Early Happy Thanksgiving. I was reading a New York Times article on how Gov. Eliot Spitzer of New York announced an unexpected increase in ridership and other revenues have made a plan to raise the base subway fare unnecessary. Intrigued, I searched around for the MTA (the authority that runs the public transportation around the New York area) financial annual report compiled by City of New York's Independed Budget Office. http://www.nytimes.com/packages/pdf/nyregion/empire_zone/20070605_mta_2.pdf It's a pretty interesting read, and it exposes a lot of unjustice and short sightedness about how MTA is run. For example - MTA had $9.3 billion in revenue in 2006 - MTA had $8.7 billion in costs in 2006 and expected to have $9.7 billion in cost in 2007. 2007 costs would be higher than 2007 revenue - By law, MTA can not lose money. That is why MTA is and has been trying to raise the price of tolls and subway fares - About 40% of the public transportation's revenue is derived from taxes. For example there is the petroleum tax, taxes on real estate and taxes on real estate transaction (when there is a change of ownership on the property, >$500,000, you have to pay taxes). I'm guessing that the real estate transaction tax is that is why Gov. Spitzer decided not to raise subway fares. There has been unprescedented number of real estate transaction recently, driven by the low interest rate. In other words, revenue from the taxes on real estate transaction have been increasing. Spitzer probably took a look at the upward trending number and probably thought it was not nessasary to raise the fare. Shortsighted because it's probably a one time phenomonen and revenue from that section would most likely trend down in the future (aka. it's too expensive / risky to buy real estate now). Or he may be a trying to use the transaction tax as a way of giving the MTA the short stick and telling them to shape up, while appeasing the general public. - About 40%, $3.7 billion, of 2006 revenue is from farebox, or fees for riding public transportation. $4.7 billion of the total 2006 costs is attributable to Labor. Yes. $4.7 billion. So everytime you swipe your card to go on the subway / bus / train, you can think that not 1 cent goes to infrastructure improvement. It all goes to paying the workers of MTA. Perhaps if they ran a labor intensive organization, i.e. financial services company, I could understand that.... but common... the business of MTA is providing public transportation. You push a stick on the subway, you drive a bus... common now.... the equivilant wage of a teacher who went through college? My money should be going to the improvement / automation of the system. This is why I think unions in public serivces ought to be disbanded or at the very least checked for power... remember the strike subway strike in 2005? "Currently, a worker can retire after 25 years at age 55 with half pay. Using the Annuity2000 Merged Gender Mod 1 Life table with ages set back 2 years, a 3.5% annual salary increase and a 5.0% interest rate for calculation purposes, the current pension costs the employer -- the taxpaying public -- roughly 25.4% of salary per year for someone who starts work at age 30 and retires at age 55. If the TWU Local 100 loses and the retirement age is set age 62 for that same 30 year old, then the cost per year would be 17%. This calculates to a 7% wage cut per year for every year." - The reason for the 2005 MTA strike | 
