Dear Editor
Dear Editor Striking It Rich Marvin Kitman didn't pay me for quoting at length from my "Emmy Awards Down With" piece in his "Improving the Art of Self-Praise," (NL, July 7)-though I was very happy...
...In the United States, the proclaiming of a financial emergency has roughly the same effect as an appeal to "moral decency" in Germany, or an accusation of "lack of gallantry" in France...
...I can think of no other explanation for the remarkable fact that the notoriously cocky New Yorkers have quietly endured the Mayor's general lack of leadership throughout the emergency and put up with the Ford Administration's repeated cynical display of indifference toward the city's troubles...
...Even worse, to my mind, is the cowardly silence of New York's elected officials in both Houses of Congress, with the possible belated exception of Bella Abzug...
...Although no one would minimize the staggering economic realities (nor the consequences for the thousands who have lost their jobs), the timing of Wall Street's denunciation of the city's budget policies after years of questionable management by our elected officials appears arbitrary...
...The editors of Readers Digest, that's who...
...We must insist that a fair share of our hard-earned money be returned to maintain the social and cultural services New York is committed to...
...You are a pal...
...Yet as Lekachman and other economists have shown, New York is notoriously disadvantaged in the Federal and state taxes it pays against the aid it receives from Washington and Albany...
...Joined with that refusal came rumblings of an entirely unprofessional disgust over New York's life style, and, in particular, over its presumptive generosity toward the poor...
...replies: How about starting with your very own subscription to The New Leader...
...So thank, you, Marvin Kit-man...
...Indeed the demands for reform coming from the business community go well beyond a legitimate call for better budget management...
...Potomac, Md...
...New York City Robert Lekachman ("Banks and Beggars in New York City," NL, September 1) has defined the essentials of New York's fiscal trouble with an expert's grasp for detail and a lucid mind's avoidance of equivocation...
...And such favorite conservative goals as abolishing free tuition would, in the face of billion-dollar deficits, net only an infinitesimal saving...
...And they have plucked my article out from under Kitman's, and, in keeping with the free enterprise system, have sent me a CHECK...
...Perhaps a non-native of this country will be forgiven for feeling that Americans tend to be taken in by talk of monetary sternness...
...Dear Editor Striking It Rich Marvin Kitman didn't pay me for quoting at length from my "Emmy Awards Down With" piece in his "Improving the Art of Self-Praise," (NL, July 7)-though I was very happy that he used it...
...Now I've got to figure out how to spend this $17.00...
...Jerome S. Shipman...
...Certainly, the national banking community's refusal this past summer to buy New York's municipal bonds unless the city ''straightened itself out" went far beyond a professional fastidiousness...
...We hear that the city should "stop coddling its poor" by drastically reducing its welfare rolls, ending free tuition at the City University and cutting down (or out) open admissions...
...Above all, we must, through our Congressional representatives, exert continuous and effective pressure upon the President and Vice President to tackle the city's crisis as the major national problem that it is...
...It blots out critical distinctions by spreading an amorphous sense of guilt...
...Now I am even happier, because guess who reads The New Leader...
...New York City Gene Shalit M.K...
...New York City Thomas E. Goldstein Professor of History, City College of New York Name That Tune "Form has become its own end," says Charles Deemer ("The Myths of Promiscuity," NL, September 15), "and many of our most fashionable writers seem to have joined Jiminy Cricket in singing, 'It ain't what you do, it's the way that you do it.' " As for myself, I prefer to sing along with Trummy Young and the Jimmy Lunceford Orchestra of 1939, " Tain't what you do, it's the way that cha do it...
...In the process, he has confirmed what some of us noneconomists have suspected for a while, i.e., that the crisis is really political in nature, and therefore must be remedied by political means...
Vol. 58 • October 1975 • No. 20
