The Streets Were Paved with Gold - Ken Auletta [148]
Rent control is a classic case. Privately, most public officials concede that it has hastened the city’s property tax base decline, encouraged abandonment, and squeezed many smaller landlords out of business. But the issue, they whisper, is political dynamite. What about a means test to ensure that those who could afford to, pay a fair rent and are not subsidized by other taxpayers? No, they say. It would be an invasion of privacy to check people’s income—something welfare does all the time. Presumably, conservative Republicans would take a different view, seeing it as an ideological issue—free enterprise, a free market, etc. Instead, they, too, see it as a political issue. To score political points, in April 1977, Albany Republicans pushed for and won agreement for a four-year extension of rent control. As reported by Linda Greenhouse of the Times, “The closed-door Republican conference at which the plan was adopted yesterday was reportedly an acrimonious one, with upstate Senators maintaining their philosophical stand against rent controls for more than an hour. ‘But we are practical people,’ one of those Senators said. ‘We realize the tremendous political problems.’ ” The bill sailed through the legislature, was signed by the Governor, and created still another commission to study the subject.
Nassau and Suffolk County Republicans, who dominate those counties by parading their fiscal conservatism as if it were manhood, also played the game when it suited their purposes. For years, Nassau and Suffolk Republicans have chided city Democrats for their profligate ways. Yet their cops, who generally vote Republican, have been gifted more lavish pay and fringe benefits—including more days off, bigger longevity payments, more generous duty charts, noncontributory pensions—than have city cops. Proving that principle in the pursuit of votes is a vice.
Nationally, the most devout conservatives play the game. Senator Strom Thurmond of South Carolina voted against the federal seasonal loan program to assist New York City in 1975. It was, he said, a “give-away” to permissive liberals. No doubt, his constituents cheered, as they do when he supports “give-aways” to farmers. In 1976, for instance, farmers were victims of a severe drought, facing financial ruin without federal help. Congress broadened by $750 million the loan program of the Small Business Administration. With the loans in the pipeline, and the drought ended, the following year harvests were so bountiful that farmers were complaining about falling prices. So they called for new loan assistance and “disaster” aid to speed federal help, some of it necessary. Prodded by conservatives like Thurmond, the SBA overgenerously declared two-thirds of all U.S. farm counties disaster areas. (When New York, after heavy snows, sought such designation, the same members of Congress, and President Carter, said no. Presumably the difference between drought and snow is that one is God’s fault, the other New York’s.) Under the terms of the “disaster” loans, farmers were allowed to borrow up to $250,000 over twenty years at 3 percent interest (New York City paid more than 7 percent for its seasonal loans).
By early 1978, the farm loan program was expected to cost $4.6 billion. Reminding the Congress of the earlier $750,000 loan limit, Congressman Robert Giamo, Chairman of the House Budget Committee, was quickly outmaneuvered by conservatives who barreled across a $1.4 billion supplemental appropriation. Giamo told Time magazine he at least hoped to increase the interest rate to 5 percent—two-thirds the rate banks were charging corporations. But he wasn’t hopeful: “The SBA loan fund is set up to help people cope with an unusual disaster—one that happens once in a lifetime. What has happened is that it has turned