The Streets Were Paved with Gold - Ken Auletta [82]
Because it is a special city—America’s true capital—New York merits special aid. No other city in the world is as much a national treasure or resource. New York is not only the home of the United Nations, but also the world’s center of commerce, communications, finance, fashion, ideas. As New York is diminished, so is the resource. And unlike other nations—England, France, Italy, which subsidize London, Paris and Rome as national resources—the federal government does not provide special support to New York.
Murder or suicide?
One has to be careful to distinguish between soft federal dollars—direct grants, CETA funds, countercyclical aid, community development funds—which tilt toward New York, and hard federal dollars—highways, home loans, military and space expenditures, dams, water projects—which tilt toward the Sunbelt. One also has to slice through some thick local gibberish, portraying New York as a victim of a federal conspiracy (like conservatives who blame communists, liberals enjoy scapegoating). The social legislation of the past forty years, we sometimes forget, was promoted by the Northeast, often over the objections of Southern legislators. Some of those bills, including minimum wage laws, liberalized immigration and tariff policies, inadvertently aided the Sunbelt.
For years, a succession of New York officials charged that the United Nations drained New York’s budget and that the federal government should reimburse the city for upwards of $20 million. Along comes a study in late 1977—co-sponsored by the Consular Corps, a city agency—revealing that the 22,000-member diplomatic community pumped about $450 million annually into the city’s economy. We measured the cost of policing the U.N.—but not the tourism it attracted, the sales and other taxes its employees paid. There’s a lesson in this. We need more information and less rhetorical posturing. “We do agree,” the Chairman of the Council of Economic Advisors and President Carter’s chief domestic aide wrote to Moynihan in September 1977, “that the federal government needs more systematic information on the overall impact of all its programs, collectively, on regional economies.”
There’s also a political lesson for New York. New York officials, if they don’t want to be laughed at, need to determine how they can logically complain about those federal policies which hurt New York while ignoring those which help. They also need worry about a political civil war. “Not since the Southern Governors Conference was formed over 40 years ago has there been such a concerted effort against our region,” Oklahoma’s Governor David L. Boren warned the 43rd annual Southern Governors Conference in 1977. “Last year, the Northeast received $300 per person in federal grants while the South averaged $250. This happened even though the South and Southwest remain 10 percent below the national average in per capita income.” The Sunbelt was marshaling its forces, as the Northeast had earlier done. Emotions ran high. So high that in late 1977 Governor Hugh Carey journeyed to Austin, Texas, to warn, “Our larger society is in danger of splintering badly from a host of real but reconcilable differences. Our Congress of caucuses is in danger of turning into a cacophony of caucuses.…”
Unlike the first Civil War, this time the North couldn’t win. With the loss of population comes a loss of Congressional representation. The 1980 Census is expected to result in New York’s Congressional delegation shrinking by another four members, to