Awful warning

IN ANNOUNCING his plan to "save" New York City with yet another massive infrastructure project, Governor Mario Cuomo demonstrated, once again, why he is the nation's pre-eminent orator. No other living politician (and very few of the dead ones) could have endowed tunnels, rail links, public housing, and the Second Avenue subway with such an aura of grandeur and spiritual uplift. New York desperately needed the psychological boost. But does it need new infrastructure? Consider this: the city's employed labor force--the most frequent users of its infrastructure--shrank by 104,000 over the past 12 months, and is now only 3 per cent greater than it was at the start of the Cuomo administration in 1983. But the value of new public infrastructure, as measured by the outstanding debt of New York's public construction agencies, rose from $26.5 billion to $52.1 billion, up by 46 per cent (in constant-dollar terms) during Mr. Cuomo's tenure.

New York's infrastructure is crumbling primarily because the recent construction binge has outpaced the city's capacity to manage and maintain what it already has. More infrastructure will only worsen the situation. Of course, the governor touts new jobs--79,000 of them--as the real payoff. But he is looking at only half of the economic equation. For the next thirty years New York taxpayers will be forced to pay the interest and principal on the bonds for this project, amounting to $24 billion over this period. With each upward ratchet of the tax scale, more infrastructure users are squeezed out of New York. Indeed, according to City Comptroller Elizabeth Holtzman, New York City will lose another 320,000 private-sector jobs by 1994 because of city and state tax hikes already enacted.

New York's problems transcend infrastructure and, for that matter, the recession. Over the past thirty years the city's payroll has increased by 50 per cent while its population has shrunk by 6 per cent. Public-education spending has doubled from ten years ago, yet test scores are down. The city spends $600 million to create housing for homeless families, yet squeezes the supply of affordable private housing with strict rent control. Mayor Dinkins promises layoffs of city workers to keep the city solvent, but delivers a 14 per cent income-tax hike, and no substantial layoffs.

Some a day a New York politician will extol the virtues of small government, privatization, educational choice, and the free exchange of goods and services with the same fervor that Mr. Cuomo lavishes on infrastructure. With luck, there will still be people around to listen.