Word: public
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...still strong. Whether they occupy one-and two-family row houses or ranks of monotonously alike apartment buildings, working-class families take pride in an orderly environment. They readily feel threatened by population shifts that change the makeup of their schools, road projects that cut up their neighborhoods, public housing projects that bring in welfare recipients. Like any citizens, they would like more and better amenities and services: a new school, park or playground, better transportation, sewage or public health facilities. But it is in Harlem that a large, new hospital just opened. It is programs aimed at helping blacks...
...have graduated from college or to have accumulated enough capital to become modest entrepreneurs. They have status but are not secure in it. They have aspirations for the good life but not quite enough income to achieve it. They cannot afford private schools for their children, and the public schools in many of their neighborhoods are bad. They cannot tolerate crime; yet it keeps rising. They are open to liberal approaches, but the city has had liberal administrations of one kind or another for as long as they can remember while conditions have grown worse...
Plenty has. Lindsay set out to tame the tough civil service unions and to prevent threatened strikes by public employees; such strikes are illegal in the state. Instead, he and the city suffered through a numbing series of strikes, starting with a transit stoppage on his very first day in office. Since then, sanitation workers, teachers, welfare-department employees and others have also struck. To prevent still more stoppages, Lindsay has been compelled to make extremely high wage settlements...
...measure of rationality on fiscal operations by ending reckless borrowing to cover operating expenses. But he also increased spending by 75% and imposed a municipal income tax, giving New York City residents the highest taxes per capita in the country. The increase has not produced many tangible improvements in public services. Most of the money has been consumed by inflation, by the civil service wage settlements and by a nearly 200% increase in the cost of welfare assistance to the poor. During the Lindsay years, welfare has replaced education as the city's biggest single expense, now totaling $1.5 billion...
...fella, this is the tough way to do it. If I had the money, I wouldn't do it this way, but I don't have any choice." When the conversation turns to his record and Lindsay's, he recalls that he has been in the public employ for 25 years. "I challenge you to tell me what mistakes I made in those 25 years...