The Empire Page

Some interesting thoughts I heard recently on the state of New York’s financial situation. The first was by City Comptroller John Liu. When asked why we cannot pass extra taxes for the wealthy he responded that the only reason people give is that the wealthy would leave New York. However, he continued that there are a number of reasons people would leave New York, high crime, bad education, dirty streets, bad public transportation, and a lack of affordable housing  just to name a few. These services are what makes New York livable and without them the wealthy and many others would leave. All of these are paid for by taxpayer dollars sometimes you need to raise taxes to pay for them. As the response to the disaster in the Gulf shows, people want their government there to provide services. However in many cases people don’t make the connection between these services and the taxes we need to pay for them. This is where the whole tax-cutting movement of the past 30 years and the anti-government tea party movement comes in.  Yes, we cannot just tax and spend but targeted tax increases to those who can most afford to pay them to pay for essential services cannot be ruled out.

Second is that I saw something in the paper that I have been wondering about concerning the size of the growth of the City and State budget. In the mid-1990′s when I worked for the City Council the City budget was around $30 billion and the State budget was around $60 billion. Now less than 15 years later these numbers have doubled. How did we get there? Since this is greater growth than the rate of inflation you cannot just blame employee salaries. Did we just open more and more programs (under the fiscally conservative Giuliani and Bloomberg?) or have a boom in big capital projects that we still need to pay off? Are there a lot of rich consultants and contractors out there due tot the City’s and State’s largess? How is it also that the same programs (libraries, senior centers) that help the poorest of our society always seem to be on the chopping block? The answer to these questions may explain the shape we are in. Anyway, I’d like to know.