We can only assume that there would be a much larger benefit to the New York Budget when Marriage Equality is Passed. A 2007 NYC Comptroller’s Report “Love Counts: The Economic Benefits of Marriage Equality for New York” estimates that legalizing gay marriage would:

add $142 million, on a net basis, to New York City’s economy during the three years following legislative approval. It would add about $184 million, on a net basis, in spending to the State’s economy.

The Economix blog makes the overall point I would have:

More recently, economic desperation has helped reshape how we think about the regulation of other social issues — including policies related to state-sanctioned gambling, marijuana, immigration and even prostitution.

Theoretically, our laws are supposed to be based on our sense of morality, and not mercenary interests, wherever you come down on social issues like same-sex marriage and gambling. But when push comes to shove, the issue facing many politicians is whether they can afford to restrict behaviors that some constituents may find  “immoral” but which happen to be quite lucrative.

Anyone more interested in this topic should check out the Chamber of Commerce’s The Economic Impact of Gay Marriage event.

So what’s next? The Division of the Budget has a handy little guide:

The Legislature, primarily through its fiscal committees – Senate Finance and Assembly Ways and Means – analyzes the Governor’s spending proposals and revenue estimates, holds public hearings on major programs, and seeks further information from the Division of the Budget and other State agencies. Following that review, the Legislature acts on the appropriation bills submitted with the Executive Budget.

But now to the meat of the bills, what did Cuomo actually propose? At the highest level, if the budget were passed by the legislature as is, it wold be the first in decades to actually reduce spending–meaning a lot of state agency, Cities and citizens are going to have to feel the pain. “Planned spending on Medicaid programs and local school aid would each be cut by $2.85 billion,” but on Medicare “he declined to articulate specific cuts. The tough calls, he said, would be left up to a special policy team of health-care industry figures, who have less than two months to figure out how to squeeze savings.” Even a member of that policy team notes: “It will require alchemists, not policy wonks or providers, to transform cuts of this magnitude into gold.”

On education, the WSJ continues:

The most dramatic cuts fell on education, provoking criticism from Democratic lawmakers, teachers unions and the Bloomberg administration, which decried the loss in funding to city schools as unfair.

Under the governor’s plan, state spending on public schools would drop 1.7% from the current-year total. Between 1999 and 2009, school spending grew at a compound annual average rate of 6.3%, according to the Empire Center for New York State Policy, a fiscal think tank.

The Mayor is obviously a little upset:

Unfortunately, the budget does not treat New York City equitably; it eliminates 100 percent of New York City’s revenue sharing aid – more than $300 million – while cutting other localities by just 2 percent. The residents of our five counties pay a disproportionate amount of State taxes, and they deserve the same level of support.

The proposed budget also

• shrinks the state’s prison system by 3,500 beds in medium- and minimum-security facilities, although he doesn’t specify where, that would be left to a commission;
• includes a 10% cut to state agencies, which if not approved will lead to nearly 10,000 public worker being laid off if the Unions don’t come to terms;
• does not propose extending a temporary state income tax increase on wealthy New Yorkers; and,
• cuts $125 million in property-tax rebates as he seeks a permanent cap on local property tax growth.

Other IOC chairs and I will have more in-depth analysis of the budget, its cuts, and the budget process over the coming weeks and months as everything unfolds.

“We’ve got seniors who think bike lanes are walkways. We’ve got police cars using bike lanes as a quick way around town. We’ve got taxi cabs pulling up so close to the bike lanes that a passenger gets out and actually doors a cyclist.”

Or as Michael Green, the president of the Century Road Club Association, explained in the same Wall Street Journal article:

…recounting the recent comments of a friend. “Her attitude was, ‘The laws that protect cyclists are never going to be enforced, so why obey rules that aren’t going to be used to help you?’” Mr. Green said. “It’s amazing the people I see riding and not obeying traffic laws. It’s across the board, from teenagers to 65-year-old women.”

The lawlessness Mr. Green and others described is easy to find: Pedestrians who routinely jaywalk and stand in bike lanes; a woman pushing a man in a wheelchair down the protected bike lane on Broadway; a bike messenger racing through a red light on Sixth Avenue; cars that use bike lanes as passing lanes; wrong-way cycling along the protected lane on First Avenue.

That isn’t to suggest that bikers are completely innocent. Biking on the sidewalk happens much more than it should, as does biking against traffic on a busy road. To address these many problems, the Department of Transportation is unveiling a new set of campaigns according to the WSJ article:

In the next few months, DOT will unveil several campaigns for radio, television and billboards. One series of television ads will take aim at cyclists who ride on sidewalks, pedal through red lights and go against traffic.

The campaign, titled “Don’t Be a Jerk,” will feature prominent New Yorkers preaching bike etiquette. Mario Batali, the famed chef and restaurant owner, recently filmed a spot.

Lets hope the campaigns are successful, bikers, drivers and pedestrians would all be better off if everyone followed the rules.

“I am,” Sarah Palin told me … when I asked her if she was already weighing a run for president. “I’m engaged in the internal deliberations candidly, and having that discussion with my family, because my family is the most important consideration here.”  Palin went on to say that there weren’t meaningful differences in policy among the field of G.O.P. hopefuls “but that in fact there’s more to the presidency than that” and that her decision would involve evaluating whether she could bring unique qualities to the table. “Yes, the organization would have to change,” Palin said during an hourlong phone conversation.

That obviously doesn’t come as much of a surprise, but the article released today (and which will be in this weekend’s NYT Magazine) is a remarkable feature on Palin and her team. It’s exactly what the Times has billed it as: “A who’s who and what’s what of the inner circle of the top G.O.P. shadow candidate.” Politico reports that “Draper began the piece in January, and interviewed Palin on Nov. 4.” In some ways I hope she does get nominated. Not because I want her to be President — I obviously don’t — but because I’m pretty sure there isn’t a more polarizing figure on the right. There is no one Republican candidate more likely to get our fellow Democrats out to vote on November 6, 2012.

(Cartoon by Clay Bennett, as seen here.)

Chalk it up to my old age (I’m staring down 31 next month), but it seems to me that counting on candidates to provide incentives for voting is a little bit like paying a kid for earning good grades. It breeds reward seekers, not responsible citizens. Of course, having a leader who speaks directly to the issues we care most about — education, the economy, immigration — and can quote Jay-Z to boot is pretty inspiring. But it would be unwise for us to grow accustomed to the luxury of external inspiration when it comes to electoral politics. There won’t likely be another Barack Obama in our lifetime.

Instead, we must be motivated by the promise of something less sparkly but more sacred: a country that reflects our deeply held values. That might sound like a pipe dream at a time when we can’t even get basic climate legislation passed, but one of the gifts of youth is a bit of naive idealism. In a recent survey, Rock the Vote found that 83 percent of young people believe that their generation has the power to change the world.

Although I think her narrative about hand-holding values is a little naive, I think she is tangentially speaking to a point I have been thinking about for awhile. Young people should not be enthusiastic about candidates; they should be enthusiastic about issues that candidates should be forced to agree with if they want the youth vote. I am tired of politicians thinking of young people (and particularly the Young Democrats) as a glorified field operation (my opinion, not MYD’s). Instead, they should be thought of a constituency that needs to be wooed and bargained with, just like any other.

But for that to happen, we have to assert ourselves. We have to stand up, collectively in some large group, and say this is what we’re for and this is what we’re against. Young people should vote in masses, and it shouldn’t be that there is candidate that motives people to vote, it should be that young people demanding their interests get represented. We should be enthusiastic for candidates who agree with us, and refuse to work for candidates who do not. And young people should be running for office to move parts of those debates forward.

Young people I know often complain that their vote doesn’t matter, and to a large extent it doesn’t’. But that could change. It could change if we organized in to a group and voted as a bloc. With friends over this last weekend, but also before, I’ve mentioned that we should form an “AAYP,” the American Association for Young People. There is the League of Youth Voters, but their mission is slightly less holistic (although no less important) as they “focus on non-college youth and youth from low-income communities and communities of color.” There is also the United States Student Association, but again, instead of trying to form a lobbying and benefits organization for all young people, their community is more specific. Until such a comprehensive, well-run organization exists, until young people both vote and demand something for their votes, we’ll be ignored.

Because, in truth, I think a lot of politicians prefer we did not vote (certainly a lot of older people prefer that). They like us when we make phone calls, but if we have a policy idea than it is assumed we don’t know what we’re talking about. It is true that sometimes we don’t know what we’re talking about, but neither do most Congressmen. We should be organized as a collective force. Our vote should be more than something to be courted, it should be won.

House Republicans late Thursday were able to corral enough votes to defeat a bill that would have provided up to $7.4 billion in aid to those sickened by toxins resulting from the 9/11 attacks.

In the process, they set off a host of fiery speeches and denunciations from their Democratic colleagues and produced a veritable YouTube moment from Rep. Anthony Weiner (D-N.Y), whose district includes many of the affected.

Well worth watching:

Stringer is the only mayoral contendor who raised much money in the past six months:

Mr. Stringer raised more than $600,000 this year, and he said he intends to carry over about $1 million from his re-election campaign last year.

“I’m gratified by the close to 1,000 people who contributed, and I’m moving forward,” Mr. Stringer said in an interview. “This is a long journey.”

Thompson has also made his intentions clear:

“It is definitely my intention to run for mayor in 2013 and we’ll begin that process in the latter part of this year,” Mr. Thompson said in an interview.

2013 is going to be an interesting year. If all five ran, we’d also have big fields in the comptroller and Manhattan Borough President races. Not that my political acumen matters much, but if all five ran and went the distance to Primary day, I would bet on Liu.

Publicly, Cuomo has supported Paterson’s positions at key moments while not appearing to meddle. When the Legislature tried to replace school-aid cuts with tax increases, Cuomo spoke out forcefully on Paterson’s behalf at a press conference. Behind the scenes, Cuomo has been even more active. “Andrew’s mark is all over this budget,” a Democratic insider says. “He began a dialogue with Paterson about a month ago, and they’ve been having nearly daily conversations and Andrew talks a ton to Larry Schwartz,” Paterson’s chief of staff.

Paterson and Schwartz came up with a stroke of political genius—the lame-duck governor’s threats to shut down state government have enabled him to force weekly budget concessions from the Legislature. Cuomo has successfully bolstered their choices, from cuts to education spending to holding the line on most tax increases to fending off the temptation to add billions to the state’s deficit through Ravitch’s plan. Winning those battles now, by Paterson proxy, reduces the pain Cuomo will need to inflict should he get elected. The risk is that Cuomo has antagonized the Legislature six months before he’s sworn in. Last week, he declared that the Legislature was “dreaming” if it didn’t agree to a Medicaid-funding contingency plan and said the Legislature had “accomplished absolutely nothing” in their revisions to Paterson’s budget. “It’s classic Andrew,” says an Albany insider who likes Cuomo. “The fundamental points are accurate, but it’s going a little too far, it’s saying a little too much.”

In the 77 days since oil from the ruptured Deepwater Horizon began to gush into the Gulf of Mexico, BP has skimmed or burned about 60 percent of the amount it promised regulators it could remove in a single day.

The disparity between what BP promised in its March 24 filing with federal regulators and the amount of oil recovered since the April 20 explosion underscores what some officials and environmental groups call a misleading numbers game that has led to widespread confusion about the extent of the spill and the progress of the recovery.

…

In a March report that was not questioned by federal officials, BP said it had the capacity to skim and remove 491,721 barrels of oil each day in the event of a major spill.

As of Monday, with about 2 million barrels released into the gulf, the skimming operations that were touted as key to preventing environmental disaster have averaged less than 900 barrels a day.

Skimming has captured only 67,143 barrels, and BP has relied on burning to remove 238,095 barrels. Most of the oil recovered — about 632,410 barrels — was captured directly at the site of the leaking well.