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These people are narrowminded and probably never leave Upstate because theyre too busy shoveling.
and people downstate are too busy choking on smog and sitting in traffic to realize there is more than the 40 mile radius around them
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Originally Posted by RS085
not to mention the colleges and universities and degrees.
hopefully you realize that the bulk of the fine universities in NYS are upstate and many are private institutions
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Originally Posted by RS085
Let Upstate NY become Iowa then.
Please do. Iowa is a fine place. In the most recent Forbes "Top 100 Places to Live" Urbandale, IA came in at 42nd - Ankeny, IA at 62nd, Bettendorf IA at 80th. New York didn't have a single representative.
Ankeny is an offshoot of Des Moines. It would compare similarly to Irondequoit in NY (an offshoot of Rochester). Ankeny has job growth near 25% while Irondequoit has job loss of around 8% and the median family income in Ankeny is $15,000 more as well.
Des Moines also outperforms Rochester in Median Family Income by $18,000 and while Rochester has job loss of -6%, Des Moines has job growth of 2.56%
Cedar Rapids compares in size to Syracuse. The Median family income in Cedar Rapids is about $28,000 more than Syracuse. While Cedar Rapids has job loss of 1.4% they are still faring better than Syracuse at 3.8% job loss.
Neither state is a world beater with the tax situation or total business climate, but Iowa fares a little better than NYS in most instances.
So yeah, Iowa would be just fine and dandy to many upstaters. Although with much more resources than Iowa I'm very confident an independent upstate could outpace them as opposed to just staying close to it.
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Originally Posted by RS085
Alot of cities like Utica thrive on having NYC. The amount of refugees and immigrants that COME from the city alone and move to Utica is what keeps that city alive.
why don't they stay in NYC if it offers so much to so many ... why do they have to move to a barren outpost like Utica where they are relegated to a lifetime of shoveling?
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Originally Posted by RS085
Be real people, what does Upstate NY have to offer?
Water, Electricity, Agriculture, Wine, a wide variety of industry, decent level of rail and water connections, a gateway to both Ontario and Quebec, tremendous parks, access to a wide variety of neighborhing cities, excellent universities, wide variety of recreation, etc, etc, etc
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Originally Posted by RS085
never gonna happen anyway. People need to start embracing having a WORLD CITY and use it to their advantage instead of wanting to become hermit crabs from life. If you want to live in a cave the rest of your life fine, but dont ruin it for everyone else that loves having NYC and actually uses it. You have to be an idiot to not realize that.
and here is the truth of the matter - i'd say the vast majority of people in upstate don't care either way ... NYC isn't on their radar .... then the bulk that remain are against it and the slim minority actually perceive some benefit
Last edited by bellafinzi; 12-30-2009 at 10:15 PM..
and people downstate are too busy choking on smog and sitting in traffic to realize there is more than the 40 mile radius around them
An NYCer's view of the world:
^ And it's true. I have a friend from NYC who could tell you how to take a subway anywhere in NYC; often multiple ways. But any other geography and his eyes glazed over. Totally smart kid too, but he had no idea where anything was.
You think the #'s are fudged b/c you want them to be.
Nothing is cheap downstate...nothing...especially our transportation and certainly not our taxes, nor mortgages/rents. I live less than an hour from New York City. For me, a monthly ticket on the train costs $232.
Maybe NYC on it's own doesn't carry the whole state, but "downstate" certainy does...this incorporating the 5 boros, LI, Westchester and Rockland.
Is that all, $232.00? That is CHEAP!!! VERY INEXPENSIVE!!!
Consider commuting 120 miles a day, half of it in winter weather. Say you average 24 mpg between your commuter car and the 4x4 needed for those long winter's night commutes. I don't, I need to upgrade the car for higher mpg's in that veh.
50 weeks x 5 days x 120 miles = 30,000/24 = 1,250 gallons x $2.81 (today's price) = $3,512.50 / 12 = $292.71
And that is just for gasoline, part of which pays for your subway ride.
Then add insurance at $500/vehicle/year (which is inexpensive, by comparison to what you have to pay, but I've got forty years of pretty darned good driving holding that rate down, too), maintenance and ownership costs. I'd say double the gasoline cost, most sources advise to do that. $600/month. The winter before last I spent more than just for gasoline during a period of exclusive 4x4 use, much of which called for the 4wd due to weather.
And everything gets taxed, some things multiple taxes, which, while paying for my roads, also pays toward your train commute as well.
Sure, we can draw the line farther and farther out until it proves your point.
What I am saying is that you prople complain how expensive it is to live there while never considering that all the government services, all the government employees, every pothole costs more to take care of, thus, your greater contributions get used up locally before there is anything left to load up to send to Albany to pay welfare for my toothless neighbor.
Our counties are strapped by state mandates just as severely as are yours, on a per-capita basis.
Here is some raw data. Please "show us how it works".
The total annual state subsidy for the MTA, which runs all public transportation and NYS-based commuter railroads in the NYC metro area is $191 million.
The NYC annual tax subsidy to NYS has been estimated at $11 billion.
MTA receives no operating revenue from the federal government.
Footnote:
The MTA receives $5.3 billion in non-fare revenue. $191 million comes from the state, with the remaining $5.1 billion from local taxes and local government subsidies from the city of New York and 9 suburban counties. The state subsidy totals about 3.6% of non-fare subsidy revenue, 1.6% of total revenue.
Just for fun, I looked up the Annual Report for the NFTA, Buffalo's public transportation authority. It received $46.7 million from the state, which totals about HALF of its total operating revenues, a much bigger state subsidy on a percentage basis.
First I'll address the last part: whatever that is in Buffalo, it is not a transportation system. It is curiosity whiich runs basically from nowhere to nowhere, or downtown to nowhere, same difference. Subsidizing that makes as much sense as pouring money into the Barge Canal, a waterway for a few expensive pleasurecraft...but that is yet another story.
I am taking you to task on your figures...but not because I think they are incorrect...the most correct numbers in the universe can still be used to mislead. I think these have been used to do just that.
Even though I detect a condescending note in your rebuttal, I will ignore that and offer some food for thought. But not now. This will take some time. I am on my way out the door to go to work. Have a nice new year.
These questions I always found to be annoying and stupid.
The people in Upstate NY that want to separate from downstate are warped. They dont realize how much benefit they get from having a WORLD CITY IN THEIR STATE.
The sheer tax base alone, not to mention the colleges and universities and degrees. They wanna separate? fine. Let Upstate NY become Iowa then.
I just dont know how some things register with people's brains. They have a world city and they complain about it.
.
A person could be an idiot to realize that a city has little or no bearing on everyday life here. We have a true "world-class" international city much closer than NYC. So what? It's another place to go where they pay too much for a cup of coffee, a beer or a baseball ticket.
What does Upstate have to offer. Why, before air conditioning, did everyone who could get out of NYC, did get out of NYC by the trainload, every summer?
Oh, yeah, we like to dream of the maggot infested panhandlers, the projects, the nightly shootings, the drugs, illegal guns on the streets, the prostitution...yeah, all things you want to expose your pre-schoolers to.
The sheer tax base? Spoken as only a politician could..You ever run for office? Along with a tax base come responsibilities.
What's the welfare caseload? How much do we pour, via US Department of Agriculture "foodstamps" (no stamps no mo'!), which is paid by my Federal taxes, into your slums and suburbs alike? School breakfasts and lunches? You have to include everything and you aren't doing that. The numbers you crow about working for you can also work against you.
Moderator cut: personal attack
Last edited by bellafinzi; 12-30-2009 at 10:18 PM..
If this state were to split in two, you would still see a mass exodus to NYC, especially from youth.
The youth population that lives Upstate, for the most part, is going to bigger cities with opportunity. NYC is a magnet for that, so it actually might come back to bite Upstate in the ass. Brain drain is caused by college graduates leaving Upstate after graduation, and alot are heading to NYC.
This is a misconception. There is and has never been any kind of "mass exodus" to NYC from other parts of the country. New York State - ALL of it - has seen a mass exodus to other states, mostly growing Sunbelt locales like the Carolinas, Texas and Florida. Very few Upstaters relocate to NYC compared to the number who move down south, and lots of Downstaters are headed to the sunbelt too. Here is a little known fact: Since 2000, the NYC metro area has had a net out-migration of 1.4 million people to other parts of the country. The only factor providing the (very small) increase in population to the NYC metro is foreign immigration and the children born to those immigrants.
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Originally Posted by RS085
There are actually people that wanna get rid of NYC and become even more irrelevant.... boggles my mind.
You are ascribing some notion of "status" to sharing a state with NYC. As evidenced by the responses to your post here, nobody Upstate cares about this or feels some special kind of "relevancy" by being in the same state.
Your mind is boggled because you apparently know very little about the rest of the state north of the Westchester county line, which is typical. I have lived many years both Upstate and here in NYC, and I have several good friends who were born and raised in NYC, so I understand this particular type of ignorance quite well every time I have to explain that my hometown of Buffalo is not an Arctic outpost that is snowbound 11 months of the year.
Last edited by UpstaterInBklyn; 12-30-2009 at 03:10 PM..
Not to mention, it's not like Upstate is more "famous" by being associated with NYC, it's less. If someone says they're from Ohio, you say, "Oh, where in Ohio?" An Upstater traveling anywhere says they're from NY and people automatically assume NYC. If they had their own state, they would be more famous.
Not that I even want to split into two states; I think it would cause more problems than it would solve. Just... every argument you made was terrible.
Oh, yeah, we like to dream of the maggot infested panhandlers, the projects, the nightly shootings, the drugs, illegal guns on the streets, the prostitution...
Your other statements in this post and others stem from the same type of ignorance about other parts of the state that I just accused a NYC native of having.
Downstaters seem to have the erroneous perception of Upstate as something akin to a snow-swept wasteland, full of country bumpkins in awe of the "Big City". Upstaters see NYC as a crime-ridden, polluted, dysfunctional welfare haven which also patently untrue. I have lived several years in both places so I see these perceptions first-hand over and over.
Another completely false perception is that Upstate somehow "carries" Downstate financially, which is just plain nonsense.
When RS085 stated that Downstate has a tax base, (s)he is absolutely right. Millions of high income people Downstate, especially Wall Streeters and Corporate execs earning 7 and 8 and even 9 figure incomes provide a boatload of revenue to the state in the form of State income taxes. Last year when the state raised taxes on the highest incomes has undoubtedly skewed the numbers even more.
Quote:
Originally Posted by MuddyAxles
whatever that is in Buffalo, it is not a transportation system. It is curiosity whiich runs basically from nowhere to nowhere, or downtown to nowhere, same difference. Subsidizing that makes as much sense as pouring money into the Barge Canal, a waterway for a few expensive pleasurecraft...but that is yet another story.
The people who depend on public transportation in Buffalo would undoubtedly disagree with this statement
Fixed. The economy in NYC at the moment is arguably worse than upstate. Obviously, it's not that way normally, but not many upstate graduates are going there. I'm going to be graduating in the spring; first and foremost I'd love to stay upstate, but if not I'm gonna be looking primarily at Texas. NYC is the last place I'd expect to get a job right now.
The reason there are no jobs upstate is that NY's laws regarding business are structured with the attitude of, "You wanna do business in NYC? Fine. You're gonna pay more taxes and be more regulated." Which works because firms NEED offices in NYC. Whereas they don't need them upstate, so the increased taxes and regulation hurts upstate.
I don't favor splitting the state, but THAT is the argument that you guys are not getting here.
Everyone I know that went to North Carolina came back. The majority of whom I know, and its plenty, are around the NYC metro.
If youre an NYer, and went to a SUNY school, or private school, the place with the most opportunity, within the state, is NYC.
Texas I know because taxes are cheaper, or non-existent and Austin is a hotspot. I still dont think the ratio of people from Upstate going to Austin is more than NYC by a long shot.
you act as if the state was split, there would be a wall put up, keeping people from going to NYC. Upstaters would still have a world class city nearby, same state or not. You show extreme ignorance with your lack of knowledge of upstate. There is plenty going on upstate to include the Adirondacks, Niagara Falls, two great lakes , wineries, top notch universities and mid sized cities that offer a good deal.
The only reason why upstate benefits from NYC is because of crazy policies put forth by downstate politicians that benefit NYC but kill upstate. These policies that drive up taxes work down there but not up here. In return, NYC has to send up more money.
Youre talking to someone who is from Upstate........
As far as what youve listed, yawn. You're the preaching to the choir.
The attitude that some people have Upstate towards downstate is warped. Its small minded thinking, for small minded people.
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