Cities' finance problems

I've sometimes thought it would be a good idea to revamp the calendar. Not in the drastic way of the Romans or Napoleon – I'm not suggesting for a minute it's time to stop naming the midsummer month after the Emperor Augustus and start chanting, 'June, July, Brezhnev or Pelé'.

What I have in mind is nothing ceremonial but something which, if it was done well, would be as true a guide as a barometer to the political and social weather of a nation. Long ago, for instance, I suggested that for all purposes of understanding the rhythm of American life, the American New Year started, not on 1 January but on 3 or 4 September, on Labor Day. By miraculous good luck, I happen to have that talk at my elbow. Let me quote the first few sentences of it: 

'The real end of the American year is not 31 December but the annual festival of Labor Day. It's the day when the summer is put away. The swimming trunks squeezed for the last time, the ashtrays in country cottages filled with mouse seed and the cupboards with mothballs, the storm doors hammered into place against the mesh screens of doors and porches, the lock turned for the last time on your private world of sun and sand and picnics with sand in the sandwiches. Labor Day brings you back to the world of schools and offices, to sniffling colds and insurance policies, to taxes and commentators, to dark nights and the dark horizon of politics.' 

Well, whatever happens in any year, Labor Day, the official start of the full working year will still be New Year's Day. 

What I'm putting up now to some political social historian as learned as the late Denis Brogan and as sprightly as Art Buchwald is something far more subtle and perceptive. Done with genius, it would rank with Plato or Aristotle as a guide to how things really work. For instance, 20 January is down in the calendar as the day when the new Congress first convenes, but this is no more than a ritual. They ought to mark on this new calendar, the day the Senate Banking Committee holds its first meeting because that's the day when you would begin to learn each year how harshly or softly the Congress means to deal with the president’s ideas about spending your money. For in all money matters the president proposes but the Congress disposes. 

Just now the Senate Banking Committee is easily the most important, you might say the most frightening, government body to New Yorkers. It alone can decide whether to bail out New York City from its financial mess or whether to leave it to sink or swim. Mayor Koch was down in Washington the other day trying to demonstrate to the committee a proposition which, to him, is as simple as the road to doomsday. Withhold long-term loans now, he was saying, 'industry will look elsewhere, the middle class which bears the main tax burden to pay for all the city's services – water, police, schools, sanitation, so on – the middle class, faced with heavier taxes still will simply decamp to neighbouring states like New Jersey or Connecticut, which don't have state income taxes, let alone city income taxes. And then New York would turn into an impoverished jungle and Congress would have to reach down even deeper for huge amounts of rescue money. 

Mr Koch splayed his hands and adopted his wry smile as if he were being very kind and tolerant before a panel of obtuse senators who simply cannot understand that two and two make four. To which the senators retorted, 'You come to us begging a big loan and eventually we give it to you on the promise that you cut your municipal working staff and trim some services and you go away heaping blessings on us. And then the next year, you're back again with papers and figures proving that you've made heroic sacrifices but you miscalculated. You need another fat loan. 

'At what point,' they pointedly asked, 'do we hear from the mayors of Chicago and St Louis and Baltimore and San Francisco and all the other big cities that are running down and can't pay their way?' 

At that, Mr Koch gave his resigned smile and shrugged his shoulders. The fact he cannot explain away is the one that might have come from Alice in Wonderland, namely when New York City first went a-begging to Congress, its annual budget was running at $11 billion. Of course, it was essential to reduce it if New York was going to survive. Well, Mr Koch was back this week to tell them sweetly that New York has done nobly. It has reduced the budget from $11 billion to $13 billions. 

Well, the item on the new calendar that first occurred to me had nothing to do with the Senate Banking Committee. It would mark off the first Tuesday in June as the day when you could learn, with more certainty than the public opinion polls, the direction in which the country is moving politically. 

Last Tuesday, eight states held primaries and some of these preliminary bouts were watched by the whole nation, especially California, for a reason I went into a few weeks ago when I was out there. This had to do with what is roughly called ‘the taxpayers' revolt'. California, I reminded you, is a state, is THE state, which throughout the century and more of its existence, has cherished the custom of a referendum on all burning social issues. The thing that's been burning Californians for the past year has been the threat of the state legislature to double property taxes, what in Britain are called rates. Double! Just think of it! You pay, say, £100 in rates today, next year you'll pay £200. 

This horror generated so much protest that a counter proposal of hot and bothered citizens went on the ballot on Tuesday as the subject of a referendum known as Proposition 13. It didn’t merely defy the landlords lobby and the real estate lobby, it proposed to cut ALL property taxes by 50 per cent. And last Tuesday Californians voted for it by better than two to one. So it now has the force of law and the interesting thing to you and me, wherever we are, will be to see maybe a year from now who's right? The opposing citizens who said this cut would throw the state and its educational system, its police services especially, into bankruptcy and chaos. Or the two voters in three who are sick of big government and believe it can be trimmed of a lot of fat without paralysing its muscle. 

Americans in many other states will begin to look at their property rates and their telephone bills and the taxes they've laid out in what are called 'school bond' issues to finance more or better education. 

There was a time, not so long ago, when a school bond issue was no more of an issue than Mother or Santa Claus. Only a churl and a skinflint would deny money to our precious children. But, last Tuesday, the city of Cleveland voted down a school bond issue by nearly four to one. So did Columbus, Ohio. And out there too, there was a possibly more interesting revolt still. 

Columbus, as every man of letters knows – and women who write letters too – Columbus was the birthplace of the late, great James Thurber. As an indignant letter writer to The Listener reminded us when somebody had the gall to identify Columbus as the birthplace of the present, great Jack Nicklaus. 'Who?' snorted The Listener correspondent, 'Who is Jack Nicklaus?'. 

Well, shocking as it may sound to a double-dome Briton, I would bet that for every native of Columbus, Ohio who has heard of James Thurber, a hundred have heard of Jack William Nicklaus. For anyone embarrassed at not being able to identify this Titan, may I simply say that Jack Nicklaus is the greatest golfer of his or any other age, that he was born in Columbus and lived there until a year or two ago, that he built a fine tournament golf course in Columbus, that he went to Ohio State University and that Ohio State – considered not as a seat of learning but as an incubator for great footballers – is the pride of more people in Ohio who, lamentable thought it may be, have ever read the works of James Thurber or Robert Benchley or even Franz Kafka. 

You see, football brings hundreds of thousands of free-spending visitors into a famous football town. It is a highly approved form of revenue by shopkeepers, saloon owners, hotel managers, taxi drivers, restaurateurs and the manufacturers of buttons and flags. If there's one state that you could bank on to vote any time for a new sports stadium, that state is Ohio and that city is Columbus. 

Well, last Tuesday, the voters were asked to give work to their own people and entice the dollars of out-of-towners by voting on a fine, new, $29 million sports stadium. They killed it by a heavy vote. 

Is there a trend in these haphazard revolutions? It's always rash to pick one, but I believe there is. In New Jersey, a venerable Republican senator, Senator Case, was beaten for his party's nomination in November by a young unknown. Now, Senator Case is 74 and Mr Bell, his opponent, is 34, but that isn't what did it. Senator Case is a liberal Republican and Mr Bell is a young conservative. And in several other states, in city elections, the voters turned down liberal Republicans. They seemed to be saying what conservative Republicans have moaned for years that a liberal Republican is a contradiction in terms, is no better than a Democrat. So, in an oblique way, they were voting against Jimmy Carter. 

If there is a marked national trend, it is one against the waste and corruption that has defamed the idea of welfare in this country against big government, against more taxation for public and social services. The conservatives are feeling very bullish. They stand on the highway against the sign pointing to Washington and they cock a thumb at any passing citizen and say, 'Going my way?'.

This transcript was typed from a recording of the original BBC broadcast (© BBC) and not copied from an original script. Because of the risk of mishearing, the BBC cannot vouch for its complete accuracy.

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