For too long, those campaigning for Mike Bloomberg’s job have been debating the city’s past rather than its future.
From the NYPD’s stop-and-frisk policy to charter schools, our candidates have limited themselves to haggling over which successes they would tweak or scale back. No one has offered an agenda that builds on the Bloomberg and Giuliani successes to take New York into a safer, more prosperous and more competitive future.
The Manhattan Institute has just made a bid to change this. A special issue of its City Journal — devoted to a blueprint for a post-Bloomberg New York — has just hit the mails. It highlights challenges the candidates wish to ignore, notably, the coming budget crunch, and it proposes solutions that many are afraid to speak honestly about: e.g., why getting rid of subsidized housing would make rents more affordable for more New Yorkers. In the coming days we will publish excerpts.
Broadly speaking, the top three priorities here are the same as ours: maintaining the pro-active policing that is the key to protecting law-abiding citizens, especially those in edgier neighborhoods; more and better alternatives to a public-school system failing too many of our children; and a radical overhaul of a tax and regulatory environment that, as editor Brian Anderson suggests to us, exhibits a “third world hostility” to business formation in this city.
We’re not saying the Manhattan Institute has all the answers. We are saying that in a mayoral campaign notably devoid of imagination, this special edition of City Journal offers creative ideas about the hard truths that must be addressed to keep the world’s greatest city thriving in this young century.
We’d even be happy if the candidates could tell us why they disagree. At least then they’d be offering New Yorkers some idea of what they intend for the city’s future beyond their own election.