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To judge from the happy talk coming from City Hall and Albany, these are Gotham’s golden days. The pols point to sky-high budgets — investments, they call them — as proof they are fighting to make New York better than ever.
To which the public responds: Liars, liars, pants on fire!
New Yorkers, it turns out, see life in the five boroughs as bad and getting worse. Much worse.
That’s the resounding message from a huge survey of city residents conducted by the private Citizens Budget Commission.
The findings amount to a thumbs-down response to our government overlords by painting a dismal view of the quality of life.
Even allowing for the fact that New Yorkers are renowned world-class complainers, the survey offers almost nothing for elected officials to cheer.
No matter how you slice it, it’s not a pretty picture.
‘Good’ grief
A few highlights, er, lowlights:
- Only 30% of respondents rate the quality of life as excellent or good, down from 51% in 2017 and 2008.
- Only 24% rate the quality of government services good or excellent, down from 44% in 2017;
- Only 11% believe the government is spending tax dollars wisely, down from 21% in 2017.
How low must it go before the political establishment wakes up?
The conclusions are bad enough in the absolute sense, but are even worse in reflecting a sense of continuing decline over time.
A telling example is the response showing New Yorkers feel only marginally safer riding the subway during the day now than they felt on the subway at night in 2017.
Yikes.
The commission sent detailed questionnaires to a random sample of 125,000 households late last year to get meaningful participation from every borough, neighborhood, income level and racial and ethnic group.
It said the questions were consistent with a survey it conducted in 2017 and one the city conducted in 2008.
Although only about 6,600 households responded, organizers say the results are statistically valid, with some margins of error calculated at plus or minus 1 percentage point.
The commission, a private nonprofit founded in 1932, is widely respected for its budget and economic analyses of both city and state government. Although it carefully steers clear of partisanship, there is no way to ignore the political reality driving its findings.
It confirms a fact, repeatedly confirmed over time, that big, expensive government policies in deep blue cities and states hobble the economy and make public safety a dicey proposition.
One-party fiefdom
New York reflects that truth in spades, having been a one-party fiefdom since Republicans George Pataki left the governor’s chair in 2006 and Michael Bloomberg left City Hall in 2013.
And so savvy readers will digest the explosive CBC findings with the knowledge that Democrats hold all city- and statewide positions as well as veto-proof majorities in the City Council and state Legislature, reducing the GOP and other dissenters to sideline hecklers.
Yet there is also another dimension to consider, with New York’s continuing decline corresponding to the rise of the progressive left here.
Although there was always a radical fringe in New York politics, it dramatically grew in power largely as a reaction to Donald Trump’s election as president in 2016.
In the next election, the 2018 midterms, progressives ousted six moderate Dems in the state Senate who had caucused with Republicans and shared leadership positions. The center-right mix had been a good balance with left-leaning Dems controlling the state Assembly.
But in a relative heartbeat, the far left used its Senate power to push an extreme agenda in both houses. One result was that then-Gov. Andrew Cuomo, ostensibly at odds with the left, nonetheless signed destructive criminal-justice initiatives that tied judges’ hands and led to the release of dangerous criminal suspects.
The riots and demonstrations following the 2020 death of George Floyd at the hands of Minneapolis police launched another wave of radicalism.
The “defund the police” movement spawned some of the most destructive social policies America has ever seen.
The city’s mayor at the time, Bill de Blasio, an actual red diaper baby, proved true to the cause by slashing the NYPD budget by about 15%.
His infuriating tolerance for crime, mayhem and anti-business programs, in conjunction with an increasingly left-wing council, created yet another layer of expensive dysfunction.
The death knell was the election of the likes of Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg, one of a group of prosecutors who talks and acts more like defense attorneys. They never met a criminal they don’t feel sorry for.
In the prosecutors’ warped views, victims, most nonwhite, are just the collateral damage of fixing what they see as a racist criminal-justice system.
This modern history explains how so many of the hard-won gains in public safety and the booming economy that Rudy Giuliani started and Bloomberg finished were squandered. In their place, government costs soared even as the streets grew more dangerous and public disorder drove middle-class families and even the wealthy out of town.
Sunshine State lesson
Decline is not inevitable, a fact I saw clearly on a recent trip to Florida. While in the booming West Palm Beach area to interview Trump at Mar-a-Lago, I had numerous conversations with New Yorkers who have fled part time, and others who have abandoned the city altogether.
The sentiment is consistent — the city doesn’t work any more. They say the advantages, and there are many, are not worth the hassle, the fear and the price. Public schools are another problem, and the cost of private institutions is prohibitive for most.
Exorbitant taxes are a common gripe, and the invasion of perhaps 200,000 migrants has added fuel to the get-out-of-Dodge instinct.
The cost of government in New York is impossible to defend. The city, with a population of 8.5 million, has a budget of $110 billion. The entire state of Florida, home to nearly 22 million people, has a budget of $116 billion.
Another example: In New York state, with 19 million people, Gov. Hochul has proposed a budget of $233 billion — and the Legislature wants to raise it to at least $246 billion.
That means, on a state level, New York spends more than twice as much per capita as Florida.
And for what? As an obvious contrast, many highways in Florida are nearly spotless, while the Major Deegan and others around the city double as garbage dumps.
The cost issues throw an especially harsh light on the CBC findings about the public’s fear of riding the subways. Despite the MTA’s vastly inflated budget, the state wants to impose congestion pricing on cars and trucks entering Midtown Manhattan, with the goal of raising another $1 billion a year for mass transit.
But get this — the system admits it has lost up to $750 million a year from fare beaters, with one in three bus passengers refusing to pay. Rather than solve that problem, the agency demands more cash — and the government is ready to slap another $15 daily tax on anything that moves.
Mad as hell
Given their gripes, it would be understandable if fed-up New Yorkers imitated actor Peter Finch. His Oscar-winning performance as Howard Beale in the 1976 film “Network” featured his nightly shouting out his Manhattan window: “I’m mad as hell and I’m not going to take it anymore.”
Unfortunately, that’s not the New Yorkers we have. Most don’t bother to vote and those who do automatically support any and all Democrats.
Unless enough people come to their senses, a dead raccoon on the “D” ballot line might someday be elected mayor.
Then again, would it matter?
