Mayor Michael Bloomberg via ABC News: "The protesters are protesting against people who make $40- or $50,000 a year and are struggling to make ends meet. That's the bottom line. Those are the people who work on Wall Street or in the finance sector.” In fact the mean payroll per worker in the Finance and Insurance sector in Downstate New York was $231,822 in 2010, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. For all private workers outside the Finance and Insurance sector, the mean payroll per worker in Downstate New York was $57,806 in 2010, or 30 percent above the U.S. average. An advantage indicative of and cancelled out by a higher cost of living. There used to be a lot of people in finance in NYC who earned $40,000 to $50,000. They were back office workers, who did things like due diligence. What ever wasn’t automated was outsourced following the early 1990s recession, and NYC lost tens of thousands of those “pink collar” jobs. 

From the NY Times City Room, “when asked about the latest budget cuts, Michael Mulgrew, president of the United Federation of Teachers, said that city schools ‘have been cut to the bone’ and were already stretched to their limit.” Actually spending on the city’s schools is going up by a $billion this year and went up by $billions more in the past few years, but it is all being diverted to the retired as a result of a UFT “victory” in a 2008 retroactive pension enhancement that allowed teachers to retire at age 55 after 25 years of work rather than 62 after 30, and other previous pension deals. 

Also from the Times: “Patrick J. Lynch, president of the Patrolmen’s Benevolent Association, warned of projected cuts to the Police Department. “The last thing this city should plan to do for the future,” Mr. Lynch said, ‘is to reduce the staffing of the N.Y.P.D., which has already been stripped to the bone in our local neighborhood precincts.’” According to Census Bureau data I published last week, NYC has nearly 2 ½ times the U.S. average number of police officers relative to population.

The Occupy Wall Street people don’t get it. I know this because if they did, they would be much angrier. But I guess propaganda works. Meanwhile, this is why reading or listening to the news just gets me ticked off.