RAGGED THOTS

Be careful of what you wish for, you just might get it. So goes the saying and Mayor Michael Bloomberg is the walking embodiment. He wanted a third term, got the term limits law overridden to attain it -- and now finds headaches on all fronts. He's quietly feuding with Gov. Andrew Cuomo over the parameters of how to layoff city teachers.  There's a stunningly embarrassing $800 million fraud-and-cost-overrun scandal involving a contract to develop an electronic timesheet for city employees.

But scholars Fred Siegel and Sol Stern go into full detail on why the, ahem, bloom has left the rose of this administration.  While last December's snow storm perfectly dramatized the collapse of Bloomberg's much vaunted "managerial" reputation, Siegel and Stern assert that the writing was on the wall much earlier:

It is tempting to depict Michael Bloomberg’s reversal of fortune in his third term in office — a term he secured by muscling through a change in the city’s term-limits law before spending $150 million to win only 50.7% of the vote — with hubris metaphors drawn from classical tragedy. But this assumes there was glory before the fall. In reality, there never was greatness. There have been no lasting fiscal or education reforms.

The story of Bloomberg’s mayoralty is this: There is no there there.

It is now abundantly clear that the myth of Bloomberg’s accomplishments was the result of two forces: his own immense wealth and the city tax dollars generated by the stock-market surge of the 2000s. Both sources of revenue, private and public, were used to co-opt and silence his opposition and thereby allow the glamorized portrait of an indispensable manager and the guardian of the public purse to be drawn without countervailing criticism. 

An objective accounting of Bloomberg’s tenure reveals the many ways that Bloomberg’s standing as New York’s richest citizen actually undermined New York’s democracy, even as the city’s fiscal health and essential infrastructure deteriorated.

It's an excellent, comprehensive piece. The "New York's richest citizen" part should be kept in mind throughout.

Meanwhile, if Police Commissioner Ray Kelly and departed Schools Chancellor Joel Klein epitomized the sturdy professionalism of Bloomberg's first two terms, a different individual symbolizes the third one. The Times explored the vexing problem of Transportation Commissioner Janette Sadik-Khan, who has managed to infuriate parts of all five boroughs with what, to many, seems like an anti-car agenda -- bike lanes everywhere and traffic shut down on Broadway at Times and Herald squares.  Indeed, residents of the Park Slope neighborhood in Brooklyn have filed suit over a bike lane around Prospect Park. 

Counterintuitively, The Post, in a rather tongue-in-cheek editorial Monday, urged the mayor to keep Sadik-Khan -- after first noting a Bloomberg quote from last year:

"I've always said that if you want lifetime employment in our administration, you just get The Post to demand that I fire you," you said last December.

Lest anyone think the above quote from Bloomberg on whether he listens to media when it comes to dealing with his closest aides was simple throw-off line that the mayor didn't really believe, I humbly refer you to the following commentary. It didn't see print at the time, but was written by yours truly three-and-a-half years ago after an interesting encounter with Hizzoner. The date was August 28th, 2007. Some elements of the present day troubles might be gleaned even then.

Read more »

Labels: Janette Sadik-Khan, Michael Bloomberg, New York City

So, exactly how popular are rich people who, in the middle of a tough recession -- which saw another 600,000 jobs lost last month -- flaunt their wealth? You know the type -- the Gucci shoes, great furs, two or three cars (or planes). Indeed, proving that pride goeth before fall, Merrill Lynch/Bank of America's John Thain was forced to resign shortly after it was revealed he redecorated his office to the tune of $1.2 million -- while Merrill was racking up a $15 billion loss in the last quarter. That Thain gave bonuses of $4 billion to his executives at the same time is now the subject of a New York attorney general probe.

In any event, conspicuous consumption never plays well -- but especially not in tough times!

Does that extend to, you know, buying people?

NYC Mayor Michael Bloomberg is putting that to the test. It's not enough that he spent about $150 million combined in his first two runs; it's not enough that he got a compliant city council to overturn term limits that had been approved twice by the public. No, the mayor has to practically guarantee a third term by purchasing the services of consultants previously in the employ of his likely opponents.

The mayor is still popular among the public -- though the term-limits overturning has caused his personal attributes to take a slight hit. On balance, he's done a reasonable job running the city. But at some point, there may be a case of the straw breaking the camel's back. At some point, the power of one man to buy anything -- and anyone -- his heart desires creates righteous envy.

Whether that is something that Bloomberg's possible opponents can tap into -- asking New Yorkers if they feel they are becoming serfs in King Michael's dominion -- will be something to track as this year goes by.

Labels: Michael Bloomberg, New York City

It's been a while since I wrote on local New York politics. So, let's take note of Michael Bloomberg.

Given the bulk of his "State of the City" speech Wednesday, one could almost be led to believe that the mayor really is planning on running for president -- as a Republican!!! What else are we to think when he actually champions tax cuts and education reform that starts moving perilously close to the land of vouchers?

With revenue rolling in because of the still-booming NY real estate market, Bloomberg announced a $1 billion package of property and sales tax cuts. It's only a 5 percent cut -- $750 million for one year, plus a $400 "rebate" for the third year in a row. But considering that the centerpiece for Bloomberg's first budget in 2002 was an 18.5 percent property tax increase, this is a marked improvement.

However, as Manhattan Institute scholar Nicole Gelinas points out, this is still not enough:

Bloomberg proposes only a one-year cut. He said yesterday, "It would be great if we can extend this in the years to come, but we can't know that we'll be as fortunate in the future with our revenues and expenses so right now it would not be fiscally sensible to commit to doing so."

Due to this caveat, while homeowners will no doubt put their savings to good use, New York's economy won't benefit from this cut as much as it could.

Why? Commercial-property investors and their tenants, as well as rental-property investors, will still have to budget new projects or renovations using the higher tax rate, since there's no guarantee the savings won't vanish next year.

If Bloomberg is set on property-tax cuts, he'd do better to at least enact a permanent tax cut - and then pledge to keep spending permanently in line to pay for it. But what the city's property-tax structure really needs is complete reform - rental-property owners and condo residents, for example, now pay far more than their fair share of property taxes, pushing costs up for free-market tenants and owners alike.

And in fact, to spur private investment in the city's economy, an income-tax cut would be better than a property-tax cut. A permanent cut in the city's top 3.6 percent income-tax rate, even a modest one, would have two positive effects.

First, it would encourage the creation of the new jobs the city constantly needs. Second, it would reduce New York's dangerous dependence on volatile tax revenue from Wall Streeters. These traders and others directly provide more than a fifth of city in- come-tax cash - but their incomes tend to fluctuate from year to year, creating wild swings in the city's annual surpluses and deficits.

As Nicole says -- make the tax cuts permanent. Whether commercial property or a single-family dwelling, it becomes very difficult to get people to come to NY to raise a family -- if there's not greater year-to-year tax relief. Why would someone move to New York if they knew that the odds were that they'd be facing a de farcto taxe hike, the following year?

Meanwhile, Bloomberg did even better for his ongoing school reform -- including accountability standards for principals, revising tenure eligibility for teachers (yep, that wailing howl you just heard was the city teachers union.

But most significantly, Bloomberg wants to:

overhaul a decades-old school funding system that, solely for political reasons, rewards some schools over others. You wont believe this, but today, funding gaps between comparable schools can top $1 million, or $2,000 per student, year after year.

That's not right and we're going to fix it.

Starting in September, we're going to fund students instead of schools, basing our investment on the number of students enrolled, and their particular needs. The goal is equitable funding among our schools and ensuring that each school has what it needs to teach its students.

The possible implications for this could be huge.

Tying funding formulas to students rather than schools has been a goal of school voucher advocates for years. As the New York Sun notes, Bloomberg's plan opens the door to a school choice/voucher discussion:

If the money is going to follow a student, why not let it follow him or her right into a private independent or parochial school?

So far the mayor and his schools chancellor, Joel Klein, have opposed school vouchers, while enthusiastically backing charter schools. But the change they are proposing could one day allow a mayor and schools chancellor who succeed them — perhaps emboldened by the disappointing record of only incremental improvement within the public monopoly system, even under capable management — to try vouchers. Or at least it could give them a wedge for opening up the issue in Albany.

In liberal New York, Bloomberg undoubtedly can't be as candid as he might wish to be. However, one can't ignore the fact that the cumaulative impact of all of the changes that the mayor and his school chancellor have been making over the years -- accountabilty, more freedom for principals and now this revised funding formula -- is to take apart the schlerotic parts of the public school system and insert something that is far more child- and parent-centered.

Right now it is taking the principles of charter schools and making it system-based. A few years down the line, however, and we could be looking at voucher pilot programs in the Big Apple.

Oh, as for my observation above that one can only "almost" believe that this combination of tax cuts and education reform means Bloomberg is thinking of running for president as a real Republican, be advised that he also devoted a significant part of his speech to his favorite inter-state concern -- "illegal" guns!

C'est la vie.

UPDATE: I appeared this morning on local public radio station, WNYC's Brian Lehrer show, discussing Bloomberg's tax cuts. Listen to liberal pundit Andrea Batista Schlesinger who is on right before me, as I respond to a few of her comments.

Labels: Michael Bloomberg, New York City, school choice, tax cuts

For those who might not have heard about this yet, this is perhaps one of the most inspirational goodwill stories to come around in some time.

Fifty-year old Navy vet and construction worker Wesley Autrey managed to save a man going through a seizure -- not once, but twice. The second time, he covered the stricken man's body with his as they lay between subway rail tracks as an oncoming train ended up screeching to a halt above them.

Autrey managed to keep enough presence of mind to tell the milling crowd on the subway platform to shut up enough so his four and six-year old daughters could be told that their dad was alright.

Autrey is now, appropriately, the toast of the town -- lauded by Mayor Bloomberg at City Hall, invited onto David Letterman and Ellen DeGeneres; Donald Trump sent him a check for $10,000; the MTA has given him a year of free Metro cards, etc.

However, the best part of the story is Autrey's spiritual selflessness in addition to his physical heroism: Without any prompting, he has said several times that he's not a hero: He says the men and women over in Iraq, "fighting to give us the opportunity to be able to save someone's life here" (paraphrasing his comments on Letterman Thursday night), are the true heroes.

Anyway, for those looking for good news, you can't hope for much better than this to kick off the new year.

UPDATE: Clip from Autrey's appearance on Letterman is here.

Labels: New York City, Wesley Autrey