Word: auletta
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Dismissing New York's problems with a wringing of hands and perfunctory laments about federal support of the Sunbelt the flight of the middle class to the suburbs, and the greediness of banks and unions, achieves nothing, but Auletta notes that New Yorkers have been offered little more. He says to blame "historical and economic forces, everything and everybody, is to blame nobody. We run the risk of learning nothing from what happened to New York. So Auletta looks at each party's involvement in the collapse and outlines specifically how each is responsible...
...primary culprit is the city itself. "At the risk of overdramatization," Auletta cites 21 "original sins" which the city, state and federal governments committed. In addition to rather prosaic "sins" like the growth of the suburbs and high taxes, Auletta reveals financial shenanigans that politicians and bankers employed to allow the city to continue its spendthrift ways. His discussion of the Nelson Rockefeller championing of moral obligation bonds clearly explains how an irresponsible procedure, responsibly put forth, grew into common practice. Moral obligation bonds, designed by then little-known bond lawyer John Mitchell, allowed the state to sell bonds...
...central question of the fiscal crisis, and of Auletta's book, is why did New York need to borrow all this money in the first place? He answers by calling the city "Liberalism's Vietnam" and provides a cogent parallel of how "more money, more programs, more taxes, more borrowing--didn't work here; just as more troops, more bombs, more interdiction, more pacification programs didn't work" in Vietnam...
...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...