new york

Regulation of the Day 191: Sippy Cups

by Ryan Young on August 1, 2011 · 4 comments

in Nanny State, Regulation, Regulation of the Day

Post image for Regulation of the Day 191: Sippy Cups

Children are messy. That’s why Richard Belanger, one of mankind’s unsung heroes, invented the sippy cup. By taking advantage of surface tension, liquid won’t spill out even if the cup is held upside down.  Even the most determined toddler has a hard time making a mess.

Then came the lawyers.

New York’s state legislature just passed a bill requiring warning labels to be put on all sippy cups sold in the state. It isn’t because sippy cups are dangerous. They don’t have sharp edges. They aren’t toxic. Nor are they a choking hazard. No, it’s because sometimes parents sometimes fill sippy cups with liquids that contain sugar, such as fruit juice. The labels warn that giving your child such drinks will cause tooth decay.

A similar bill passed last year, but fell victim to then-Gov. David Paterson’s veto pen. Current Gov. Andrew Cuomo’s stance on sippy cup policy is unknown. He will see some interest group pressure, though:

“I can show you photos of children who go to bed with sippy cups,” said Mark Feldman, executive director of the state Dental Association, which pressed for the bill.

“All you see is little black stumps that is all that is left of the teeth,” he added.

And I can show you a busybody who spends entirely too much time worrying about other people’s children. If his strongest argument is anecdotal hyperbole (possibly photoshopped?), then his case is weak indeed.

Either that, or the ADA felt the need to have a legislative accomplishment to brag about in its newsletter to prove its clout.

Regulation Roundup

by Ryan Young on June 28, 2011

in Features, Nanny State, Regulation

Post image for Regulation Roundup

With the unemployment rate still over 9 percent, regulators have been very busy tending to their own job security. Here are some of their more recent make-work programs:

New York Snow Debacle Shows: It’s Government Unions vs. Taxpayers

by Ivan Osorio on January 5, 2011 · 1 comment

in Deregulate to Stimulate, Economy, Employment, Labor, Regulation

The longstanding alliance between Democratic politicians and government employee unions has come under increasing strain, as I recently noted in a Washington Times op ed. Now the New York City snow cleanup slowdown is adding to that strain.

As state and local governments face large and growing budget shortfalls, the individuals who lead those governments are having to make hard decisions on where to cut spending. And the area with the most room to cut is public employee compensation, which has far outstripped that in the private sector. Thus, simply eliminating waste in other parts of city and state budgets won’t bring the books into balance. As the Manhattan Institute’s Nicole Gelinas notes in City Journal:

Only if state and local politicians identify the true culprit behind the botched post-storm cleanup: the misguided idea that management expertise can overcome the benefits costs that are consuming the city budget.

If money could melt snow, Mayor Bloomberg would be basking in victory over the storm. When he took office in 2002, Gotham spent $1.3 billion annually on the Department of Sanitation. Today, the city spends more than $2.2 billion on “New York’s Strongest.” That increase during Bloomberg’s tenure was almost three and a half times the inflation rate. It follows that we should have a sanitation army well equipped to clean the white stuff up fast. Not quite. Today’s budgeted sanitation force—from supervisors to garbage collectors—is 392 people smaller than it was nine years ago, a 4 percent decline even as population is up. And the department is shrinking further, as Deputy Mayor Stephen Goldsmith knocks 200 people off the rolls to save $21 million by moving supervisors into front-line jobs.

So where has the city’s swelling sanitation budget gone? Not into better services but into workers’ health care and pensions, as well as borrowing to fund infrastructure, which would otherwise be unaffordable because of those sky-high benefits. Taxpayers now spend $144,000 on salary and benefits for each sanitation worker, up from $79,000 nearly a decade ago. Nine years ago, taxpayers contributed about $10.5 million annually to support sanitation pensions; this year, they’ll cost $240 million—a more than twentyfold increase (the final number may be lower, though, as some changes to the pension funds, which push up contribution rates, may not go into effect until next year).

Such generous government employee compensation packages are not only expensive — they are impervious to economic downturns. So, as private businesses retrench or cut back hours, governments must carry on, even as tax revenues fall, until they reach a crisis stage at which draconian measures become necessary. Yet even then, government employee unions are wont to push back against any curbs in compensation, as the New York snow cleanup slowdown painfully shows. Thus, elected officials have no option but to face government unions head on, as Gelinas recommends.

Bloomberg should direct his innovators to focus on where the money is, reducing taxpayers’ commitments to pay future retiree benefits before they consume even more of the budget. He could run a media campaign, for example, to help the public understand that Governor Andrew Cuomo must do wholesale pension change so that new workers, not taxpayers, take more responsibility for their retirements. Further, as union workers would chafe under a serious effort to pare back health benefits in future contracts, the mayor needs an old-fashioned labor-wars veteran to make sure that employees aren’t executing stealthy work slowdowns, as some sanitation workers may have done last week.

That course of action will be difficult, but if carried out effectively, likely would meet widespread  support among the general public — from whom government unions are also becoming increasingly disconnected. As Wall Street Journal columnist William McGurn notes:

In theory, of course, organized labor is all about fraternal solidarity. For many years, it is true, private-sector unions supported collective-bargaining rights and better benefits for government workers, while public-employee unions supported the private-sector unions in their opposition to legislation such as the North American Free Trade Agreement in the 1990s.

Suddenly, it’s a different world. In this recession, for example, construction workers are suffering from unemployment levels roughly double the national rate, according to a recent analysis of federal jobs data by the Associated General Contractors of America. They are relearning, the hard way, that without a growing economy, all the labor-friendly laws and regulations in the world won’t keep them working.

What’s more, “blue-collar union workers are beginning to appreciate that the generous pensions and health benefits going to their counterparts in state and local government are coming out of their pockets,” says Steven Malanga, a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute. “Not only that, they are beginning to understand the dysfunctional relationship between collective bargaining for government employees and their own job prospects.”

It’s no coincidence that states that have barred collective bargaining for government employees, such as Virginia, have found it much easier to keep their finances in order. That’s the least the taxpaying public should expect.

For more on government employee unions, see here and here.

Union Holds New York Hostage

by Ivan Osorio on December 30, 2010

in Labor, Politics as Usual, Regulation

Public anger over New York City’s botched snow plowing effort this week has turned to the city’s sanitation workers union — for good reason. The New York Post reports:

Selfish Sanitation Department bosses from the snow-slammed outer boroughs ordered their drivers to snarl the blizzard cleanup to protest budget cuts — a disastrous move that turned streets into a minefield for emergency-services vehicles, The Post has learned.

Miles of roads stretching from as north as Whitestone, Queens, to the south shore of Staten Island still remained treacherously unplowed last night because of the shameless job action, several sources and a city lawmaker said, which was over a raft of demotions, attrition and budget cuts.

“They sent a message to the rest of the city that these particular labor issues are more important,” said City Councilman Dan Halloran (R-Queens), who was visited yesterday by a group of guilt-ridden sanitation workers who confessed the shameless plot.

Halloran said he met with three plow workers from the Sanitation Department — and two Department of Transportation supervisors who were on loan — at his office after he was flooded with irate calls from constituents.

The snitches “didn’t want to be identified because they were afraid of retaliation,” Halloran said. “They were told [by supervisors] to take off routes [and] not do the plowing of some of the major arteries in a timely manner. They were told to make the mayor pay for the layoffs, the reductions in rank for the supervisors, shrinking the rolls of the rank-and-file.”

New York’s Strongest used a variety of tactics to drag out the plowing process — and pad overtime checks — which included keeping plows slightly higher than the roadways and skipping over streets along their routes, the sources said.

The snow-removal snitches said they were told to keep their plows off most streets and to wait for orders before attacking the accumulating piles of snow.

The costs that government employee unions impose on taxpayers are bad enough. But holding a city hostage during an emergency should be truly beyond the pale. In this case, people died because emergency vehicles couldn’t get through the unplowed streets. (It’s worth noting that, while The Post is to be commended for reporting this story, the workers who revealed the union shenanigans are whistle blowers, who do not deserve the ugly “snitch” epithet.)

New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg hasn’t shied away from taking on the teachers unions that have brought the city’s public schools to dysfunction. Now the sanitation union’s bosses have issued him a challenge. He must meet that challenge if he wants to put a good light on his legacy.

For more on public sector unions, see here and here.

Sunday Brunch in New York City

by Nicole Ciandella on December 3, 2010

in Culture, Nanny State, Personal Liberty, Regulation

You can find a lot in New York City that you can’t find anywhere else in the world. But if you’re in New York and all you want is a Bloody Mary with your Sunday morning brunch, I’m afraid you’re out of luck: New York State law forbids the sale of alcohol before noon on Sundays.

That’s right: if you go to brunch at 11:30 a.m. on a Sunday morning at a New York City restaurant—no cocktails for you!

If I seem a little angry, that’s because I am. I spent Thanksgiving weekend in New York with my family, and on Sunday morning—before I boarded a train back to D.C.—my parents took us to a small Italian restaurant for brunch. The prix fixe menu included a choice of a Bloody Mary, Bellini, or Mimosa; but when I tried to order my drink, the waiter gave us the bad news: he couldn’t legally serve liquor for another hour.

Many parts of the U.S. still enforce Blue Laws despite First Amendment objections to Sunday-specific regulations. Several states still limit Sunday alcohol sales (both for on and off-premises consumption), and some states have bans on Sunday hunting and Sunday car sales.

The New York ban on serving alcohol before noon on Sundays is, in my opinion, an arbitrary (and frustrating!) infringement on people’s right to enjoy the long-standing American tradition of Sunday champagne brunch. But more importantly, the law is robbing restaurant owners of potential revenue. New Yorkers who eat before noon on Sundays are spending less on brunch than they might if cocktails were available; and those who eat after noon are competing for tables in the artificially-condensed time-frame when the bar is allowed to open. Last Sunday, when I was denied a Bloody Mary at 11 a.m., I suddenly realized why the restaurant was so empty. On Thanksgiving weekend, as tourists swarmed the streets of New York looking for ways to drop their hard-earned cash, waiters at brunch restaurants were looking at empty tables, counting down the minutes until the 12:00 rush.

Frankly, it’s hard to believe that New Yorkers are putting up with this. Maybe it’s because they all sleep late on Sundays. Or maybe they’re growing used to life in the Nanny State: after all, this is the city that has recently declared war on salt, trans fats, smoking, soda, and alcoholic energy drinks.

If New York doesn’t come to its senses soon and shrug off the mantle of Big Apple Government, the city may have to rebrand itself. Old New York was Dustin Hoffman pounding on a cab yelling, “Hey, I’m walking here!” New New York is all about yielding. Frank Sinatra sang of New York, “If I can make it there, I’m gonna make it anywhere!” But as New Yorkers continue to be coddled by their Mommie Dearest elected officials, they may find it hard to “make it” anywhere with trans fats or—horror of horrors—smoking in public parks. The rest of America is drinking mimosas with their Sunday morning brunch while New Yorkers are drinking plain orange juice—and New Yorkers aren’t really complaining.

Maybe waking up in the city that never sleeps isn’t all it’s cracked up to be—at least, not if you wake up before noon on Sundays.

Photo Credit: Williac’s Flickr Photostream.

Regulation of the Day 159: Playing Chess

by Ryan Young on November 18, 2010

in Nanny State, Personal Liberty, Regulation, Regulation of the Day

Yacahuda Harrison, 49, likes to play chess. He and six of his friends were playing the classic strategy game in an Upper Manhattan park. Their game was broken up by “[a] squad of cops in bulletproof vests,” The New York Post reports.

This is because it is illegal for adults to be in said park unless they are accompanied by a child under 12 years old. The law is intended to keep sexual predators away from children.

No children were in the park when Harrison’s chess game was busted. He and his accomplices were ticketed and have a December 28 court date.

Image credit: jbparker’s flickr photostream.

Regulation of the Day Update: Ladies’ Night Bar Specials

by Ryan Young on September 8, 2010

in Legal, Nanny State, Personal Liberty, Regulation, Zeitgeist

As noted previously, ladies’ night bar specials are illegal in Minnesota. The state’s Department of Human Rights says they are unfair gender discrimination. But they’re still legal in New York.

That upsets attorney Roy Den Hollander. He thinks ladies’ nights are unconstitutional. So he sued several New York bars. The Second Circuit Court of Appeals wisely threw out his case. Even more wisely, they chose not to take him seriously:

The court, with evident amusement, said it must rule against Den Hollander even though “without action on our part, (he) paints a picture of a bleak future, where ‘none other than what’s left of the Wall Street moguls’ will be able to afford to attend nightclubs.”

It’s not often that New Yorkers show more common sense than Midwesterners. Minnesota’s solons should take heed.

Hype About Lobsters and BPA: Here We Go Again!

by Angela Logomasini on August 24, 2010 · 1 comment

in Environment

A series of articles and blogposts now warn that the chemical Bisphenol A–used to make hard clear plastics–is wreaking havoc on lobsters in the Long Island Sound. Here are a few such hyped headlines: “Bisphenol A: Bad for you, bad for lobsters,” “Lobsters and Us,” “Plastics, chemicals may weaken lobster’s health,” “Lobster dieoffs linked to plastic pollution, including bisphenol A.”

Problems began in 1999 when Long Island suffered a massive lobster die-off. Lobstermen blamed the pesticide spraying used to control the spread of the deadly mosquito-borne West Nile Virus. But the spraying occurred after the die-off began–it could not have caused it.

Researchers pointed more likely causes: overly warm water and parasites. Nonetheless, lobstermen sued the pesticide company involved and netted $12.5 million in a settlement in addition to receiving $3.65 million in federal disaster payments. They proved nothing, but gained quite a bit.

Now they are looking at plastics—particularly those plastics made with the chemical bisphenol A (BPA). They cite the research of one scientist who says pollution might be contributing to a disease that rots lobster shells, which his now plaguing lobsters in Long Island and Southern New England.

BPA is a convenient target since it’s been in the news quite a bit. Environmentalists say BPA-based products are dangerous to humans, despite the fact that dozens of research panels around the world have ruled them safe. States are passing bans on some BPA-based plastics and Congress is looking at the issue as well.

With BPA already in the headlines, Hans Laufer–professor Molecular and Cellular Biology at the University of Connecticut—was sure to gain attention with his claims that BPA pollution might also be affecting lobster health. He maintains that BPA, along with other chemicals, creates stresses that reduce lobster resistance to the disease.

One of 15 researchers with the New England Lobster Initiative, Laufer recently presented this research at a symposium in Rhode Island. Unfortunately, there is no public record of this meeting and Laufer’s research is not yet available. According to a representative with the initiative it will go though peer review and be published in the Journal of Shellfish Research. Until then, all we know right now is what Laufer has told the press.

While it is important to investigate all possible factors, Laufer has been playing up his “findings” with some highly questionable claims. On the University of Connecticut website he claims: “The U.S. produces about 1 million tons of BPA produced annually, 60 percent of it ends up in the ocean.” Yet he offers no evidence or source for this very provocative claim.

Perhaps a more important question is whether the levels are high enough to have any effect. A 2009 analysis published in Environmental Science and Technology reported that BPA levels are extremely low—at parts per trillion–and impact on aquatic life is also low. This is not surprising, since BPA breaks down rather quickly. There was one exception: higher levels were found in fresh water sediments in areas impacted by several waste water treatment plants depositing into the waters–a situation that does not apply here.

It may be that Laufer simply just doesn’t like plastics or BPA, which he says is “as big a threat to human health as tobacco.” Never mind that there are no documented cases of anyone dying from trace exposures to BPA, but thousands of people every year from smoking.

Other researchers involved with this initiative have produced solid research that on focuses on more likely sources of the problem, mostly pointing to Mother Nature herself.

Researchers have shown that lobsters in New York and New England suffer in large measure because relatively warm waters make it a marginal area for their survival. “[The lobster decline] is a combination of factors that are all related back to changes in water temperature,” Robert Glenn– a marine biologist with Rhode Islands’ Division of Marine Fisheries–told the Cape Cod Times.

Warm water has some of same effects that Laufer says chemicals do. It stresses the lobsters; makes them more susceptible to disease; and can even impact growth and development. Not surprisingly, lobsters are migrating away from the warmest areas and are doing much better in the cooler waters, such as in waters near Maine.

Another problem may have more to do with perception than reality. New York lobstermen are using the 1990s as a baseline to measure the yield they want to take from the waters. Yet during that decade, lobstermen pulled far more of the critters out of the water than ever before—probably more than could ever be sustainable.

In New York, lobster take peaked in 1971 then dipped in the late 1970s into the 1980s, only to balloon in the 1990s, up to a record of more than three million pounds in 1992 and then to its pinnacle of nearly 9.5 million pounds in 1996.

nys_-lobster_chart20101
Before the 1990s, such high figures must have been unimaginable to New Yorkers. The average yield for all the years between 1950 and 1989 totaled less than a million pounds. In fact, 1999 ended a decade that was largely an aberration for New York. Interestingly, the take for 1999 (just over 7 million) and 2000 (nearly three million) is still higher than any year before 1990.

The University of Rhode Island’s Kathleen Castro, who chairs the New England Lobster Research Initiative executive committee, highlighted such factors in a press release related to Initiative research. She explains:

“In the 1970s we didn’t have many lobsters around, and in the 80s and 90s we had them coming out of everywhere. We don’t know why there used to be so many of them, and now we don’t know why there’s so many less. Fishermen got used to the high numbers, and it may be that now they are just back down to more normal levels. It may be related to water temperature, predator abundance, or shifts in the ecosystem.”

It is likely that the pollution angle will continue to be a media focus. After all, too many people have too much to gain. The greens gain more hype to push a BPA bans, activist researchers garner more headlines, and the lobstermen amass more targets to sue for “damages.”

Image credit: tuppus’ photostream on flickr.

Regulation of the Day 145: Unregistered Chariots

by Ryan Young on August 3, 2010

in Culture, Regulation, Regulation of the Day

When King Tutankhamen’s tomb was discovered in 1922, six chariots were among the artifacts found inside. One of them even had some wear and tear; maybe Pharaoh had personally used it for hunting.

It is even possible that falling off that very chariot caused the broken leg that is believed to have ultimately killed him at the age of 18 or so. That chariot is now on display in New York as part of a traveling exhibition of Tutenkhamen’s artifacts.

Getting the chariot from Egypt to New York was quite an ordeal. At roughly 3,300 years of age, the wood is fragile. First it was carefully packed into a truck and driven to Cairo from the Luxor museum. Then it was loaded onto a New York-bound cargo jet. A curator was by its side at all times.

Once it arrived stateside, the New York Times tells of an unexpected regulatory hurdle through which the chariot had to pass before leaving JFK International Airport for its Times Square destination and painstaking reassembly:

When New York traffic officials reviewed the papers required for the oversize truck that would transport the chariot into Manhattan, they saw that the cargo inside was classified as a vehicle, and demanded its Vehicle Identification Number.

“I’m totally serious,” said Mr. Lach, the exhibition’s designer. “But we got it cleared up.”

Good for them. The exhibit is on until January 2 if you care to look for the chariot’s VIN yourself.

Wine in Grocery Stores, Still on the Table in New York

by Angela Logomasini on July 22, 2010 · 2 comments

in Nanny State, Personal Liberty

A proposal to allow New York State supermarkets sell wine might re-emerge this year if Governor David A. Patterson can break the state’s budgetary stalemate. Battles over how to pay for New York’s ever-expanding welfare and regulatory states means that lawmakers have been unable to come to an agreement on the budget.

Patterson argues that allowing supermarkets to sell wine would increase much-needed government revenue. Current liquor store owners–who apparently fear competition–have been fighting the proposal while wineries and others support it. Surely, lawmakers should cut spending to resolve their mess, but giving consumers greater freedom is a great idea–budgetary mess or not.

The issue appeared to be dying on the vine, along with the governor’s budget. But Patterson says he will call an emergency session of the legislature to get the budget done–even though lawmakers might prefer to be home campaigning as Election Day approaches. Patterson has such authority under the state’s constitution and has tried to use it in the past without much success. Maybe impending elections will rouse lawmakers to action.

When New York lawmakers finally do allow wine in supermarkets, they should allow consumers to buy spirits there as well–as Governor Robert F. McDonnell has proposed for Virginia. Despite claims to the contrary, there is no evidence that such access would increase abuse or other problems, as reported in a Virginia Public Policy Institute study on the topic. There is no good reason to deprive consumers of access to these products as well.

Silly bans against selling wine or spirits at the supermarket are not really designed to address alcohol abuse, underage drinking, or the like. They exist to serve special interests, be they government agencies or liquor stores those agencies have essentially granted monopolies. An ad on this topic by New Yorkers for Economic Growth and Open Markets says it all.

← Previous Entries