Spitzer serves up hot dog fine and with relish

Times
From James Doran, Wall Street Correspondent

THE hot dog vendors of New York City have become the latest and most unlikely target of an investigation by Eliot Spitzer, the corruption-busting state attorney general.

Mr Spitzer, who has dealt with criminals working for Wall Street’s investment banks and the insurance market, yesterday fined one of New York’s biggest hot dog stand operators $450,000 (£240,740) for forcing its vendors to work long hours for wages lower than the legal minimum.

Vendors, who sell a New York hot dog with onions for $1.50, a can of cold soda for $1 and a giant bread pretzel for $1.25, may seem an odd target for Mr Spitzer, who has so far wrung more than $2 billion out of the world’s biggest finance houses for breaking New York business laws.

But there are thousands of such carts in Manhattan alone. On a busy summer’s day a single cart in a prime tourist spot, such as at the gates of Central Park or outside the Metropolitan Museum of Art, can make $4,000 in a day. The most lucrative sites are auctioned off by the New York City Department of Parks and have been known to fetch more than $500,000 apiece.

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/newspaper/0,,172-1372062,00.html

The people at the bottom end are ALWAYS the ones exploited by the bosses. In this case the Corporate Criminals. Some of whom should be sent right to prison.

This looks like a side project.

You're a hot dog magnate. You run a thousand carts, and they average $2000 per day per cart. Your sales are $726 million per year. Your cost before wages is maybe half that, or $363 million per year. (I was going to use $3000 per cart-day, but figured that most of y'all wouldn't buy off on a guy selling a billion dollars worth of hot dogs a year.) And by "costs" I mean everything you need to sell hot dogs, from the cart itself to the food and electricity.

If you ran these carts eight hours per day at total personnel cost of $20 per hour (I did a real loose calculation and figured $12 per hour to the employee and $8 to the government), you're spending $160,000 per day for all your cart operators. Remember you're only spending $1 million on food every day, so you're taking $840,000 PER DAY back home. If half of that was divided between taxes (remember, you get to write off the entire $1 million in cart operating costs), license fees, support staff, facilities and everything else you need to run a big business, you get to go home and put $420,000 a day in your mattress.

Most of the people who live in New York City don't make $420,000 a year. You do it in one day. And okay, $12 an hour isn't much in NYC, but it's better than many of us make.

This particular firm wasn't paying its employees $12 an hour. They were probably hiring illegals and paying them $3.

Now let me see...the difference between $12 an hour and $3 per hour, times 1000 employees, times 363 days per year of operations...$26,136,000 in ill-gotten gains.

If $26 million is "nothing" to you, is the place you work at hiring?

He was also on Frontline last night, it was about how credit card companies are screwing the consumer.

Gets my vote any day

My post was made without adequate reading and comprehension. Sorry!

I was watching an interview a few months ago. He said that when he was still in law school, he was watching the legislative process to strengthen states' rights and he turned to his now-wife - girlfriend at the time who was also in law school and told her: "They will rue the day they ever gave this power to the states" .

He knew this change would enable him to take on crime the way he now is doing.

The Democratic Party desperately needs candidates who stand for something more than GOP-lite.

Spitzer could be its future.

spitzer's kicking more righteous ass in new york than anyone since teddy roosevelt. if the dems reinivent themselves as a reform party--a move that makes more and more sense with every fresh deLay revelation--spitzer would be a great leader. he's got moral clarity, left-style. though no hair, unfortunately.

Welcome to DU!! :toast: