NYC’s Fiscal Crisis

How did Mike Bloomberg end up changing the rules so that he could run for a third term as mayor? Let’s ask NYC speaker Christine Quinn:

“It’s a piece of legislation and a vote and a choice that is a difficult one, but it’s one we take at a different time, a time when our city is facing the worst fiscal crisis since the Great Depression,” she said.

I didn’t like McCain talking about this as a fiscal crisis, but in some ways this is even worse, because New York City actually had a real, honest-to-goodness fiscal crisis not so long ago, in the late 70s. And judging by its bond ratings right now, it’s nowhere near those levels yet.

So if Quinn had said that she was voting Bloomberg back in to prevent NYC’s worst fiscal crisis in 30 years, that might be one thing. But she didn’t. Yes, NYC is going to be in fiscal pain, now that Wall Street tax revenues have dried up for the foreseeable future. (This year’s losses will cover a lot of future years’ profits.) But scare-mongering about the Great Depression is not a constructive way of going about things.

Still, things are bad, even Felix Rohatyn says so, and he knows what a fiscal crisis looks like:

Offering a gloomily unsettling vision of New York City’s future, Felix G. Rohatyn said Friday that he believed the fiscal crisis of the late 1970’s might seem ”benign” compared to what the city is likely to endure in the next five years.

Oh, wait, that’s not Friday as in today, it’s Friday as in June 2, 1989. I guess I’m not the only Felix who gets things very wrong when I venture into econopunditry.