Infinite Unknown

Embattled Governor: $1.5 Billion In School Aid Next To Be Halted

Gov. David A. Paterson

NEW YORK (CBS) ― For hundreds of thousands of New Yorkers, the check won’t be in the mail — at least not on time. New York State has stopped paying tax refunds and won’t start again until next month.

The tax refund delay is part of a bigger cash crunch.

Message to New Yorkers: don’t start spending your tax refund money because it’s going to be delayed.

Half a billion dollars’ worth of refund checks were put on hold last Friday, and state beancounters won’t start sending you your money until at least April 1.

“I apologize that we had to do this. I hope it serves notice on the public of how serious our financial situation is,” Gov. David Paterson said.

Several hundred thousand New York taxpayers will be affected with most getting an average refund of $1,000. People who filed in late February and early March might have to wait as long as six weeks till the checks are in the mail.

The governor said the move was unavoidable. He’s also planning to withhold $1.5 billion in school payments and aid to local governments. Continue reading »

Tags: Government, New York, Politics, tax, Taxpayers, U.S.

(AFP) — Kariana, aged three, has a lonely existence in the New York homeless shelter her parents moved into last year. Lonely, but not alone — there are nearly 16,000 children just like her.

Homelessness in New York has soared as a result of the damaged US economy and children make up almost half of that growing population.

Shivering outside the forbidding gates to a Brooklyn shelter, Kariana’s petite mother, Karen Diaz, said she’d been homeless since arriving three months ago from Puerto Rico with her husband Pedro, Kariana, and a second daughter, aged six.

“We thought we would be here just for 10 days and get some place better, but time flew by,” said Diaz, 24.

Guards would not allow a reporter inside the building, a former hospital now named the Auburn Family Shelter.

Diaz described a rough life of tasteless food, “disgusting, dirty” communal toilets, bunk beds in their family room, and “scary” fellow residents.

“There are no friends for the girls. There are a lot of sick people,” Diaz said, as Kariana fidgeted in the bitter cold. “We keep to ourselves.”

With unemployment running over 10 percent in New York, sky high house prices, and icy winter temperatures, the family is lucky to have a roof while Diaz’s husband searches for a security guard job. Continue reading »

Tags: Children, Economy, Homelessness, New York, Society, U.S.

“Mr. Geithner has been wrong about everything for the last 15 years.”

Added: 12. December 2009

Tags: Barack Obama, Ben Bernanke, Debt, Dollar, Dubai, Economy, Fed, Federal Reserve, Global News, Gold, Government, Greece, Inflation, Ireland, Jim Rogers, Keynesianism, New York, Obama administration, Politics, Recession, Spain, Tiger Woods, Timothy Geithner, Treasury, U.S.

See also:

- $160,000 Per Stimulus Job!?! The White House Calls That ‘Calculator Abuse’ (ABC News)

- Sour ’stimulus’ plan reduces employment (OneNewsNow)

- Featherbedding stimulus job numbers (Washington Examiner)

NY jobs don’t add up

Just 300 stimulus hires

The feds and the city are using some funny math to inflate the number of jobs created by the $787 billion stimulus program so far — with the tally including thousands of brief, low-wage summer jobs for youths.

New reports just released by the Obama administration claim New York state has “created/saved” 40,625 jobs — including 25,526 in the city.

A spokesman for Mayor Bloomberg told The Post that the city had “created” 3,000 jobs and that the rest represented already employed teachers and other city employees who faced possible layoffs without the federal “shot in the arm.”

The spokesman could not immediately give a breakdown of what the new jobs entailed. But a memo issued by Deputy Mayor Edward Skyler suggested the number of stable new jobs was under 300.

The memo had a footnote explaining that the city used a formula required by the feds to count 2,882 “full-time-equivalent” as created jobs.

That number was based on 19,518 youths who took part in a summer employment program, Skyler said. The seven-week program paid minimum wage — less than $8 per hour — for residents age 14 to 24 to work in local businesses, public facilities and nonprofit groups and included some training, officials said.

Continue reading »

Tags: Barack Obama, Economy, Government, New York, Obama administration, Politics, Unemployment

New York wants all health workers to get flu vaccines.

NEW YORK (CNN) — A New York state Supreme Court judge Friday granted a temporary restraining order against a requirement that all health care workers in the state get H1N1 flu vaccinations.

The state health commissioner had said the workers had to be vaccinated against both seasonal and H1N1 flu by November 30 or risk disciplinary action.

The Public Employees Federation filed suit, and Judge Thomas McNamara on Friday granted the restraining order, which will be in effect at least until the State Supreme Court can review the case during a hearing scheduled for October 30.

In a news release, federation President Kenneth Brynien called the decision “a big step in the right direction.”

Peter Banks, a council leader for the organization, added that its members “are not against the vaccination program; what we are against is the mandating, putting conditions of service over an unproven vaccine.”

Continue reading »

Tags: Flu, Health, Healthcare, Law, New York, Politics, Supreme Court, Vaccination, Vaccine

Date: 15th Oct 09

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Tags: New York, Police, Police State, Protesters, Society, U.S., Violence

It was created 40 years ago to provide health care for the poorest New Yorkers, offering a lifeline to those who could not afford to have a baby or a heart attack. But in the decades since, New York State’s Medicaid program has also become a $44.5 billion target for the unscrupulous and the opportunistic.

It has drawn dentists like Dr. Dolly Rosen, who within 12 months somehow built the state’s biggest Medicaid dental practice out of a Brooklyn storefront, where she claimed to have performed as many as 991 procedures a day in 2003. After The New York Times discovered her extraordinary billings through a computer analysis and questioned the state about them, Dr. Rosen and two associates were indicted on charges of stealing more than $1 million from the program.

It has drawn van services, intended as medical transportation for patients who cannot walk unaided, that regularly picked up scores of people who walked quite easily when a reporter was watching nearby. In cooperation with medical offices that order these services, the ambulettes typically cost the taxpayers more than $50 a round trip, adding up to $200 million a year. In some cases, the rides that the state paid for may never have taken place.

School officials around the state have enrolled tens of thousands of low-income students in speech therapy without the required evaluation, garnering more than $1 billion in questionable Medicaid payments for their districts. One Buffalo school official sent 4,434 students into speech therapy in a single day without talking to them or reviewing their records, according to federal investigators.

Continue reading »

Tags: Fraud, Global News, Medicaid, New York

ST. PAUL, Minn. - Minnesota is deep in the hole financially, but the state still owns a premier golf resort, a sprawling amateur sports complex, a big airport, a major zoo and land holdings the size of the Central American country of Belize.

Valuables like these are in for a closer look as 44 states cope with deficits.

Like families pawning the silver to get through a tight spot, states such as Minnesota, New York, Massachusetts and Illinois are thinking of selling or leasing toll roads, parks, lotteries and other assets to raise desperately needed cash.

GOP lawmakers are pushing to privatize the Minneapolis-St. Paul International Airport and the state lottery. Both steps require a higher authority - federal legislation in the case of the airport, a voter-approved constitutional amendment for the lottery. But one lawmaker estimated an airport deal could bring in at least $2.5 billion, and the lottery $500 million.

Continue reading »

Tags: Debt, Economy, Government, Illinois, Massachusetts, Minnesota, New York, Politics, Recession

With Wall Street hemorrhaging jobs and assets, even many of the wealthiest players are retrenching. Others, like the Lehman Brothers bankers who borrowed against their millions in stock, have lost everything. Hedge-fund managers try to sell their luxury homes, while trophy wives are hocking their jewelry. The pain is being felt on St. Barth’s and at Sotheby’s, on benefit-gala committees and at the East Hampton Airport, as the world of the Big Rich collapses, its culture in shock and its values in question.

Illustrations by Barry Blitt.

A snapshot: East Hampton, late summer, a lawn party at a house on the ocean overlooking the dunes. The host is a prince of private equity known for dressing well. One of his guests is Steven Cohen, the publicity-shy billionaire whose SAC Capital, with $16 billion under management, is perhaps the most revered of the 10,000 or so hedge funds spawned by this giddily rich time. Nearby is Daniel Loeb, of Third Point, one of the better-known “activist” hedge funds, who hopes to move soon into a 10,700-square-foot, $45 million penthouse at l5 Central Park West, a Manhattan monument to the new gilded age. Gliding easily between them is art dealer Larry Gagosian, so successful at selling Bacons and Serras to Wall Street’s new titans-including to Cohen-that he now travels in his own private jet and has his own helicopter to take him to it.

Continue reading »

Tags: Banks, Credit Crisis, Credit Crunch, Economy, Financial Crisis, Hedge Funds, Lehman Brothers, Mortgage crisis, Mortgages, New York, Society, Stock Market, Unemployment, Wal Street

At least 29 states plus the District of Columbia, including several of the nation’s largest states, faced an estimated $48 billion in combined shortfalls in their budgets for fiscal year 2009 (which began July 1, 2008 in most states.) At least three other states expect budget problems in fiscal year 2010.

Continue reading »

Tags: Alabama, Arizona, Arkansas, Bubble, budget deficit, California, Connecticut, Delaware, Economy, Financial Crisis, Florida, Georgia, Government, Illinois, Iowa, Kentucky, Maine, Maryland, Massachusetts, Michigan, Minnesota, Mississippi, Nevada, New Hampshire, New Jersey, New York, Ohio, Oklahoma, Politics, Recession, Rhode Island, South Carolina, Taxes, Taxpayers, Tennessee, U.S., Vermont, Virginia, Wisconsin