Political Class Dismissed

Free NY’s roll-out of its ten point plan for real reform was a grand slam: all four TV news stations and the four main local radio stations covered the event: TW, 2, 4, 7, WBEN, WNED, WBFO and WECK. I called into WECK on the way down while Dave DiPietro was interviewing Carl Paladino and we had a nice quick chat.

Channel 7 went live at noon with Julie Fine while Rich Newberg followed us into Antoine Thompson’s office only to be told his cameras are barred from the building. Nice.

The lady from WBFO was on her first day and a wild day it was.

Anyway, here’s the ten point plan:

1. Make gerrymandering illegal. There is no need for a bipartisan committee to do so. Just mandate that the districts be geometrically compact and allow any citizen to sue to keep you honest.

2. Abolish all forms of corporate welfare, subsidies grants, loans, enterprise zones. These are just excuses to give politicians power to extract donations from business people. Roll all of the savings into an across the board tax cut.

3. Merge all school districts into the local towns; the town council becomes the board; no more special elections where few vote.

4. Abolish all authorities and special districts. Merge into local governments, privatize them, or, as with IDAs, abolish them.

5. Equalize private and public sector salaries and benefits.

6. Convert state pensions to defined contribution plans and eliminate pensions for all elected officials and all benefits of any kind for part-time elected officials.

7. Eliminate all the well-known pension scams such as the using overtime to inflate the “high-three.”

8. Abolish all Medicaid extras not required by federal law and cap spending until we spend the average of other states.

9. Hire the Ohio and PA budget directors for a million dollars each so they can tell us why they spend 68 cents to the NY dollar on state and local government.

10. Finally, legalize medical marijuana. Marijuana helps cancer patients better tolerate chemotherapy treatment. It helps them fight the severe nausea that destroys their appetites and threatens malnutrition. It is time that NY stop its barbaric practice of arresting sick people for taking medicine!

For the various policy studies that underlie these proposals, go to FreeNewYork.org.