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By Root 1029 0

“nazi” and a “right-wing kook,” as was that other perennial candidate, Vito Battista—who could more easily be called a kook. Similar admonitions were issued by State Senator John Marchi, the Republican/Conservative candidate for mayor in 1969. Marchi was labeled an “extremist” for preaching fiscal responsibility. “They were shooting the messenger,” Marchi recalls. His opponents, Liberal/Independent John Lindsay and Democrat Mario Procaccino, pounced on Marchi when he warned that the transit fare would climb to 25¢; they would not allow that to happen. Just weeks after Lindsay was reelected, the fare climbed to 30¢. There were few voices in opposition. Pithy Daily News editorials regularly clanged the alarm, the business-oriented Citizens Budget Commission sometimes issued critiques of city budget gimmicks, but with few allies they were easily dismissed as cranks. When he foreboded that the city was living beyond its means, Democratic gubernatorial contender Howard Samuels was assailed for being “anti–New York.”

Such was the temper of the times. Critics were bucking the sixties—the Age of Good Intentions, limitless optimism, when candidates vied to outspend their rivals and promised new ideas, new programs, new solutions. Budgets were not viewed as inflexible boundaries restricting what could be spent. Robert F. Wagner, for twelve years New York’s bland mayor, captured the go-go spirit of the times in his final 1965 budget message: “I do not propose to permit our fiscal problems to set the limits of our commitments to meet the essential needs of the people of the city.”

Armed with that novel government philosophy, the Statue of Liberty City, home for generations of poor immigrants, commenced an ambitious, politically popular and compassionate effort to care for the less fortunate by taxing the more fortunate. New York undertook its own partial experiment in local socialism and income redistribution, with one clear result being the redistribution of much of its tax base and jobs to other parts of the country as middle-class taxpayers and businessmen fled town.

The city’s budget, $2.7 billion in 1961, leaped to $13.6 billion in fiscal 1976. The budget expanded at an annual rate of 8.6 percent from 1961 to 1966, when Wagner was mayor; almost doubled to 15.9 percent annually over John Lindsay’s first five years, 1966 to 1971; increased at an average annual rate of 10.2 percent between 1971 and 1975, when the city’s economic base was rapidly declining. Of equal significance is how the budget grew. “Between fiscal years 1961 and 1976,” concluded the Eighth Interim Report of the Mayor’s Temporary Commission on City Finances, “the share of total City expenditures allocated to police, fire, sanitation, and education declined from 46 percent to 30 percent, while the welfare, hospitals and higher education share increased from 22 percent to 37 percent.”

From an emphasis on basic services—which are most visible to middle- and upper-income residents—the city’s budget shifted to providing more public employee benefits and more services for the poor. “Fifteen years ago,” the 1977 report noted, “almost half of every dollar spent for operating the City was allocated to police, fire, sanitation, and education. At present, less than one-third of every dollar goes for these functions.” By 1975, the Regional Plan Association said, New York was spending an average of $249 per person in aid to the poor vs. an average of $59 for all other local governments in the state.

As their share of the budget pie diminished, middle-income residents found New York less attractive. And more expensive. By 1975, New York City had as many different taxes (twenty-two) as Howard Johnson’s had ice cream flavors. There were personal income and commuter taxes, sales taxes, vault taxes, auto use taxes, stock transfer taxes, cigarette taxes. New York developed another distinction: its middle- and upper-income residents came to shoulder the steepest tax burden in the U.S. Using 1974 data, the Eleventh Interim Report of the Mayor’s Temporary Commission disclosed that