The Last Post from a Party of One

It has been a little more than 16 years since I loaded up my first post on Room Eight, a group blog, after being asked to do so by Ben Smith, then of the New York Observer, later of the Daily News, Politico, Buzzfeed, the New York Times, and now something else.  At the time Tom Suozzi was running for Governor, but every special interest in the state had gotten together and decided to make Eliot Spitzer Governor, and they demanded that Suozzi drop out so an actual election could be avoided.  But that would have meant that those who agreed with Suozzi would not have had a chance to express themselves by voting.  Suozzi did the right thing, stayed in, and lost.  Spitzer resigned in a prostitution scandal sometime later.

Suozzi has won and lost a variety of elections for a variety of offices in the years since, until once again running for Governor this year.  And once again all the special interests got together and decided whom to appoint as Governor and as state legislators, and once again demanded that Suozzi drop out to avoid an election, even monkeying with the dates to ensure as few people voted in the primary as possible.  Once again Suozzi defied them, stayed, in and lost.  Once again this was the right thing to do.  You take your shot, speak your piece, and when you lose, you lose.

That could the theme for this blog too.  Because after 16 years of rowing into a social tsunami, and shouting into a social hurricane, I find I know longer have the heart and energy to keep grinding out what are, in effect, research reports in my spare time, while also working full time doing something very similar.  This will be my last post for the foreseeable future, and quite possibly ever.  It explains why I have done this, and why I will now stop.

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My first post on Saying the Unsaid in New York was in January 2013, nine and one-half years ago, but as noted my first blog post was on Room Eight back in May 2006.   Room Eight started having technical difficulties in 2012, and was shut down after people started threatening its administrator in 2016.

http://r8ny.com/2016/12/09/the-end-of-room-eight/

One could, however, date my participation in public discourse, such as it has been, back further, when I got fed up enough to do my duty as a citizen in a democracy and run for office as a minor party protest candidate.  Here is what I said at the time, in 2004 – as of the date I write this it is still on the internet.

http://www.ipny.org/littlefield/civicunion2020.html

And before that, in 2001, the Taub Urban Research Center at New York University had published my compilation of data from the 1997 Census of Governments, my first such compilation.

And before that, while on the staff of the New York City Department of City Planning, I had been tasked with writing several sections of the Annual Report on Social Indicators, a report mandated by the then-new New York City Charter that passed in 1989.  That was the first time I compiled and analyzed data on the regional economy, commercial real estate market, and local government finances, compared with the past and other parts of the country.  I was 28 years old at the time.  Here is the cover of the first such report.

And a table from it.  Back then, we’re talking about Quattro Pro spreadsheets with data typed in from photocopies or copied by hand at libraries, not downloaded from the internet.

Here is my first chart summarizing the data, from the 1992 Annual Report on Social Indicators, two years later.

Ah, so that’s what’s going on!  I later would come to understand that most of social services “for the poor” was actually mostly Medicaid for the old.  I would watch with growing confidence over the years as city spending on interest and pensions – costs from the past — fell per $1,000 of personal income, allowing spending on actual public services and benefits to increase.  Until that ended, and reversed, and Generation Greed politicians cashed the city and state’s future in.

That was the beginning, and here is where my research on state and local government employment and finances ended up.  

The Most Recent Public Finance Analyses, Charts and Tables

That information will stay there, but new data will only be made available in the future if someone else is willing to compile it.  I remain willing to help by showing any honest and independent party how to do so – if my explanations of where the data comes from and how to compile it, in the first post in each series, are not enough. Regardless of how it may seem to you, it actually isn’t all that hard once you know how to do it. This is funny enough that after seeing this online I added it to the post after the fact.

I left City Planning in 2001.  So why keep doing all this work, on my own time for free, for another 21 years?

At first, I was motivated by hope.  I have been the beneficiary of the prior work of generations who came before, in this country and in my family, who made it better for those coming afterward, including myself, and felt an obligation to make a similar contribution to the future to the extent I could.

And then by fear, as I discovered that starting with Generation Greed the opposite was happening.  The generations in charge, and in particular those on the inside, were making things worse and worse for the common future and those who will live in it, with every deal, policy, economic and social trend working to the detriment of the later born and ordinary people.  Someone had to try to do something to turn this around, or else.

And then by anger.  Not only was the future being cashed in to benefit those working the system, in the public and private sectors, but this was taking place without being explained in the media, controlled by those cashing it in.  What was and is happening, and who was and is benefitting, seemed to be under Omerta.  So that those generations and interests that were grabbing, grabbing, grabbing wouldn’t even have to face the psychological accountability of having the link between what they took and others lost widely reported, discussed and, understood.  Especially if the grabbing was at point in time A, when there was “plenty of money,” and the consequences for others arrived at point in time B, “due to circumstances beyond our control.”

The difference between what was being said and reported, and what I knew to be true (and obviously so based on even a cursory look at readily available data), made me mad as hell. From 1976, though it could have been yesterday.

This has continued to get worse, with the media saturated with so-called news based on press releases from interest groups and the faux think tanks they fund.   So-called news that divides people based on tribalism.  So-called news that tells people who have benefitted from the economic, social and fiscal trends that have left later-born Americans worse off what they want to hear — that someone else is to blame.  

From 1976.

All while readily available sources of information that could describe what has actually happened are ignored.   Shouldn’t the media be examining that data, and then going out to find qualitative information to back it up and explain it?  I guess that wasn’t’ and isn’t what sells.

And now, new generation, new media, same misinformation, disinformation, ignoring politically inconvenient information that isn’t what you want to hear, while providing a zillion outlets for non-information.  

More than once over the past 20 years I have been struck by what is called “news” and what is called “opinion.”  On both Marketwatch and Bloomberg News I have read articles that analyzed readily available public data, considered its strengths and weaknesses, reported what the data showed, and explained what it might mean.  These articles were in Marketwatch Opinion and Bloomberg Opinion.  

If the reporting of factual information is “opinion,” then what is “news?”  Look at the so-called news stories in just about any media outlet and you’ll read “so and so said something.”  For some reason someone saying something is considered news, and not opinion, even if the so and so that said something is a Kardashian, or some other celebrity. 

There is a consequence of this.  Consider what David Gergen, journalist and advisor to Presidents, said about this country back in 2010.

https://www.commonwealthclub.org/events/archive/transcript/david-gergen-will-america-remain-great-nation

In general we’ve been very, very good at responding to emergencies. Where we’ve had real trouble is in responding to chronic conditions that build up over time. A sage once said that America is excellent when we have a wolf at the door; we are pretty terrible when we have termites in the basement. That has been my experience to a significant degree in politics and what I continue to see happening today.

What he didn’t get was that the country was and is being run by the termites – termite groups, termite interests, termite generations.

Over time we have allowed all these problems to build up, and now they are all falling on us at the same time. All this postponement is coming home to roost at the very moment when our political system seems so polarized and paralyzed. Many of us thought that President Obama could turn the page, that he could open a new chapter in American politics. We still hope that, but frankly that hope has waned for a great number of Americans, and if anything we are more polarized today than we were before he was elected. It’s a sad thing to see, and it’s troublesome about where we find ourselves.

In the face of this I have tried to break the Omerta, with regard to Generation Greed and the consequences of its choices for those coming after, and with regard to the executive/financial class and (in New York) the political/union class, and the consequences of their self-dealing for the serfs.  And tried and tried.  And tried and tried and tried.

Some have suggested over the years that I engage in more self-promotion, perhaps on social media sites such as Twitter or Facebook and the like.  But I’m not a social media type of guy – the only social media site I’ve ever been on is Linkedin, and only because I needed to find a new job.  You can’t present facts and evidence in 180 characters.  I don’t accept something to be true just because someone else, usually someone with a selfish interest involved, says so.  I don’t expect that anyone would accept that from me either.  Why bother to read anything I write in the absence of facts and evidence?

Perhaps 100 tweets on 100 ways Generation Greed has left those to follow worse off?  I’ll leave that to someone else.  They can find the facts to back it up in what I have already written.

The assertion that I have wasted my time, because I have failed to engage in self-promotion, is ironic.  Three years ago, I found that I had been simultaneously banned from commenting on two websites, and that someone had apparently tried to get me banned from commenting on others.

It Would Seem That Somebody Doesn’t Like NYC Public Finance Charts

When commenting on those sites I had at times provided links back to posts I had written that contained spreadsheets, charts, links to original sources, etc. – facts and evidence – as support for what I was saying.  I had also found that Disqus allows charts to be dropped right into the comment.  After banning me from commenting, I found that the two sites then went back and deleted every comment I had made with a chart in it.

When Ben Smith asked one of the sites why I had been banned, the answer was because of self-promotion!  I don’t believe that was the actual reason, but if it was — damned if you do, damned if you don’t, damned if you don’t and they say you do.

The Twitter and Facebook crowd, however, is not the audience I wanted anyway.  I wanted the sort of people who would actually download the spreadsheets, look at the data themselves, follow the links to articles cited, compare all this with their own experience, and make up their own minds.  That’s why when I compiled a dataset and used it to write a series of post explaining what I found, the first post just explained where the data came from and what was done with it – and put it out there, so people could see it and make up their own minds, before hearing from me.  I have been writing for open-minded, curious, fair-minded people.  All 77 of them, on planet earth, because for some reason lots of people outside New York – or even the United States – have been reading this blog.

In addition to providing information for policy wonks, one of the main goals of this blog was, for lack of a better word, plagiarism.  To have others, perhaps those in the media who have the ability to digest information into easier, more palatable forms, absorb the information I was producing, come to think of it as their own, and reproduce it after following up and trying to explain it.  Thus getting around the ego problem – people only really being interested in what they think of themselves.  After all, aside from patterns I’ve noticed in numbers, where did all my own knowledge come from?  From being curious, and learning a little bit here, a little bit there, and having it mix together in my brain until something new came out.

As far as I know this happened just once, when someone told Brian Rosenthal of the NY Times that I knew a great deal about mass transit finance, and I pointed him to a comparative analysis of mass transit finances I had done using data from the National Transit Database.  Don’t just read what I wrote and write “Larry Littlefield said,” I told him.  Look at the actual data and go back to the original source to make sure I didn’t just make it up.  And see if you see anything in it I didn’t.  So instead of “Larry Littlefield said” the Times could say “this is the way things really are,” before finding out why.  He actually did this.

I hoped at the time that a lightbulb would come on, and journalists covering the city and state would start combing through the data that gets released all the time by major statistical agencies, looking for important trends and conditions to be described and explained.  It didn’t happen.  

Even so, WordPress tells me that more and more people have been downloading the spreadsheets in recent years, both as they are added, and from the past.  Often far more people than the number who are recorded as actually reading the posts.  And that’s good.

Why stop now?

Changing personal circumstances have led to a loss of heart and energy.   After a long spell of unemployment during the pandemic, I find I am no longer able to ride a bike 8 ½ miles to work, work all day downloading data, analyzing spreadsheets, and writing reports, bike 8 ½ miles home, eat dinner – and then spend free time downloading data, analyzing spreadsheets, and writing reports.  I just want to go to sleep.  

I had been able to repeat to myself “the journey of 1,000 miles begins with a single step” and start writing.  Now I find the single step that I used to take easily has become very hard.   Many people started blogging around the same time I did.  I think I outlasted most of them.  

Nothing new to say.

I’ve tried to put everything I know about state and local government policy, in New York compared with elsewhere, now compared with the past, on the internet.  At some point, however, you know so much, and have said so much, that there isn’t going to be much that is new.  I long had a set of MS-Word documents, in the upper left and corner of my home computer desktop, with the start of outlines of things that I wanted to write about at some point.  That is now empty.

I’m just glad I’m not a professional journalist.  I only had to write something when I had something to write.

No confidence I’ll find a better way to say it.

I have to face the reality that my ability to analyze and explain things may have peaked.  I was once disappointed to find, having written a new post on a subject, that people were reading an old one from several years before, perhaps directed there by a search engine.  Now I wonder if a new post I write might instead make it less likely that someone will read a better one I have already written.

When I started Saying the Unsaid in New York I wasn’t sure if Room Eight would remain on the internet, and created a page of some of the better posts I had written there from 2006 through 2012, in MS-Word format.

Greatest Pre-2013 Hits From the Old Room Eight Blog

I have now created an additional page, a catalog of links to key Saying the Unsaid in New York posts, by category, from 2013 to 2022.  

Catalog of Links To Key Saying the Unsaid In New York Posts From 2013 to 2022

Read through these, and the data analysis posts in The Most Recent Public Finance Analyses, Charts and Tables page, and you’ll know most of what I do.  Combine that with things learned elsewhere, and perhaps you’ll have a much better idea of what has actually happened that what you are getting.  I feel pretty good about what I’ve written over the past five or six years.  I don’t think I can top it, or even match it, going forward.

Diminishing confidence in the data.

There is always new information coming out, of course, but some of the data I used to write about routinely is no longer made readily available, or is coming out with big errors – generally only for New York City, in ways that makes New York’s state and local government appear to be less of an extreme case.  

I worry about falsification.  I never wrote much about the federal government, but I did once compile and write about long term trends in federal revenues, expenditures and debt every four years.  Somehow, however, during 2020 I didn’t feel like downloading that data from Whitehouse.gov.  With the spread of fascist-like autocracy around the world, this seems to be a global trend.

https://www.economist.com/finance-and-economics/2022/05/19/indias-once-vaunted-statistical-infrastructure-is-crumbling

In a modern economy there is no substitute for high-quality national data-gathering. The sunlight provided by accurate figures is often unwelcome for an increasingly autocratic government: transparency invites accountability. But neglect of the statistical services also leaves Indian policymakers flailing in the dark, unable to quickly spot and respond to brewing economic and social problems. ■

In the U.S., it used to be the Republicans who wanted to suppress data and de-fund statistical agencies, often using “privacy” as an excuse — even as private companies created increasingly detailed dossiers on every one of us with neither compensation nor permission.  After the wave of retroactive pension increases and underfunding led to soaring public employee pension costs, and given soaring Medicaid costs, however, not wanting too much “uncurated” information available to those who could not be relied upon to provide the “correct” interpretation – and none of the back-up – has become bi-partisan.  We have passed the point of peak transparency in the United States.    

And so data that was once readily available in easy to analyze form has been only put out in raw form, if at all.  Forcing me to do more and more work to compile it. 

One example is the DAC-REX files that the Governments Division of the U.S. Census Bureau once put out – spreadsheets with state level data on state and local government finances with every data item for every available year starting in 1972.  That data could be adjusted for inflation for a trend in per capita spending or revenue by category, or divided by the personal income of each state.  The Census Bureau stopped putting those files out after FY 2008.  But I have spent many, many hours painstakingly updating them through FY 2019. 

These files, up to 7.2MB, are too large to upload to this site.  But I loaded them on Google Drive and there is a link to them in the THE MOST RECENT PUBLIC FINANCE ANALYSES, CHARTS AND TABLES page – for anyone’s use.

Even if decent data continues to be compiled and published – not something to be taken for granted with Generation Greed still in charge – the past few COVID years are not representative of where things may be going in the long run – my main interest.  Since good data lags, it may be 2024 before new data I’d want to write about becomes available.  That’s too a long span to try to cover with Old Man Yells at (the) Cloud posts.

There is ever more tribalism, allowing Generation Greed to limit public discussion to its culture war issues.

The Supreme Court has done Democrats and their special interests, Republicans and their special interests, and Generation Greed –a big favor with their recent decisions on culture war issues such as abortion and guns.  They were starting to struggle to come up with culture war issues to change the subject to – having politics and news coverage be exclusively about where the transgendered go to the bathroom was a bit of a stretch.  Now it will be easier.  And yes, keeping the reality of Generation Greed, and the executive/financial class and political/union class vs. the serfs, under Omerta is what the culture wars are really about.

https://nypost.com/2022/06/29/how-lee-zeldin-could-win-against-kathy-hochul-in-november/

Congressman Zeldin and Governor Hochul are now in a narrative war, and whoever wins it will win the election,” political consultant Bill O’Reilly told The Post in a text.

“To Zeldin, this race is about inflation, taxes, and crime. To Hochul, it’s about abortion, guns, and January 6. That’s all we’re going to be hearing from the candidates for the next four months.”

You bet the party of Anthony Weiner and the party of Roger Stone want to control the narrative.  So they don’t have to talk about how O’Reilly’s generation inherited a country that had been built up and improved, in prosperity, power and fairness, over many generations – and cashed it in.  

Or why it is that New Yorkers find their public services inadequate and the needs of the poor unmet, despite the nation’s highest tax burden, and who has benefitted from this.  

Or how much of this situation in New York City is not only because money is sucked into the past by those now dead or in Florida, but also to other parts of the state, and other parts of the country.

I hope those who have read this blog will always remember that the falsehoods that are said are the unsophisticated lies, the Fox News and MSNBC-level lies.  The sophisticated lies involve the unsaid.

If I was going to succeed in breaking Omerta, it would have happened already.

There is this from the aforementioned David Gergen just this year, putting a little crack in the Omerta, and calling for the Baby Boomers and those older to get out of the way, having failed the country and robbed the future, and allow Millennials and Gen Z to take over and perhaps turn things around. 

Gergen later tweeted that Millennials and Gen Z should take over from the Baby Boomers, something that got an immediate reaction.

https://www.huffpost.com/entry/david-gergen-cnn-generation-x_n_627b5928e4b0d7ea4cd40ffc

Generation X was forgotten, again.  David Gergen, CNN analyst and adviser to four presidents, tweeted that it was time for Baby Boomers to step aside and let a new generation take the reins of power. But he skipped right over one.

“Baby Boomers have been running the country for nearly three decades.  Some successes, a number of disappointments.  It is time to pass the baton to younger generations:  Millennials and Gen Z.”

Notice what’s missing?

Plenty of people on Twitter did. He completely ignored Generation X ― both in his tweet and during the CNN appearance he promoted.

I’m a late Boomer myself, and late Boomers – born after 1957 – actually share most of the characteristics, and situation during their formative years, with Gen X.  So not Generation Greed.  Generation Apathy.

We were in high school when the average male wage started to fall, and in college when the Reagan tax cuts first caused the federal debt to soar.  We knew we’d be made worse off to pay it back.  Then there was the 1982 legislation to raise our payroll taxes, just as we hit the labor force, and cut our future Social Security benefits, less than a decade after benefits had been increased for existing beneficiaries.  Two-tier labor contracts, with lower pay and benefits for new hires, were rolling through business and industry at the time.  

And our response?  “We’re screwed anyway, so we might as well just worry about ourselves.”  I’m not paraphrasing here.  It is a direct statement I recall from a classmate.  One reason Generation Apathy was apathetic is that after a rough start, things turned out OK, at least thus far, for college educated people who entered the labor force in the 1980s.  And after a rough start, things turned out OK for graduate school educated people who entered the labor force in the 1990s, the core of Gen X.  

And these articulate groups didn’t worry about what was happening to the less well educated – though we will share their fate in old age, as the government goes broke.  If the U.S. ever does bite the bullet while it remains an alternative to biting the dust, it is now too late for us to be around to reap the later benefits.  We’ll be gone, perhaps quite a few years earlier than those who came before.  Meanwhile, among the Millennials even the highly educated are much worse off that those who came before had been at the same point in life.

Former President Barack Obama was born exactly one day after I was.  Great! I remember thinking back when he was elected.  From now on the leadership will pass to those younger than me, instead of the miserable lot that is older than me.  Perhaps the next generation will do better.  It can’t do worse.

Obama took office in early 2009.  The next President will take office in early 2025 – sixteen years later. Sixteen years!  If Generation Apathy was going to push out Generation Greed and start turning things around, that’s when it would have, could have, and probably should have happened.  That was our chance.

As it is, Obama turned out to be a very conservative president, keeping us on the downward glide path, making a few tweaks – and running up a lot of debt to protect all existing interests from significant change.  In part because that’s what the Baby Boom congress wanted, especially after 2010.  Get the government out of my Medicaid!  So now, after Generation Apathy, we have generations even more screwed.  To misquote JFK, with the same generation still in charge, a new generation has gotten torched.

Back when I was in college, I got started on college radio (WRCU Hamilton) by doing the 11 pm Sunday news.  I would introduce my newscast by saying here are things that have already happened and you can no longer do anything about.  Another 42 years of such things have been added, and Generation Apathy didn’t do anything about them.  Too late now.

And 42 years before that, my parents were born.  Back then there was not only no internet, but also no television.  Barring disaster – the wolf at the door – things don’t change that much day to day, or year to year.  But look back further, as far back as there is reasonably comparable data – or data that could be made reasonably comparable – and you see that big changes have happened.  And probably will happen again, if not in my lifetime, then in my children’s lifetime.  Direction uncertain, but it doesn’t look good.

But no one seems to compile and report that long term data, to see the massive things that are actually happening that don’t involve things celebrities are saying, and narratives various tribes among Generation Greed are pushing.

Now another century gone. What are we going to leave for the young?  What we couldn’t do, or what we wouldn’t do.  It’s a crime, but does it matter?  Does it matter much?  Does it matter much to you?  Does it ever really matter?  Yes it really really matters.

Is there nothing we can say or do?  Blame the future on the past, always lost in blood and guts, and when they’ve gone, it’s me and you.

I may be a member of Generation Apathy, but after blogging for 16 years you can’t say I’m apathetic.  But I am burned out.

I will do a couple of things.  I’ll turn on two factor authentication.  I was reluctant to do so because at some point my old flip phone will stop working, I’d lose control of its number, and be locked out of my own blog. That’s OK now.  

And I’ll see if I can take some counter-party risk and pay up to keep those annoying ads – about toe fungus and rectal issues – off the site for at least a few years.  I actually believe the ads are phony, meant to embarrass people into paying for WordPress instead of using it for free.  In my case, once they were pointed out to me, it worked like a charm.  I get the sense that quite a few people are reading what I write on mirror sites somewhere.  If you are seeing ads you aren’t reading my blog directly.  I have paid — through February 2028.

So how shall I end this?  Perhaps by linking to a video by the Saw Doctors, led by Davy Carton (born 1959) and Leo Moran (born 1964), my late boomer contemporaries, who created so many great songs and should have been better known.  Here is one about being depressed that the community is going to hell (in their case because their hometown sugar beet industry was failing).  But somehow holding out hope, like David Gergen, that despite the accumulated thicket of privileges, favors, deals, and deficiencies, the next generation can still control its own destiny and turn things around.

But the kids have dreams, brand new dreams, they’re in control of a bright new future, the kids have dreams.

Yup, dreams like crypto, internet sports betting, internet porn, vaping, extremely potent marijuana, and in the end – fentanyl.  Sorry kids, I did what I could.  Goodbye, and good luck.