Bill de Blasio‘s campaign caught a wave of voter sentiment by giving a voice to the rising sense that life in New York City has become less fair. Like Ed Koch’s blaring support for the death penalty during a national and local crime wave in 1977 and John Lindsay’s voice of protest against the Vietnam War in 1969, he connected with voters through an emotionally charged issue mostly outside the scope of a mayor’s authority.
Symbols and rhetoric matter, and the new mayor-elect is right that income inequality in New York City, and across the United States, has gotten worse recently. The city is growing jobs at the top and bottom of the income ladder; in the precious middle, there’s a dangerous hollowing out, according to U.S. census bureau statistics. But the causes are national and global in scope, and require a response from Washington to produce tax reform, new federal spending policies and nationwide rules regarding labor and employment practices. What’s more, much of what the city can do on the margins requires permission from Albany.
As to de Blasio, he has pledged to do five major things to promote equality and fairness. Two will be tough to deliver, but are clearly in his power: a dramatic expansion of affordable housing, which would also create thousands of construction jobs, and a new direction for police-community relations.
But his other three promises lay largely beyond the authority of his new office: preservation of community hospitals and a dramatic expansion of accessible health care; increasing taxes on the wealthy to fund early childhood and after-school programs, and job creation in all five boroughs.
As the U.S. health care system is in the throes of a dramatic restructuring, the mayor-elect, who will have no control over the Affordable Care Act, has pledged to create a “navigator” program to ensure city residents receive maximum benefits. It is a sensible idea, but uncertainty surrounding the act’s implementation clouds any effort to assess the effectiveness of the imagined city enrollment initiative.
The proposal for wealthy New Yorkers to fund early education and after-school programs, the crux of de Blasio’s symbolic push to get the rich to pay “their fair share” to help those struggling to get by, requires the New York State Legislature to pass a tax increase that Gov. Cuomo then must sign. Action in Albany is far from assured — in an election year, Cuomo has made clear that he is looking to cut, not raise taxes — and when a city raises the burden on wealthy residents, it risks causing its tax base to flee.
If de Blasio manages to transform our public schools into centers for learning that elevate young people of all incomes, that would be genuinely progressive, in a big way — but even then we wouldn’t begin to see the economic dividends for at least a decade.
Of the 22 ideas listed in de Blasio’s plans for “Jobs for All New Yorkers and Growth for All Neighborhoods,” fully half involve better coordination of existing programs or focused efforts to promote specific economic sectors, with funding for these and other initiatives provided by redirecting municipal corporate tax concessions. Even if all that happens according to plan, it’s hard to see these incremental proposals having more than a marginal difference on income inequality. And many of the ideas have been tried in the past and backfired, redistributing wealth on arbitrary and political terms that only increase the expense of government while diminishing local productivity and accountability.
Three initiatives involve support for a living wage, which ultimately is controlled in Albany, as is much of the funding for City University of New York, which de Blasio pledges to increase despite his lack of authority over the state budget. A proposal to use city pension money to make loans and investments to local businesses requires approval from the pension fund trustees, which is also uncertain.
Our new mayor is compassionate and clever, and he has proven he has keen pitch for the city’s political music — useful attributes in a leader.
But the job that awaits the new mayor in City Hall does not include the power to tackle the challenge of income inequality that he has defined as the central one facing the city he will lead.
McNickle is a historian of New York City politics. He is author of “To Be Mayor of New York: Ethnic Politics in the City,” and “The Power of the Mayor: David Dinkins 1990-1993.”
