The New York Spectator/Hell of a Town

Thcker, William

THE NEW YORK SPECTATOR HELL OF A TOWN by William Tucker n the little New Jersey, town where I I grew up, we could just see the tip of the Empire State Building on the horizon. You could get there...

...That dream has grown harder to sustain with every passing year...
...I think my leftist friend has outsmarted me...
...A year ago, I started seeing his name in the newspapers...
...When it comes to making it difficult to get on the ballot," says Richard Smolka, publisher of Election Administration Report, "New York is in a class by itself...
...To everyone from Governor Mario Cuomo on down, "The City" is the source of all social beneficence...
...Some don't even bother to retire...
...New York City is being defeated by the mobility of modern capital...
...The mindset of the average New Yorker has not changed since the 1930s...
...A few weeks ago she was telling me how The City was dealing with the financial crisis: "It's such a joke...
...You could get there for a dollar and a quarter on the Lakeland bus...
...In Texas, when Lyndon Johnson gave up his Senate seat to become vice president, seventy-two people ran to replace him...
...Even more mobile are the highly educated liberals who built the system...
...New York was the Emerald City...
...One has a private practice, one works for the state attorney general, and six work for The City...
...Her job makes her a member of the Teamsters' Union...
...I realized that my whole ambition had been shaped by these old show tunes—that I had been humming them for years as I walked the streets—and that my dream had essentially come true...
...The myth of government as provider is supported by a political system that has not reformed itself since the days of Boss Weed...
...Governments constantly steer spending away from capital improvements and into personal salaries—remember, computers don't vote...
...Pensions are based on the final year's earnings, including overtime...
...But in New York, when maverick Abe Hirshfeld challenged Mario Cuomo's choice for lieutenant governor in 1986, a Cuomo-appointed judge ruled that, for technical reasons, Hirshfeld's 70,000 signatures did not meet the 20,000-signature requirement...
...The mother of a kid on my son's baseball team is a lawyer with the Human Resources Administration (HRA...
...Ever wonder why New York state has never had a tax revolt...
...CBS is supposedly getting ready to decamp...
...More than 93 percent are union members...
...It was a transcendent moment...
...One day I asked him what he did for a living, assuming he must be independently wealthy...
...It's too depressing going around visiting these families, so I come down here instead...
...On June 30, the City of New York will finish its fiscal year about $450 million in the red...
...Most New Yorkers figure that the only way to get ahead is to join the Party of Government...
...I never wanted to live anywhere else...
...T he City knows exactly which end is 1 up...
...Policemen and firemen regularly retire on pensions greater than their salaries, by piling up hundreds of hours of overtime their last year of employment—all with the consent of their supervisors...
...S tuck with the bill, taxpayers are leaving left and right...
...His wife, also an attorney, worked for the HRA...
...When I used to go to the YMCA once a week, there was one guy who was always in the gym—whatever the day, no matter what the hour...
...1:1 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR JULY 1991 41...
...Voters still do not have the right of ballot initiative, a reform adopted by a majority of states during the Populist era...
...When the Moving Picture Machine Operators union refused to take a cut in overtime pay last April, Hollywood began moving movie production out of New York within hours...
...Meanwhile, having been stunned once again last April by the amount of taxes I had to pay, I did a little arithmetic...
...The suburbs are filled with men in their mid-forties working in liquor stores and car dealerships while collecting City pensions...
...Within one block of my house I know eight lawyers...
...Mayor Dinkins is already talking about closing down libraries, draining swimming pools, and turning off streetlights...
...A seat on the New York Stock Exchange, which cost $1.15 million in 1988, now sells for $350,000...
...Thirty years later, I stumbled across the album again and played it...
...Every government employee I know complains about the antiquated conditions at his job...
...He'd been elected head of one of the unions and was leading his fellow lawyers in a walkout, tying up the criminal justice system while demanding a pay raise Six months later, he and his wife moved to New Jersey, where taxes are lower and crime levels more tolerable...
...The City doesn't know which end is up...
...The City" is a palpable entity, capable of providing everything for everybody if only we feed it enough money and find the politicians to run it right...
...Strange as it may seem, this strategy enjoys much popular support...
...One of the owners in our first co-op in Brooklyn was an Old Leftist who spent weekends at Nicaragua rallies and worked in the public defenders' office...
...In Oregon, you can run for governor with 1,000 signatures or a $100 filing fee...
...Sure, there were deductions here and there, but the final rate still came to more than 50 percent...
...When a drug-crazed mother in Brownsville throws her baby in the trash, it's because "The City" didn't have enough social workers...
...Even fielding an opposition candidate is nearly impossible...
...There's no need to improve services when people have no power of choice The idea is to create new services ("unmet needs") and put more potential voters on the payroll...
...TAS 's New York correspondent, is a writer for Forbes...
...This is the "Firemen First" principle—when the budget crunch comes, cut the most visible and necessary services to soften people up for tax hikes...
...Simple...
...When two kids in Spanish Harlem rob a bodega (killing the owner in the process), it's because "The City" William Bickel...
...In my own gentrified neighborhood of Park Slope, the only sign of the budget crisis has been the panic in people's voices as they discuss the possibility that they or their spouses might lose their City jobs...
...He was there when I arrived and there when I left...
...didn't provide enough educational opportunity...
...Like most people I know, I live here because I have always thought it the most important and exciting place in the world...
...My sophomore year in high school, I fell in love with a Gordon Jenkins operetta called Manhattan Tower...
...I'm a City social worker for sexually abused children," he said...
...Even the twenty-five chaplains in the prison system have their own union," says Forrest Markowitz, deputy research director of the Department of Labor Relations...
...The City of New York now employs 353,000 people—one of every twenty-one residents...
...They send around a priest, a minister, and a rabbi every year to tell us they need a pay raise...
...As a free-lancer in New York City, I paid 15.3 percent Social Security, 28 percent federal income tax, 7.9 percent state income tax, 3.3 percent New York City income tax, and 4 percent New York City unincorporated business tax...
...Middle management is in on the scam...
...The guy in the state attorney general's office became so exasperated with the lack of office equipment that he bought his own laptop computer, which he carries to work every day...
...Total: 58.5 percent...
...The first thing they did was send around a memo saying we had to get rid of one out of every hundred light bulbs...

Vol. 24 • July 1991 • No. 7


 
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