The Streets Were Paved with Gold - Ken Auletta [155]
Bella’s belief was central to the liberal faith. “I think it’s fair to say,” economist John Kenneth Galbraith told a New York Times symposium in July 1975, “that no problem associated with New York City could not be solved by providing more money.” He said it was “remarkable” and “outrageous” that “so many people of wealth had left.” The “fiscal crisis would be over,” declared author Michael Harrington, if Washington passed “three laws”—federalized welfare costs, national health insurance, and the Humphrey-Hawkins full-employment bill. These views were echoed by others on the left, including economists like Robert Lekachman. As General Westmoreland would say, if only we had a few more troops …
This preoccupation with money leads, as the social scientists would put it, to a preoccupation with “inputs” rather than “outputs.” Whether money is spent becomes more important than how it is spent. New York State’s liberal Medicaid law was “good” because it promised money and “free medicine,” though, as some warned, it led to inflated medical costs and outrageous abuses. “To dismiss policemen, firemen, sanitation workers, park employees and teachers is not an alternative when the greatest need of a city is for more police protection, more fire protection, better recreation and competent education,” Galbraith exhorted Times Op-Ed page readers in 1977. The assumption, commonly shared, was that better services come from more money, not better management; by hiring more cops rather than getting those on the force out from behind their desks or inducing sergeants to sacrifice any of their forty-six vacation and chart days off. Though labor allies say it represents a return to the sweatshop, the Koch administration did say taxpayers could potentially receive 20 million extra hours of service if all city employees worked a forty-hour week, as most other Americans do. Yet most liberals were silent. Fewer layoffs would have been necessary if all workers volunteered to forgo some of their bloated fringe benefits. Yet most liberals were silent.
This concern with “inputs” surfaces throughout recent city history. The liberal impulse argued that it was better to borrow from the capital budget rather than cut expenses. Their passion blinded them to the consequences. In the long run, it cost more. And in the winter of 1978, New York couldn’t remove snow from its trenchpocked streets because 40 percent of its equipment had broken down and there was no money for repairs. More federal training funds were good, even though Comptroller Goldin found, in 1978, that thirty days and $10 million after graduation almost one-half of the trainees were unemployed. “Why can’t liberals … talk about fiscal responsibility and productivity without feeling uncomfortable?” Senator Muskie asked the state Liberal party in a 1975 address. His own answer: “Our emotional stake in government is so much that we regard commonsense criticism almost as a personal attack.”
Ed Koch learned his lesson early in his term as mayor. He and Deputy Mayor Herman Badillo had zeroed in on the “poverticians,” those who siphoned federal poverty funds to build local political machines. “The resistance to change is enormous,” the usually ebullient Mayor told me three months into his first term, his vest unbuttoned, his shoulders now slightly stooped. “Everyone protects their own turf. They storm into your office like you’re supposed to roll over and play dead.” Then Koch recounted the problems he was having with black officials. For years, guilt-ridden liberals exempted minority programs from criticism for fear of being