One issue went unmentioned during the debates so far: cities. Neither President Obama, Gov. Mitt Romney nor their running mates thought the nation’s urban population was worth a phrase. This omission is not an outrage, but a blessing. Decades of urban planning from Washington didn’t help cities in general — and a wealthy metropolis like New York would do better if Washington ignored it even more.
For much of the last half-century, cities got plenty of attention from Washington. In the ’60s, LBJ made urban renewal a key plank of his War on Poverty, handing out federal grants to cities from New Haven to New Orleans under his “Model Cities” program. Johnson said the initiative gave “cities, finally, after a long, bitter, difficult struggle, a voice.”
They should have used it to say “no.” Instead, local officials used federal funds to build highways and other massive projects right through historic but struggling neighborhoods, destroying them.
According to Yale University’s archives, New Haven’s ’60s-era mayor, Dick Lee, came to regret his efforts, saying that “If New Haven is a ‘model city,’ God help America’s cities.” New Orleans street muralists painted oaks on one highway underpass to replace the live oaks that urban renewal destroyed.
Washington efforts to get more people on welfare and on Johnson’s new health-care program, Medicaid, “benefited” urban areas most, as cities had more poor people. Nobody worried that maybe it wasn’t such a great idea to get a whole generation of folk dependent on government.
The ’70s were no better. President Ford and, later, President Carter pushed the Comprehensive Employment and Training Act program, paying for cities to hire hundreds of thousands of workers to try to push unemployment down. Cities were supposed to train young people for good jobs to end “structural unemployment.” Instead, urban machines often used the federal funds for patronage hiring.
Even in the ’80s, urban politicians were still powerful enough to snag earmarks for big-city projects from a supposedly conservative Washington. President Reagan approved funding for Boston’s Big Dig. The promise of getting something for free lulled Massachusetts politicians into complacency about the project’s design — and state taxpayers ended up paying big when the project bubbled way over the federal pot of funds.
Today, thankfully, Washington is less interested in huge new ideas. But existing programs come with silly strings attached. Cities like Buffalo have thousands of abandoned houses — but the feds still give them money to build “affordable” housing.
Plus, free money still makes cities do stupid things. As Steve Cuozzo wrote here, New York pols used Obama stimulus money to jump-start the Fulton Street transit center downtown — a fancy subway station that won’t take anyone anywhere new.
For New York, the problem isn’t just that we end up wasting money. The problem is that we pay for everyone else to waste money, too.
Consider: Between 1981 and 2005, according to the Tax Foundation, New York received an average of only 85 cents back for every dollar we sent to Washington — our own 15-cent deficit.
Why’s that?
Because we have lots of rich people — and rich people pay higher taxes. In 2009, New York state, with 6.3 percent of the nation’s population, earned 7.7 percent of the nation’s personal income but paid 9.2 percent of the country’s personal- income taxes — a good $13.1 billion more than our “fair share,” and that’s just one year.
Our Central Park South billionaires pay for Medicaid in Mississippi.
That means that for everything from Medicaid to the Second Avenue Subway, we don’t really get federal funds — we just buy them with a lot more of own money. Next time you see Chuck Schumer on a Sunday afternoon crowing about he got money for some local project, ask him if they’re naming a bridge after him in Alaska to thank him.
So who’s the real unsung urban warrior on the campaign trail? Mitt Romney. First, he would cut federal-tax rates, meaning rich New Yorkers could keep more of their money in New York. Second, he’d cap federal Medicaid spending — making states, not Washington, responsible for most future Medicaid growth. Such a move wouldn’t prevent New York from spending even more on Medicaid — it would be free to tax its rich folk itself, and keep more of their money.
Romney should go even further, and say that states and cities should build more of their own roads, bridges and subways, rather than look to Washington. This would help New York, as we wouldn’t have to listen to rest-of-the-country rubes complain that we are communists every time we want to build a subway line or a bike lane rather than a highway.
Just like with Medicaid, it wouldn’t prevent us from building big.
As Mayor Bloomberg said two weeks ago, “We built a new subway line” — the No. 7 extension from Times Square to the West Side — with our money.” If you want to build something, he continued “tax yourself and do it.”
We shouldn’t have to build something else thousands of miles away for the privilege.
Nicole Gelinas (@nicolegelinas on Twitter) is a contributing editor to the Manhattan Institute’s City Journal.