Gotham_ A History of New York City to 1898 - Edwin G. Burrows [816]
Kelly sought Green’s removal, to restart the flow of patronage. But Green’s patron, Swallowtail-in-Chief Samuel Tilden, had just been elected governor and was now the presumptive presidential nominee of the Democratic Party. Tammany, accordingly, backed off and committed itself to retrenchment. Even when Green’s term expired in December 1876, and Kelly himself took over as comptroller, the Tammany leader adamantly opposed demands from developers, labor unions, and radicals for a depression-combating program of public works. Indeed, determined to win the business community’s confidence, Kelly cut Green’s austerity budget even further, reducing the city’s debt.
Taxes declined too, despite complaints by city and state tax commissioners and several legislative investigations that the city’s wealthy, far from being fiscally overburdened, were flagrantly evading their fair share of such taxes as existed. Real estate in the mid-1870s was seldom assessed at more than 60 percent of its value—less in the case of the Astor family and Trinity Church—and evasion of even shrunken impositions was commonplace. “Personalty” income got off even more lightly, despite the fact that in the postwar era the value of such holdings—money, goods, debts due, bonds, mortgages, and public or corporate stocks—had grown far faster than landed wealth. City tax commissioners conservatively estimated local personalty to be worth between two and three billion dollars, even though in 1879 only eighty-nine hundred people on the tax rolls admitted having any such holdings at all. Liquid portfolios, moreover, were even more grossly undervalued than real estate, via subterfuges like shifting taxable capital into nontaxable forms, or more straightforwardly through fraud and perjury.
Not only did William H. Vanderbilt pay taxes on half a million dollars of personalty income, though his total such holdings were estimated at forty million, but his New York Central railroad, while reporting a capital of $143 million, paid taxes on only twenty-two million. Corporations in general proved particularly skillful tax dodgers, deliberately violating the rules by cooking books, establishing phony indebtedness, or simply by bribing tax collectors. Investigators calculated that corporate evasion alone cost the state and city millions each year, but the notion of increasing revenues rather than cutting expenses was not to be placed on the political table.
“CHARITY RAGES LIKE AN EPIDEMIC”
In their continuing search for new ways to slice the budget, reduce taxes, and restore investor confidence, municipal officials turned their attention instead to the burgeoning relief budget. In 1873 five thousand families had been receiving public assistance; by 1874 twenty-four thousand were being aided. In March of that year, Mayor Havemeyer, aware that Tweed’s Department of Charities and Correction had been implicated in corruption, and convinced that the level of “destitution and suffering” did not seem “to warrant the interference of the Municipal authorities,” announced the suspension of all public outdoor relief from July through December. Aid resumed for a time on Mayor Wickham’s watch, in the hard winter of 1875. But in 1876, pressed by welfare reformers, the new Board of Estimate and Apportionment—which included the mayor, comptroller, and president of the Department of Taxes and Assessments—announced that such assistance would henceforth be permanently discontinued, apart from cash stipends to the blind and fuel handouts to the proven poor (an exemption that pleased Democratic coal merchants). The Board of Aldermen