Opinion

HE SPENT, YOU PAY

Nelson Rockefeller, the last of the Em pire State’s noblesse oblige politicians and a dominant figure in public life in New York during the 20th century, was born 100 years ago today.

It’s been 35 years since New York’s only four-term governor left the statehouse, but his legacy – unaffordable government and an accompanying economic decline – lives on.

E.J. McMahon of the Manhattan Institute lays out the unhappy details on the preceding page. Suffice it to be said that the principal achievements of the Rockefeller years are to be found in New York’s most-expensive-in-the-nation Medicaid system, its hyperactive public-sector unionism and – most starkly – its seemingly endless financial crises.

New York’s near bankruptcy during the mid ’70s was the most dramatic of these events, but the first cracks appeared in 1971 – and the latest round has Albany looking at a combined $27.5 billion budget deficit over the next five years.

It’s not all Rockefeller’s fault, of course; New York never lacks for politicians eager to spend public money.

And there was return on his investment: Rocky expanded New York’s parks, low-income housing and mass-transit and highway systems. And he built SUNY into a top public university.

But it all had to be paid for.

And it was Rockefeller, together with future US Attorney General John Mitchell, who invented “moral-obligation bonding” as a way to sidestep voter rejection of lavish spending – thereby creating debt that New Yorkers will be paying off for generations.

For two decades, he stifled the state GOP’s natural base in favor of his own brand of socially liberal “Rockefeller Republicanism” – a philosophy he hoped someday to impose on the national party as well.

To that end, Rockefeller sought the presidency three times (the closest he got was to serve as vice president under Gerald Ford).

Through it all, he was a larger-than-life figure.

A product of enormous privilege, he served in the Roosevelt and Eisenhower administrations before defeating another storied scion of industrial fortune, incumbent Gov. W. Averell Harriman, in 1958. He stayed on for 15 years.

He was, by his own lights, dedicated to public service – convinced that big, activist government could solve all of society’s ills.

“The solution is money,” he once said.

So he spent it all.

And New York has never been the same.