COMMITTING CITYCIDE: FROM NEW YORK TO SEATTLE, VOTERS EMBRACE FISCAL DESTRUCTION: STELLA PAUL
As the Big Apple’s tax base shrinks, its municipal costs skyrocket, increasing the urgency that it get its financial house in order. So I’ll make a bold prediction: New Yorkers may someday regret electing a man who says he does not believe in the free market system.
“Everything you heard about me is true…I am not a free-marketeer…I believe in the heavy hand of government,” Mayor-Elect Bill de Blasio recently told a meeting of major real estate developers.
The developers reportedly “were shocked and speechless” by his “scary” radicalism, but what should they have expected? De Blasio’s first job out of graduate school was raising funds for the revolutionary Sandinistas in Nicaragua. For his honeymoon, he illegally whisked his bride to Cuba, and he’s proudly trumpeted his support for “democratic socialism.”
Is this the guy to tackle New York’s runaway pension costs, which have ballooned in the last decade from $1.4 billion to $8.3 billion? Buoyed by his landslide victory, de Blasio recently emerged from a White House meeting with President Obama to proclaim, “Fighting inequality is the mission of our times.”
Somehow, I doubt he’ll fight for equality by demanding that New York’s 300,000 municipal union workers start to contribute towards their medical benefits.
So far, de Blasio’s economic program seems to consist of two parts: attempting to frighten away productive taxpayers, and throwing sops to the powerful government unions that helped to elect him.
Thus, he murmurs about fighting inequality by creating mandatory early childhood programs, which will require thousands of brand-new union teaching jobs.
And where will he get the money for this educational utopia? Wall Street is hollowing out, as banks relocate their highly paid investment bankers, analysts, and financial advisors to cheaper locations in Florida and Salt Lake City. Only 167,000 people now work at Wall Street securities firms, down from 191,000 in 2008. But don’t expect these sobering financial facts to stop de Blasio’s big spending. Like all hard-core leftists, he seems to regard the rich as an inexhaustible source of filthy lucre, to be miraculously cleansed once palmed by a politician.
Amazingly, this erstwhile reader of Barricade magazine isn’t the most radical city politician lately to sweep into power. Meet Kshama Sawant, the avowed socialist soon slated to bring her special brand of excitement to Seattle’s City Council.
Sawant recently encouraged Boeing machinists to “take over the factories, and shut down Boeing’s profit-making machine.” Irked by Boeing’s refusal to meet union workers’ contract demands, Sawant advised, “The only response we can have if Boeing executives do not agree to keep the plant here is for the machinists to say the machines are here, the workers are here, we will do the job, we don’t need the executives. The executives don’t do the work, the machinists do.”
Now that Boeing’s 31,000 machinists have rejected the “best and final” labor deal for building the new 777x airliner, Boeing is actively seeking other states in which to build its next generation twin-aisle jet. Right-to-work states like South Carolina are panting in anticipation of winning the potential deal for the job-generating airliner plant. Governor Niki Haley has already contacted Boeing to argue for the Charleston area, which has attracted 6,000 Boeing jobs in just five years.
But Kshama Sawant remains unperturbed by the prospect of losing thousands of good Washington state jobs.
You see, she dislikes the whole idea of building commercial airliners, anyway. “We can re-tool the machines to produce mass transit like buses, instead of destructive, you know, war machines,” she said.
Good luck, Seattle, in achieving any kind of fiscal sanity with Kshama Sawant on deck. Especially with your recent $5 billion in tax hikes.
Both New York and Seattle are such extraordinarily desirable places to live that voters may assume that high times will continue forever, as residents sacrifice to remain there.
But Detroit provides the ultimate cautionary tale. The goose that once laid automotive riches has passed on to the celestial choir, and the best way nowadays to get rich in Detroit is as a bankruptcy lawyer. On July 18, 2013, Detroit filed the largest municipal bankruptcy case in U.S. history, owing to its staggering $18.5 billion in debt.
Some 20,000 stray dogs now roam Detroit’s abandoned areas; 47% of its taxable real estate parcels are delinquent even for their 2011 tax bills and its population collapsed by over 60% from its 1950 peak.
As we try to calculate what went so spectacularly wrong, keep in mind this basic principle: If competition is the essence of a healthy economy, it’s also vital to maintain a healthy political system.
The term of Detroit’s last Republican mayor, Louis Miriani, ended in 1962. Since then, the city has been as rigidly ruled by one party as any Communist nation.
In fact, for decades, voters in most failing U.S. cities have elected Democratic monopolies: St. Louis, now boasting a 26 percent poverty rate, last had a Republican mayor in 1949; Philadelphia, at a 28 percent poverty level, ushered out its last Republican mayor in 1952; and, remarkably, Newark, N.J., with a 26.1 percent poverty rate, hasn’t had a Republican mayor for 106 years.
As New York and Seattle voters may discover in coming years, committing citycide happens in three stages. First, the government pursues big utopian dreams requiring public spending on crack. Second, taxpayers take flight as in come crime, decay and general collapse.
Finally, the city’s foreign occupier arrives. Guess who’s buying up Detroit? China. Bankrupt Motown is the now the fourth most popular American destination for Chinese real estate investors, now snatching up such iconic downtown buildings as the Downtown Free Press headquarters plus individual homes selling for half the price of a pair of leather shoes.
Well, we can always hope that the Chinese bring back some old-fashioned capitalism to America’s dying cities. Maybe they can teach Bill de Blasio the virtues of the free market.
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