New York’s next mayor will face two critical tasks: keeping people safe, and keeping the city from going broke. Last night, during the first official Campaign Finance Board debate, the Democratic candidates gave the wrong answers on both fronts.
The first job is straightforward. Keep the murder rate down — and keep people safe from other violent crimes and from property crimes, too.
What the Giuliani and Bloomberg administrations have done is extraordinary. In 1993, the year before Giuliani took office, 1,927 New Yorkers lost their lives to murder. In 2001, the year before Bloomberg took over, 629 died.
Last year, it was 417.
As Bloomberg said this month: “The Bronx has about the same number of people as the city of Philadelphia. But Philadelphia had 116 murders through July 1, nearly four times as many as The Bronx did.”
Yet no major Democratic candidate praised the mayor last night. Instead, they competed over who could pander the most on stop, question and frisk.
Public Advocate Bill de Blasio — the front-runner in the latest poll — won hands down in misleading people the most. He hammered City Council Speaker Christine Quinn for being too moderate on this issue, saying he was “the only candidate” who would “end racial profiling” and repeatedly promising to “end the stop-and-frisk era.”
This offered a great chance to Quinn or to the other supposed moderate, Bill Thompson: Point out that a new mayor must take a fresh look at everything — but that you prefer keeping young black and Hispanic men alive to trolling for activist support.
Instead, Quinn confined herself to saying (correctly) that racial profiling is already illegal. Then she created a muddle for herself, praising this month’s federal court ruling against New York’s policing practices as “great.”
Huh? Even if she wants to make some fixes, as any new mayor should, no mayor should welcome having her hands tied by a court order. You want to be free to make decisions; you don’t sue yourself.
Thompson was worse. He said, “It takes a mayor with courage and conviction who will end stop-and-frisk” and “who will end racial profiling” — which, again, is already illegal.
The other big issue is the budget. Next year, the new mayor will face a $2 billion deficit. Municipal labor contracts have been expired for years. Retroactive raises would cost $7.8 billion, money the city doesn’t have.
Plus, public-sector health- and pension-benefits costs will rise to $20 billion a year by the middle of the next mayor’s term, $3 billion more a year than today.
Yet the candidates were mum on these issues.
True, no moderator asked about it directly. But a solid candidate would have worked it in. When NY1’s Errol Louis asked if the candidates would make any departments immune from budget cuts, for example, someone could have answered that the first order of business will be to get costs under control.
Nope. The only mention was when ex-Rep. Anthony Weiner said “we need to pay teachers a little more . . . to take the toughest assignments.” With what money?
When it came to pet projects, Weiner, de Blasio and comptroller John Liu knew how they’d pay: Raise taxes.
De Blasio wants to hike taxes on people making more than half a million dollars a year to fund universal pre-K (staffed by union workers). Weiner and Liu want to hike taxes on millionaires to pay for a tax cut for middle-income earners.
Here, too, other candidates had a terrific chance. They could have pointed out: New York is already dangerously dependent on wealthy income-tax payers. The top 1 percent pays half of the city’s income taxes. Just a few people have to leave, or reorganize their finances, for a tax-rate hike to bring in less in taxes.
The only sane thing to do is to rein in costs first.
Instead, Quinn and Thompson bizarrely went on the defensive for not having a plan to raise taxes.
“Tax increases aren’t off the table,” said Thompson. Agreed Quinn: “If we have to do that because we can’t find the resources within our budget to get what we need . . . I will absolutely do it, progressively” — that is, hike taxes on the rich.
Sorry: Whatever your favorite idea is, whether it’s pre-K or more cops, the only way to fund it is to reform worker benefits. Otherwise, rising costs suck up any new tax revenues.
Liu got one thing right. Asked if he’d hire any of his competitors for his administration, he sighed and said: “I think I’ll be looking for all new people.”
Forgive the voters for thinking the same thing.
Nicole Gelinas is a contributing editor of the Manhattan Institute’s City Journal.