Word: auletta
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...Auletta says that New York thought too much with its heart. The nation's highest welfare benefits, a huge public payroll, over-generous union contracts, and high taxes on businesses were all good-hearted policies, but in the long run, they drained the city of its resources. "Whether money is spent, becomes more important than how money is spent." (italics in original) Auletta says the South Bronx renewal project typifies the preoccupation with doing the charitable thing, rather than what makes sense. The federal government has offered New York money to build housing in the desolate South Bronx...
...city still losing? Why has so little changed? Auletta's depressing answer cites the development of a "local equivalent of a military/industrial complex--what one might call a public/profit complex," an assortment of power brokers from the unions, the banks, the local, state and federal government. They have united in the effort to stave off bankruptcy, but in so doing, "the same absence of opposition, of rigorous checks and balances, which helped cause the fiscal crisis now rendered it nearly impossible to cure." The faces and even the titles of the protagonists have changed, but the public, or even...
...Auletta writes in short, clear and unembellished, journalistic prose--a blessing in the long, complicated sections about city finance, but often tiresome in more analytic passages. Almost every paragraph begins with a short, declarative sentence, a basically sound idea, but one which suffers from great overuse. More careful editing and proofreading--the book is riddled with typos--would have helped enormously...
...conclusion, Auletta ridicules Mayor Edward I. Koch's vision of a renaissance in the city. He feels that Koch has been as promiscuous with city funds as his predecessors; and that the mayor has not yet confronted the issues--growing debt and budget, shrinking tax base, et al.--that will determine whether the city lives or dies. On Koch's efforts, Auletta quotes the Wizard of Oz's excuse to Dorothy: "I'm really a very good man, but I'm a very bad wizard...
...sins of the municipal fathers have placed New York City in a position where only the most drastic measures can restore it to a competitive position among American cities. Auletta never specifies what exactly should be done--that is not what his book is about. It is about a city that sought to do too much--to give what it didn't have, to take what it could not use. Auletta says the city wasn't murdered. It committed suicide...