Albany’s Big Ugly, where all the difficult votes get hidden inside of the budget and sweetened by new spending, is officially late as of Friday, as the political conversation here feels increasingly unhinged from reality.
New York’s motto is “Excelsior” (Latin for “higher”), and the high-stakes game of chicken between different factions of the Democratic Party that dominates politics here is about how much more to spend and on what.
But the state is in a damn deep hole, though you’d never know it listening to the pols whistling past the graveyard, buoyed by billions in federal aid that will never come again plus an unexpected tax haul from the tech companies whose valuations exploded during the pandemic in large part because of how they’ve made it viable for white-collar workers to be productive without having to live or commute into places like Manhattan, the density-fueled economic engine of the city and the state.
You can feel the heavy thumb on the scale when the same progressive lawmakers who insist, correctly, that bail reform isn’t driving the steep rise in crime — with shootings up more than 100% in New York City since 2019, just before various criminal justice reforms took effect and the coronavirus landed here, and the seven major crime categories up 45% so far this year from last year — keep repeating that the pandemic is the reason violent crime is up across the country.
Good luck, everyone!
The same pols who favor more government intervention and spending as the solution to every other social ill, insist that government is powerless to do anything about violent crime in the short-term and that giving more discretion to cops and courts would only make things worse for the victims of the criminal justice system.
As to the victims of criminals, they’ll have to wait until a generation of spending on root causes hopefully bears fruit.
These aren’t popular positions. A Siena poll shows just 30% of New Yorkers favor the bail reform law now, down from 55% when it passed. Sixty-four percent say it’s resulted in an increase in crime, and a staggering 82%, including 79% of Democrats, think judges should have more discretion, which is what the law largely took away, to set bail.
Those numbers haven’t been enough so far to sway the “will of the caucus,” though they did seem to push Gov. Hochul, who abruptly went from suggesting she wouldn’t revisit the 2019 criminal justice reforms without “data” showing the need to do so to offering a 10-point plan to do just that.
That’s the most visible part of the reality distortion field surrounding New York’s politics, but it’s hardly the whole thing. While other cities have rebounded, New York City is down nearly 300,000 jobs from when the pandemic began and the city’s unemployment rate has been stuck at nearly double the national average.
And people left along with jobs. Between April of 2020 and July of 2021, Manhattan’s population fell by nearly 7%, or 117,000 people — the second-biggest loss of any county after Los Angeles, which is six times more populous.
While 65% of urban counties nationwide gained population in that plague year, Brooklyn, the Bronx and Queens each declined by more than 3% to give New York City a net loss of 327,000 people. In just a year, New York State lost nearly half of the population it had added over the preceding 10 years, with the city accounting for more than 92% of the state’s loss.
Things may be even worse in Manhattan than the population decline suggests, with many fewer commuters (and tourists) now arriving on the island each day. Citywide, subway travel is down by more than 40% from pre-pandemic numbers, and by more than 50% on the commuter rails. Offices are still mostly empty, and no one seriously thinks they’re going to be fully repopulated by people commuting in five days a week.
Even setting aside rising inflation rates that could punish the city’s crucial financial sector, the idea that we’re just going to return to the old normal seems increasingly absurd.
But in Albany, the spending fight has been about whether the $10 billion in new state spending that Hochul, running for a term of her own, wants to add would be enough (spoiler: it won’t be), and about which new items — a casino in Manhattan (and a reminder there that then-state Sen. Eric Adams was a player in the corrupt process to choose which “lucky” winner would get to build a vastly profitable racino in Queens), a new football stadium in Buffalo, huge new pots of money for CUNY, childcare programs, home-care worker pay and on and on — to add on top of last year’s $212 billion budget (with $177 billion in state spending).
While the dancers are going faster than ever, the music has been slowing down and it won’t be long before someone has to pay the piper.
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