WHEN New York – city and state – teetered on the brink of fiscal disaster 30 years ago, Hugh Leo Carey saved the day.
For this and other achievements, the former governor was honored last Thursday by the Manhattan Institute – the intellectual engine powering much of what has made New York the wonderfully vibrant, hugely livable city it has become since Carey rescued it way back when.
New York City’s incumbent chief executive seems not to have learned much from the episode; anyone who doubts it need only consider the clueless encomium to Carey delivered by Mayor Bloomberg Thursday evening.
The mayor, in his tin-eared style, began with a story about Hugh Carey and an Irish bar in Brooklyn.
It was supposed to have been a joke, but as is so often the case when Mike makes a funny, folks just cringed.
Now, did Carey take a drink back in the day? Yes. But to paraphrase Lincoln on Grant, New York should find out what he was drinking, and buy a barrel for all its governors.
For Bloomberg, too.
Mike went on to praise Carey’s “fortitude” in the face of the enormous challenge of 1975-76; not to prettify matters, it consisted essentially of cleaning up after a succession of fiscally feckless New York City mayors.
Swiftly, Carey set to work.
He assembled a formidable team: Bob Morgado, Peter Goldmark, Steven Berger, Sandy Frucher; David Burke, Judah Gribetz, Mike DelGiudice, Mark Lawton, to name just a few – men of intelligence and character, purpose and principle. Albany hasn’t seen their like since (certainly not during the past 10 years), and probably never will again.
Then former congressman Carey went to Washington, to call in chits accrued over 14 years in the House. President Ford, once a congressional colleague, signed on. (Ford never told New York to drop dead, by the way; the Daily News got that wrong, too.)
Presently, Washington agreed to guarantee billions in new borrowing – the “bailout.”
In return, Carey pledged the sacred honor of New York to the proposition that the days of wine and roses truly were over – that, once back on its feet, the city wouldn’t return to its profligate ways.
Carey couldn’t anticipate Mayor Mike, of course. Early on, Bloomberg resumed the practice of borrowing to finance everyday municipal expenses – the tactic that precipitated the fiscal crisis in the first place.
The following year, he refinanced the 1976 bail-out bonds – after 30 years, they were about to mature – effectively obligating the whole state to 30 more years of interest payments to make good on the profligacy of Mayors Wagner, Lindsay and Beame.
But Mike got $2.4 billion in fresh money for the municipal spending machine, which was all that mattered to him.
Now he has a new budget out, larded with election-year goodies but utterly devoid of any sense of the city’s continuing – indeed, structural – fiscal peril.
Isn’t it ironic?
There stood Bloomberg Thursday night – an unrepentant spendthrift fully in the tradition of Wagner, Lindsay and Beame – paying tribute to the man to whom history handed the consequences of their excesses.
If Mike Bloomberg possessed a fraction of Hugh Carey’s humility, humanity, stubbornness, political skill and raw courage, he might well have balanced his administration’s books without recourse to deficit spending, or re-mortgaging the future to pay for past sins.
But then, he wouldn’t be Mike Bloomberg, would he?
Where have all the leaders gone?
