.A key pillar of the budget is a proposal to fully fund the state’s public sector pension obligations for the first time since 1996.The state has not set aside the full amount of its pension obligation for 25 years, leading $4 billion in extra debt to accrue over time, Ms. Muoio said. Under a deal brokered with the Legislature, Mr. Murphy had been on track to fully fund the state’s share by the 2023 fiscal year. But the spending plan released on Tuesday sets aside $6.4 billion for the pension system, accelerating full funding by a year.“New Jersey is done kicking problems down the road,” the governor said. “We are solving them.”Under the plan, the state’s surplus, which proved to be a vital resource during the first wave of the pandemic, would not grow, officials said, but would remain at about the same level it was at the end of 2020.The Coronavirus Outbreak More
AdvertisementContinue reading the main storyOpinionSupported byContinue reading the main storyA Letter to My Liberal FriendsIf you want to know what worries conservatives, look at California.Opinion ColumnistFeb. 1, 2021, 8:08 p.m. ETCredit…Jeff Chiu/Associated PressLast Wednesday, Nick Kristof addressed his column to his conservative hometown friends in Yamhill, Ore., urging them to hold liberals accountable while doing the same for right-wing extremists, kooks and charlatans. In that spirit — and with Nick’s cheerful acquiescence — I offer a rejoinder in the form of a letter to my liberal friends.Dear Friends,No, I can’t relax! And no, I’m not worried that the Biden administration is going to send Trump voters to “re-education camps,” impose Cuban-style socialism or put out the welcome mat for MS-13. I’m just afraid that today’s Democratic leaders might look to the very Democratic state of California as a model for America’s future.You remember California: People used to want to move there, start businesses, raise families, live their American dream.These days, not so much. Between July 2019 and July 2020, more people — 135,400 to be precise — left the state than moved in, one of only a dozen times in over a century when that’s happened. The website exitcalifornia.org helps keep track of where these Golden State exiles go. No. 1 destination: Texas, followed by Arizona, Nevada and Washington. Three of those states have no state income tax, while Arizona’s is capped at 4.5 percent for married couples making over $318,000.In California, by contrast, married couples pay more than twice that rate on income above $116,000. (And rates go even higher for higher earners.) Californians also pay some of the nation’s highest sales tax rates (8.66 percent) and corporate tax rates (8.84 percent), as well as the highest taxes on gasoline (63 cents on a gallon as of January, as compared with 20 cents in Texas).Some of my liberal friends tell me that tax rates basically don’t matter in terms of the way people work and economies perform. Uh-huh. Still, I’d have an easier time accepting the argument if all those taxes went toward high-quality government services: good schools, safe streets, solid infrastructure or fiscal health.How does California fare on these fronts? The state ranks 21st in the country in terms of spending per public school pupil, but 37th in its K-12 educational outcomes. It ties Oregon for third place among states in terms of its per capita homeless rate. Infrastructure? As of 2019, the state had an estimated $70 billion in deferred maintenance backlog. Debt? The state’s unfunded pension liabilities in 2019 ran north of $1.1 trillion, according to an analysis by Stanford professor Joe Nation, or $81,300 per household.And then there’s liberal governance in the cities. In San Francisco, District Attorney Chesa Boudin has championed the calls for decriminalizing prostitution, public urination, public camping, blocking sidewalks and open-air drug use. Click this link and take a brief stroll through a local train station to see how these sorts of policies work out.Predictably, a result of decriminalization has been more actual criminality. Recent trends include an estimated 51 percent jump in San Francisco burglaries and a 41 percent jump in arsons. For the Bay Area as a whole, there has been a 35 percent spike in homicides.Yes, homicides have been rising in cities around the country. But those trends themselves owe much to liberal governance in like-minded jurisdictions like Seattle and New York, with their recent emphasis on depolicing, decarceration, defunding, decriminalization and other deluded attempts at criminal-justice reform.Funny, you don’t hear this about the places Californians are fleeing to. Austin, the preferred destination of San Francisco exiles, remains one of the safest big cities in America (and it’s run by a Democrat). Another thing you don’t hear from Texas: a board of education voting — as San Francisco’s just did — to strip the names of Abraham Lincoln, George Washington and Paul Revere from their respective schools, on grounds of sinning against the more recent commandments of progressive dogma. Not that it really matters, since all these schools remain closed for in-person learning thanks to the resistance of teachers unions.And then there is California’s political class. Democrats hold both U.S. Senate seats, 42 of its 53 seats in the House, have lopsided majorities in the State Assembly and Senate, run nearly every big city and have controlled the governor’s mansion for a decade. If ever there was a perfect laboratory for liberal governance, this is it. So how do you explain these results?For four years, liberals have had a hard time understanding how any American could even think of voting for Republicans, given the party’s fealty to the former president. I’ve shared some of that bewilderment myself. But — to adapt a line from another notorious Californian — Democrats won’t have Donald Trump to kick around anymore, meaning the consequences of liberal misrule will be harder to disguise or disavow. If California is a vision of the sort of future the Biden administration wants for Americans, expect Americans to demur.My unsolicited advice: Like Republicans, Democrats do best when they govern from the center. Forget California, think Colorado. A purple country needs a purple president — and a political opposition with the credibility to keep him honest.The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We’d like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips. And here’s our email: letters@nytimes.com.Follow The New York Times Opinion section on Facebook, Twitter (@NYTopinion) and Instagram.AdvertisementContinue reading the main story More
Credit…Timo LenzenSkip to contentSkip to site indexOpinionThe First Post-Reagan PresidencySo far, Joe Biden has been surprisingly progressive.Credit…Timo LenzenSupported byContinue reading the main storyOpinion ColumnistJan. 28, 2021, 8:50 p.m. ETDuring Donald Trump’s presidency, I sometimes took comfort in the Yale political scientist Stephen Skowronek’s concept of “political time.”In Skowronek’s formulation, presidential history moves in 40- to 60-year cycles, or “regimes.” Each is inaugurated by transformative, “reconstructive” leaders who define the boundaries of political possibility for their successors.Franklin Delano Roosevelt was such a figure. For decades following his presidency, Republicans and Democrats alike accepted many of the basic assumptions of the New Deal. Ronald Reagan was another. After him, even Democrats like Bill Clinton and Barack Obama feared deficit spending, inflation and anything that smacked of “big government.”I found Skowronek’s schema reassuring because of where Trump seemed to fit into it. Skowronek thought Trump was a “late regime affiliate” — a category that includes Jimmy Carter and Herbert Hoover. Such figures, he’s written, are outsiders from the party of a dominant but decrepit regime.They use the “internal disarray and festering weakness of the establishment” to “seize the initiative.” Promising to save a faltering political order, they end up imploding and bringing the old regime down with them. No such leader, he wrote, has ever been re-elected.During Trump’s reign, Skowronek’s ideas gained some popular currency, offering a way to make sense of a presidency that seemed anomalous and bizarre. “We are still in the middle of Trump’s rendition of the type,” he wrote in an updated edition of his book “Presidential Leadership in Political Time,” “but we have seen this movie before, and it has always ended the same way.”Skowronek doesn’t present his theory as a skeleton key to history. It’s a way of understanding historical dynamics, not predicting the future. Still, if Trump represented the last gasps of Reaganism instead of the birth of something new, then after him, Skowronek suggests, a fresh regime could begin.When Joe Biden became the Democratic nominee, it seemed that the coming of a new era had been delayed. Reconstructive leaders, in Skowronek’s formulation, repudiate the doctrines of an establishment that no longer has answers for the existential challenges the country faces. Biden, Skowronek told me, is “a guy who’s made his way up through establishment Democratic politics.” Nothing about him seemed trailblazing.Yet as Biden’s administration begins, there are signs that a new politics is coalescing. When, in his inauguration speech, Biden touted “unity,” he framed it as a national rejection of the dark forces unleashed by his discredited predecessor, not stale Gang of Eight bipartisanship. He takes power at a time when what was once conventional wisdom about deficits, inflation and the proper size of government has fallen apart. That means Biden, who has been in national office since before Reagan’s presidency, has the potential to be our first truly post-Reagan president.“Biden has a huge opportunity to finally get our nation past the Reagan narrative that has still lingered,” said Representative Ro Khanna, who was a national co-chair of Bernie Sanders’s presidential campaign. “And the opportunity is to show that government, by getting the shots in every person’s arm of the vaccines, and building infrastructure, and helping working families, is going to be a force for good.” More
@media (pointer: coarse) {
.nytslm_outerContainer {
overflow-x: scroll;
-webkit-overflow-scrolling: touch;
}
}
.nytslm_outerContainer {
display: flex;
align-items: center;
/* Fixes IE */
overflow-x: auto;
box-shadow: -6px 0 white, 6px 0 white, 1px 3px 6px rgba(0, 0, 0, 0.15);
padding: 10px 1.25em 10px;
transition: all 250ms;
-ms-overflow-style: none;
/* IE 10+ */
scrollbar-width: none;
/* Firefox */
background: white;
margin-bottom: 20px;
z-index: 1000;
}
@media (min-width: 1024px) {
.nytslm_outerContainer {
margin-bottom: 0px;
padding: 13px 1.25em 10px;
}
}
.nytslm::-webkit-scrollbar {
display: none;
/* Safari and Chrome */
}
.nytslm_innerContainer {
margin: unset;
display: flex;
align-items: center;
}
@media (min-width: 600px) {
.nytslm_innerContainer {
margin: auto;
min-width: 600px;
}
}
.nytslm_title {
padding-right: 1em;
border-right: 1px solid #ccc;
}
@media (min-width: 740px) {
.nytslm_title {
max-width: none;
font-size: 1.0625rem;
line-height: 1.25rem;
}
}
.nytslm_spacer {
width: 0;
border-right: 1px solid #E2E2E2;
height: 45px;
margin: 0 1.4em;
}
.nytslm_list {
font-family: nyt-franklin, helvetica, arial, sans-serif;
display: flex;
width: auto;
list-style: none;
padding-left: 1em;
flex-shrink: 0;
align-items: baseline;
justify-content: center;
}
.nytslm_li {
margin-right: 1.4em;
flex-shrink: 0;
font-size: 0.8125rem;
line-height: 0.8125rem;
font-weight: 600;
padding: 1em 0;
}
#nytslm .nytslm_li a {
color: #121212;
text-decoration: none;
}
#nytslm .nytsmenu_li_current,
#nytslm .nytslm_li a:hover,
#nytslm .nytslm_li a:active,
#nytslm .nytslm_li a:focus {
color: #121212;
border-bottom: 2px solid #121212;
padding-bottom: 2px;
}
.nytslm_li_live_loud:after {
content: ‘LIVE’
}
.nytslm_li_live_loud {
background-color: #d0021b;
color: white;
border-radius: 3px;
padding: 4px 6px 2px 6px;
margin-right: 2px;
display: inline-block;
letter-spacing: 0.03rem;
font-weight: 700;
}
.nytslm_li_upcoming_loud {
border: 1px solid #d0021b;
color: #d0021b;
border-radius: 3px;
padding: 4px 6px 2px 6px;
margin-right: 2px;
display: inline-block;
letter-spacing: 0.03rem;
font-weight: 700;
}
.nytslm_li_upcoming_loud:before {
content: ‘Upcoming’
}
.nytslm_li_loud a:hover,
.nytslm_li_loud a:active,
.nytslm_li_loud a:focus {
border-bottom: 2px solid;
padding-bottom: 2px;
}
.nytslm_li_updated {
color: #777;
}
#masthead-bar-one {
display: none;
}
.electionNavbar__logoSvg {
width: 80px;
align-self: center;
display: flex;
}
@media(min-width: 600px) {
.electionNavbar__logoSvg {
width: 100px;
}
}
.nytslm_notification {
border-left: 1px solid #ccc;
font-family: nyt-franklin, helvetica, arial, sans-serif;
padding-left: 1em;
}
.nytslm_notification_label {
color: #D0021B;
text-transform: uppercase;
font-weight: 700;
font-size: 0.6875rem;
margin-bottom: 0.2em;
letter-spacing: 0.02em;
}
.nytslm_notification_link {
font-weight: 600;
color: #121212;
display: flex;
align-items: center;
}
.nytslm_notification_headline {
font-size: 0.875rem;
line-height: 1.0625rem;
}
.nytslm_notification_image_wrapper {
position: relative;
max-width: 75px;
margin-left: 10px;
flex-shrink: 0;
}
.nytslm_notification_image {
max-width: 100%;
}
.nytslm_notification_image_live_bug {
position: absolute;
text-transform: uppercase;
bottom: 7px;
left: 2px;
font-size: 0.5rem;
background-color: #d0021b;
color: white;
border-radius: 3px;
padding: 4px 4px 2px 4px;
font-weight: 700;
margin-right: 2px;
letter-spacing: 0.03rem;
}
/* No hover state on in app */
.Hybrid .nytslm_li a:hover,
.Hybrid .nytslm_li_loud a:hover {
border-bottom: none;
padding-bottom: 0;
}
.Hybrid #TOP_BANNER_REGION {
display: none;
}
.nytslm_st0 {
fill: #f4564a;
}
.nytslm_st1 {
fill: #ffffff;
}
.nytslm_st2 {
fill: #2b8ad8;
}
State Certified Vote Totals
Election Disinformation
Full Results
Biden Transition Updates
“),e+=””+b+””,e+=””,d&&(e+=””,e+=””,e+=”Live”,e+=””),e+=””,e}function getVariant(){var a=window.NYTD&&window.NYTD.Abra&&window.NYTD.Abra.getAbraSync&&window.NYTD.Abra.getAbraSync(“STYLN_elections_notifications”);// Only actually have control situation in prd and stg
return[“www.nytimes.com”,”www.stg.nytimes.com”].includes(window.location.hostname)||(a=”STYLN_elections_notifications”),a||”0_control”}function reportData(){if(window.dataLayer){var a;try{a=dataLayer.find(function(a){return!!a.user}).user}catch(a){}var b={abtest:{test:”styln-elections-notifications”,variant:getVariant()},module:{name:”styln-elections-notifications”,label:getVariant(),region:”TOP_BANNER”},user:a};window.dataLayer.push(Object.assign({},b,{event:”ab-alloc”})),window.dataLayer.push(Object.assign({},b,{event:”ab-expose”})),window.dataLayer.push(Object.assign({},b,{event:”impression”}))}}function insertNotification(a,b){// Bail here if the user is in control
if(reportData(),”0_control”!==getVariant()){// Remove menu bar items or previous notification
var c=document.querySelector(“.nytslm_innerContainer”);if(c&&1 30 * 60 * 1000) return restoreMenuIfNecessary();
// Do not update DOM if the content won’t change
if(currentNotificationContents!==a.text&&window.localStorage.getItem(“stylnelecs”)!==a.timestamp)// Do not show if user has interacted with this link
// if (Cookie.get(‘stylnelecs’) === data.timestamp) return;
{expireLocalStorage(“stylnelecs”),currentNotificationContents=a.text;// Construct URL for tracking
var b=a.link.split(“#”),c=b[0]+”?action=click&pgtype=Article&state=default&module=styln-elections-notifications&variant=1_election_notifications®ion=TOP_BANNER&context=Menu#”+b[1],d=formatNotification(c,a.text,a.kicker,a.image);insertNotification(d,function(){var b=document.querySelector(“.nytslm_notification_link”);return b?void(b.onclick=function(){window.localStorage.setItem(“stylnelecs”,a.timestamp)}):null})}})}(function(){navigator.userAgent.includes(“nytios”)||navigator.userAgent.includes(“nyt_android”)||window.stylnelecsHasLoaded||(// setInterval(getUpdate, 5000);
window.stylnelecsHasLoaded=!0)})(),function(){try{if(navigator.userAgent.includes(“nytios”)||navigator.userAgent.includes(“nyt_android”)){var a=document.getElementsByClassName(“nytslm_title”)[0];a.style.pointerEvents=”none”}}catch(a){}}(); More
