When Mayor Bill de Blasio last sounded off, he was rolling out the big rhetorical guns to describe the $75 billion budget he produced.
It was, he said, “truly transcendent” and everybody involved was “extraordinary.”
So much bloviating, so little time, but one number says it all: 7 percent. That’s how much de Blasio’s first budget increases spending over the one he inherited.
Contrast that added 7 percent for his use, which is triple the inflation rate, with what de Blasio wanted landlords to get in exchange for new apartment leases: Zero. Nada. Zip.
That doesn’t sound reasonable, because it’s not.
He urged the Rent Guidelines Board to deliver a freeze, saying the members should “think deeply” about the issue. He argued that landlords don’t need more money, because they did very well in recent years.
Perhaps they did, but not nearly as well as the government. In the 12 Bloomberg years, City Hall spending grew 57 percent above inflation. Obviously, de Blasio thinks Bloomy was a piker and comes out of the gate burning money.
But the previous mayor understood the first rule of economics — there is no such thing as a free lunch, as Milton Friedman famously put it. Or, as Bloomberg told me, “I’m a true conservative because I believe you have to pay for what you want.”
So Bloomberg, wanting to spend more on services, ramped up taxes and fees. He got an 18.5 percent hike in the property tax in his first term that was compounded in subsequent years by higher market values. That windfall provided a huge chunk of the money he spent on parks, teachers, bike lanes, cops and the homeless.
Safer streets encouraged renovation and new construction, and that meant more jobs, which meant higher revenue through sales and income taxes.
Bloomberg didn’t leave the coffers flush, but he stands head and shoulders above de Blasio on economics. The rent-hike issue reveals the new mayor’s deficit.
Although the Guidelines Board didn’t approve a freeze — it allowed increases of 1 percent on one-year renewals — it scared property owners.
They cite a price index showing their costs rose 5.7 percent last year, led by increases of 8.4 percent in utilities and 7.8 percent in oil. Not incidentally, both carry high city and state taxes, meaning government indirectly drives up the cost of housing.
Then there’s the property tax itself, which accounts for the lion’s share of the 5 percent increase in direct city taxes the landlords paid last year. Again, the government is making housing more expensive.
Yet de Blasio, by raising spending 7 percent, is implicitly counting on property owners to fork over more to his bureaucracy, even as he tries to shield tenants from any increases.
That may be good politics, but it’s a lousy housing policy. The mayor talks about an “affordability” crisis, but starving private housing of the income needed to match rising costs will lead to disinvestment, not investment.
The mayor is doing something similar with small businesses. He demands they offer sick days and wants a higher minimum wage without saying how owners should pay those added costs.
His cavalier attitude suggests he looks at businesses, whether a bodega or an apartment building, and sees a fat cat to be squeezed so government can have more milk. All in the name of compassion, or progressivism.
None of this is a surprise, with de Blasio a fan of Fidel Castro’s Cuba and conceding socialist tendencies. But now that he’s mayor, the test of his convictions will come when bodegas go out of business because owners can’t afford to operate them, and apartments become dumps because owners can’t afford to maintain them.
If he’s true to his history, de Blasio will react by demanding more tax hikes.
Because government can’t do with less, everybody else must.
Bam the torpedoes
Pity the poor members of the Obama Protection Racket. They’ve masqueraded as journalists even as they adopt the party line that Dear Leader represents all that is good and true and all the problems are somebody else’s fault.
Then, wham! The latest poll lands like a bomb. It delivers very bad news for Obama, and the Protection Racket can’t attack it as biased because — drumroll, please — it comes from The New York Times.
Oh, the problems of the liberal 1 percent. Sob.
The Times poll, echoing other recent ones, shows the president is no longer treading water.
He’s sinking. Fast.
His job approval stands at 40 percent, with 54 percent disapproving. On foreign policy, it’s worse — 36 percent approve and 58 percent disapprove.
Only 23 percent say he has “clearly explained” America’s goals in Iraq. Maybe they can explain it to the 67 percent who say he hasn’t.
As I wrote Sunday, such a sour national mood could lead to early elections in a parliamentary system. Yet the safety of a four-year term may be lulling the White House into a sense of complacency.
Their efforts to fight back are feeble, amounting largely to the president giving dispiriting interviews to morning TV shows. His bemoaning the collapse of the Iraqi army in the face of surging terrorists certainly didn’t bolster confidence in his leadership.
His comments reinforced the notion he was caught off guard and doesn’t yet have a plan, despite calling the expanding war a threat to American interests.
As such, he’s not giving the Protection Racket much to work with, but I’m confident his media lackeys will find someone else to blame or, failing that, ignore the story altogether. That’s worked up to now, though the mushrooming scandals and problems make it hard to fool most of the people even some of the time.
‘Networking,’ Clinton-style
As the feds probe whether American banks are trying to improperly curry favor with Chinese officials by hiring their children, they might take a look at NBC News.
It hired Chelsea Clinton for a reported $600,000, and barely used her. By one count, she was paid $26,000 for each minute she was on air.
The move suggests there was an ulterior motive. Is it possible Chelsea was hired in hopes her parents would look more kindly on NBC interview requests?
Goodbye, good man
Roy Goodman was a rare New York pol — smart, principled and funny as hell.
The Ex-Lax heir was a liberal Republican who worked for John Lindsay, ran for mayor in 1977 and represented the East Side of Manhattan in the state Senate from 1969 until he retired in 2002.
As for his humor, I have on my wall a toast he often gave:
“I drink to your health in public,
I drink to your health when I’m alone.
I drink to your health so often,
I’m worried about my own.”
Roy Goodman died at 84 early this month. He is already missed.