Mayor Koch snowed under

Well, this week a large part of the country has had a bumper snowfall and the whole country has just received a bumper budget. Since New York is the news capital of the country – Washington being the capital of political news – New York City has made its usual big fuss about the 13 inches of snow that fell through Thursday night and into Friday of last week.

Admittedly 13 inches is more than some countries get in year – it's more than London has had in the past eight years together – but it's very much less than they get routinely throughout the Great Plains and the Midwest and New England and upstate New York. The mean annual snowfall, for instance, in Rochester New York is 86 inches, 80 in Burlington, Vermont, 108 in Sault Ste Marie, Michigan. The American record, incidentally, is 390 inches in one month, January 1911, in – where do you think? – Tamarack, California. The record for 24 hours is, God save us, 76 inches in Silver Lake, Colorado in 1921. 

But even Connecticut, 40 minutes away from New York City, had over 20 inches while New York was screaming about its 13-inch plight. New York, however, apart from regarding itself as the centre of everything – finance, book publishing, opera, art, ballet and the cloak and suit business – is understandably sensitive these days to any natural disaster, maybe I should say 'phenomenon', that requires a lot of extra money to cope with. New York, as you have surely heard, is once again teetering over the chasm of bankruptcy and the city fathers are having a dreadful time trying to convince a committee of the Senate that it should get any more federal money to bail it out. 

Now it's true that 13 inches is a lot of snow at one swoop since brisk winds soon pile it up in drifts as high as six or eight feet, enough to turn parked cars into great, sleeping polar bears and to immobilise trucks and even buses. Of course 300 years of rough and occasionally Arctic winters long ago required extraordinary equipment. 

The city has now about a thousand massive motorised snowploughs and they don't wait for the storm, they were droning away in the early dawn on Friday, shoring the stuff up into parapets against the sidewalks, the pavements, and the avenues, which run like spines down Manhattan, were navigable mostly, throughout the fall. The side streets are another story and would probably require several more thousand ploughs. In the other four boroughs, the side streets tend to get forgotten. People are out shovelling their own sidewalks or chopping the snow from their ground-floor windows, just as one indignant resident of Queens said, 'Just so we can breathe'. 

Well, it all reminds me of the record snowfall in this city. It was Boxing Day, 1947. Up to that moment, that day, we youngsters – which means anybody younger than 70 then – were properly respectful when old gaffers told us about the horrors of the infamous blizzard of 1888 in which over 400 people died. But on Christmas Day 1947, it began. And through Boxing Day and, at the end of it, we had over 26 inches. 

I recall it for two things, both of them connected. Everything stopped and since on the 27th the sun came up in a clear sky, everything was beautiful. Double-decker buses on Fifth Avenue peeped out of a smooth, rolling ocean of snow. There was no noise anywhere. And the next day it was more beautiful still, but frighteningly so – the ice storm. The temperature had gone plunging down overnight and every long branch of every tree in Central Park was shimmering, giving off sharp lights, like a sword encrusted with diamonds. I have never seen anything as beautiful ever. 

But then, as the sun went down and the snow froze, the damage began and, all through the night, there was this fierce crackling, like a fire getting under way, and the limbs splitting and falling all over the place. The price of this silence and this beauty was several million dollars and a fairly ragged-looking park for some years to come. 

In those days, America was recovering, and at a bound, from the war, but it was nothing like so prosperous as it is now and yet I don't recall any loud complaints from the citizens about the slowness of snow removal, no nasty remarks about the mayor and his incompetence. But by now we've had 40 years or more of expecting the government of the city, the state, the nation, to get cracking on our behalf. The more we acquire conveniences, the more we seem to shout out at any inconvenience at all. Maybe... maybe this is a moral reflection and if so I apologise, for we all know that today moral reflections have no place in politics. 

Anyway, after last week's 13 inches, our new mayor, Ed Koch, is a scapegoat. He, you'd gather, sent the snow. And he, according to the people in the five boroughs, is heartless or incompetent or worse. The borough president of Queens, looking over the streets, charged – that's always the word – charged the mayor with a poor level of performance. The supermarkets had late deliveries of meat or none at all, causing one, young, literary gent to echo the immortal line of Allen Ginsberg, 'Who killed the pork chops?' Mayor Koch. That's who. 

Poor Mayor Koch. The city is not only many more millions in the red than it was when it was saved by Washington and by the New York state government, it will have to add a few more millions to pay for this snowfall. And practically nobody sympathises with the mayor who could truthfully say that by overwhelming popular demand, as an economy, he got rid of 3500 sanitation employees in the last two years and was left to get along with a thousand snowploughs compared with the 1600 that tackled the last big fall in 1969. 

The sad fact is, moral or not, that when New York City was on the verge of bankruptcy, the people rallied to the last mayor's cry for thrift and sacrifice. As abstract nouns 'thrift' and 'sacrifice' sound very fine. The snag sets in when they get translated into action and turn out to mean use public transport and shovel your own snow. Well, no doubt, we shall survive. But Mayor Koch, who like all new mayors was given a rousing cheer at his inauguration four weeks ago, is now just another mayor refusing to take care of everybody at the city's expense. 

Last Monday, President Carter sent his first budget to Congress and it, also, follows the perennial tradition. The president, or the presidential candidate, makes many soaring promises during the campaign to cut down on spending and balance the budget and when the budget appears, it turns out to be the biggest budget in history, carrying the biggest deficit. 

George Washington offered a budget during the Revolutionary War, oh, of something outrageous and unprecedented, $3 million, I think. In 1917 with the First World War coming this way, Woodrow Wilson proposed a budget of ten billions, seven billions for the war effort of which three billions were to go to the allies as loans. Imagine! Ten thousand million dollars! What a famous historian of the day called 'the largest finance bill in the history of the world'. 

Well, 40-odd years went by and John F. Kennedy coolly came up with a budget of 80 billions. Nixon's last budget asked for 200 billions. Now President Carter wants $500 billion. If you can imagine that, you can imagine anything! 

The budget proposal went along with the warning that there are limits to what the government can do to cure social ills. It's not often that a Democratic President is so blunt so soon about the limits of federal largesse. And yet, of this huge pie, the largest chunk is 37 cents in the dollar to go to individuals under the dispensation of the Department of Health, Education and Welfare. So President Carter can fairly say that the trend goes on to giving most of the nation's revenue to helping out individuals, or at least the largest share. 

The next big chunk is 24 cents in the dollar for the national defence. That amounts to about $125 billion for arms, missiles, defence posts, training, salaries, maintenance of the forces. There's an interesting point here which is rarely mentioned, even by the presidents themselves, when they're attacked, as they frequently are, on the old 'guns and butter' argument. 

In the Eisenhower/Kennedy days, easily the biggest slice of the pie went to national defence. At one time, it was as high as 63 cents in every budget dollar. It's now 24 cents. Of course the... the absolute figure, the amount spent on defence is probably higher than ever. Mr Carter has anticipated popular criticism by saying, rather nervously, that it may seem a lot, but it's not as much as you would have had in a President Ford budget. Well, the actual amount may be higher than ever but in relation to the total budget, it's much lower. 

The big news then, the big, political come-on is Mr Carter's proposal to cut taxes by 25 billions. He has soft-pedalled his old line about balancing the budget by saying that keeping the economy going and putting more people to work come first. And it must be said that among the Western nations, the United States has the best record, in the past few years, for inventing millions of new jobs. The proposed tax cut, the president said, will create one more million jobs. 

So for purposes of politics and popularity in the polls, the President is crying up the big tax cut. But neither he, nor anybody else, explains how you can feed another $25,000 million into the economy without inviting another hungry visit from that old bogeyman – inflation.

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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