INNOCENCE IN AMERICAN POLITICS
Landers, Robert K
PRESS The answer to the great, unasked question about New York's fiscal crisis lies within the Municipal Building, that funereal grey block of a building across the street from City Hall. The...
...What is the city getting for all the money it doesn't have, which must come in the end from the taxpayers, or from those sad fools who trusted it enough to lend it the money for its under-worked, over-fed army...
...So far the press has focused on the drama of default: Can the city borrow $400 million in time to pay Friday's bills, or will it go under and leave the courts to decide who gets paid...
...When Kennedy ran against Nixon back in 1960 the theme of his campaign was that we can do better, the country had been vegetating under a do-nothing Eisen-hower, government could do more to get the economy running, to assure the equality of its citizens, to help the poor to fend for themselves...
...The breakdown of the consensus has not centered on the goals so much as it has on the notion that government can achieve them...
...It is hard to see the drama behind the numbers...
...All day long, all over the building, clerks with pieces of paper move up and down the corridors, solitary troopers in the great army of municipal employes...
...They are difficult to answer, but journalists have not even begun to try...
...I've been down there a couple of times on different errands and it's like a visit to another country...
...Suspicions, for the most part, are dark...
...The spirit sinks at the magnitude of the question and yet the answer to it is at the heart of New York's money troubles, and of the whole question of government in modern times...
...one shrinks from entering the municipal swamp, with its fevers and quicksand...
...The other is that a lot of city money is being wasted...
...People wonder whether or not city services are really services...
...The part which goes to retire bus dispatchers after 20 years, or the part which pays tuition at City College...
...This brings us back to New York's fiscal crisis...
...All those things seemed worth doing then, and still seem worth doing now...
...A lot of people never believed in such efforts in the first place, of course...
...and most reporters, and their editors, would rather pursue stories with more sex in them, with villains and maybe-heros struggling for money, position and power...
...Are the rest really working...
...Should the city beggar itself, or default on its borrowings, to keep that desultory army in the field...
...No one likes to pay taxes, but some of the sting is soothed when you believe the laborer is worthy of his hire, that the extension of city services has been to some pur-pose, that in fact you are a free citizen of the com-munity and not simply the victim of a holdup...
...It seems almost deserted...
...Can governments actually do anything, or do they only pay armies of clerks to fill out forms and file them away...
...The inevitable army of clerks was created but people be-lieved-I believed, at any rate-that one way and an-other the clerks were really helping the poor, that the old were getting a better deal, that schools did a better job with Title II education funds, that the rivers might have fish in them again, and so on...
...Watching a subway conductor drink a cup of coffee makes you wonder what he's doing to deserve retirement after twenty years, quite possibly on a pension greater than his normal full pay...
...Eventually she opens a door with a number on it and the corridor falls silent until some other door opens and some other woman emerges with a piece of paper in her hand, on an unknown errand...
...The national budget immediately began to grow, of course, but there was a broad consensus-Johnson's favorite word-thai the country was getting something for its money...
...What are all those clerks, in their militant hundreds of thousands, doing...
...One is that the budget shell-game is up...
...A lot of people begin to suspect-I'm not sure if I'm one of them or not-that government programs have a built-in boon-doggle factor, an organic tendency to decay into do-nothing clerk-armies drawing salaries and filling the files with useless paper...
...They are threatened most immediately by a lack of money, and by municipal workers who will tell the poor to eat cake before they will surrender their wash-up time, but in the long run they are threatened much more seriously by a loss of faith in government effort itself...
...The police, firemen, sanitationmen and teachers can be seen to be doing something, at least, but they amount to less than a third of the whole...
...Goldwater's campaign against Johnson posed the issue even more sharply, and Johnson's overwhelming victory in 1964 resulted in a flood of liberal legislation the following year...
...I can understand why reporters hesitate to take it on...
...New York is no bigger than it was 20 years ago but it spends a great deal more money-more, as we now know, than it has...
...Are all those building inspectors inspecting anything besides the opportunity for payoffs...
...What is on the piece of paper...
...the city doesn't seem to know for sure...
...Why should city clerks get off work at four on summer afternoons, decades after their offices have all been air-conditioned...
...There are something over 300,000 of them in all, perhaps 310,000, perhaps 320,000...
...They're saying New York has too many luxuries-like free college, and special schools for children who are deaf or blind...
...There has been an unseemly scramble for New York's money in the last ten years, and the poor have no doubt been in there elbowing with the rest, but something more than spleen ought to go into a rollback of city programs...
...The question is, which part...
...These are the questions of spleen, and New Yorkers at the moment are sick with spleen...
...Feeding New York's army costs something like $8 billion a year, and it is difficult not to suspect that all those clerks with their pieces of paper are on pointless errands from nowhere to no-where...
...Much of the increase has been in salaries, but after all, clerks must live too...
...There seems no way to find out short of physical assault...
...Napoleon once said that an army marches on its stomach...
...But numbers glaze the reportorial eye...
...Is the work really necessary...
...In New York at the moment this belief is hard to maintain...
...At the moment public feeling-as disgusted as it is badly-in-formed-is probably on the side of the skeptics...
...The schools cost a fortune...
...What does the city get in return for umpteen-million dollars a year in police wash-up time...
...New York's budget has swollen beyond the city's capa-city to pay because it tried to do things, to educate the poor at tuition-free universities, to protect people on the streets, to create a school system which provides some-thing more than day-care, to clean the air of sulphur dioxide, to help hordes of no-skill blacks and Puerto Ricans who came to New York just as the industry was leaving, to ease the desperation of old people who could eat or pay the rent with Social Security, but not both...
...you can hear a woman in high heels coming from a mile away, an echoing click-click as she ap-proaches down an empty corridor with a piece of paper in her hand...
...THOMAS POWERS...
...The question is what do all those people in there do, and the answer is God only knows...
...But eventually someone is going to decide what New York can afford, the clerk armies, or the services which really are vital, and if the press and the public don't do it, the accountants will...
...The New York Times publishes the city's budget every year but how many people actually read it...
...And how many understand what they read...
...Read-ers know enough, in other words, to follow the city's desperate efforts to get the money it needs to pay its bills, but they still don't really know what the money is for...
...It took some time for reporters to get a grip on the city's fiscal crisis, to understand how the debts were run up in the first place and why the city ran into trouble even keeping its loans afloat...
...The larger question of what the money is for has been neglected...
...why can't they teach kids how to read...
...Those efforts, the legacy of a 20-year consensus that government can do things for peopje, are now threatened...
...A walk through the South Bronx, which is not advised, makes you wonder if welfare funds are doing anything at all...
...Mafia wars, Watergate and even the nursing home scandal were all stories you could get your teeth into...
...Nixon's tax returns were one thing, the city's surreptitious use of capital funds for current ex-penses quite another...
...I expect that most people who follow the news are now aware the city may default on its loans, that the consequences would be awful, and that the issue will probably be decided within a month or two...
...By now two things have become clear...
...Where is she taking it...
...They don't like all those we-can-do-better programs and would like to make sure, that the baby will be thrown out with the .bath...
...Nevertheless, reporters finally untangled the numbers enough to explain the nature of the credit crisis and the city's breathtaking totter between solvency and bank-ruptcy...
Vol. 102 • September 1975 • No. 14
