Many if not most New York City teachers will continue receiving automatic longevity pay increases despite Mayor Michael Bloomberg’s announcement today that he will “eliminate raises” for them in the next budget.

In fact, as illustrated in the following chart (provided by the mayor’s press office), city teachers are eligible for annual pay hikes — above and beyond any base pay increase — during nine of their first 10 consecutive years, and 14 of their first 22 consecutive years.  For example, quite apart from any base salary increase, a rookie teacher entering his or her second year is entitled to a longevity increase of 6.4 percent.  An eighth-year teacher receives an increase of 11.6 percent, and a teacher moving into his or her twentieth consecutive year receives an increase of 11.5 percent.  (Go here for more details on the city’s teacher pay schedule.)

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Chicago Mayor Richard Daley “is looking to lure employers from Oregon after that state’s voters approved a huge tax increase last week,” the Wall Street Journal reports in an editorial today.

The tax hike in Oregon “will help our economic development immediately. You’d better believe it,” Hizzoner told the Chicago Sun Times late last week. “We’ll be out in Oregon enticing corporations to relocate to Chicago.”

Oregon raised its top income tax rate to 11% from 9% and its corporate rate to 7.9% from 6.6%, while doubling many small business tax charges and fees. “What happened in Oregon is not good news for Oregon,” explains Mr. Daley. “They believe that anybody who makes $125,000 or more [annually] or businesses or anyone who makes $250,000—they’re gonna start taxing them. They call them ‘rich people.’”

Mr. Daley isn’t buying that. “I’ve always thought America stands for [rewarding success]. You finish high school. You work hard, go to college and you hope to succeed in life. I never knew it’s a class war—that those who succeed in life are the ones that have to bear all the burden. I never realized that. It will be a whole change in America that those who succeed and work hard, we’re gonna tax ‘em more than anyone else.”

If he’s really looking for a competitive advantage to exploit, Daley should turn his gaze to the east.  New York City residents are subject to a top state-local income tax rate of 12.62 percent, the highest in the country, which Governor Paterson’s budget would raise to 12.85 percent.  The top state-local corporate tax in New York City is over 18 percent of allocated net income.

The Illinois income tax rate currently tops out at 3 percent, and the corporate tax rate is a flat 7.3 percent.

Nicole dissects Mayor Bloomberg’s preliminary 2011 budget in a Post op-ed today.   Her key point: while news coverage of what the Times headlined as a “grim budget” has concentrated heavily on the mayor’s proposed cuts, Bloomberg actually is relying much more heavily on a $2.9 billion revenue surplus created by the latest Wall Street bubble (call it the post-bubble bubble) to close a projected $4.1 billion budget gap.

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Today, a panel of arbitrators ruled against Ground Zero developer Larry Silverstein in many respects on his longstanding dispute with the Port Authority, which owns the land. But the arbitrators also handed Silverstein a big victory — one that ultimately should go a long way in allowing the full project to go forward. (more…)

You’d think the author of a well-received new book slamming the “too big to fail” doctrine and calling for smarter financial regulations would find something to like in President Obama’s proposal to break up big banks.  But in a New York Post op-ed today, Nicole argues that Obama’s latest gambit would leave New York with “the worst of both worlds: a smaller Wall Street that still poses the same risks to the global economy.”