Ten weeks after the terrorist attack in history, this city is discovering just how much the rest of the US cares about the nation's business and financial center.
Not much.
Early hopes that the nation would rally to help the city overcome the devastating economic impact of Sept. 11 appear to have been misplaced. Not only is Governor George Pataki's ill-advised pitch for US$54 billion in federal aid all but dead, apparently the city will struggle to get the $US20 billion that US President George Bush promised.
Yes, many of the city's economic problems are self-inflicted. With a work force of 250,000, New York employs one-seventh as many people as the federal government, excluding the armed forces. To support that bureaucracy, the city has the highest taxes of any local government in the US. Development is absurdly difficult, even outside Manhattan. Roads and bridges are a mess.
But all of that was true before Sept. 11, and New York somehow made do. In fact, a record number of new jobs were created here last year, according to Steven Malanga, senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute, a conservative policy group. "In the last seven or eight years, the city's economy has rebounded in a way that's very encouraging," he said.
The attacks changed all that. By discouraging people from coming to crowded places like Times Square, terrorism strikes at the heart of New York, said Mitchell Moss, director of the Taub Urban Research Center at New York University. "New York's economy is built on interaction," he said.
The industries that have suffered most severely are New York's most important employers: tourism, media, advertising and financial services, which was due for cuts even before the attacks.
Last month, the city lost 79,000 jobs, a record. The slowdown has blown a hole in city and state budgets, which are precariously balanced at the best of times.
The Citizens Budget Commission, a nonpartisan fiscal watchdog organization, predicts that the city will face a budget deficit of US$4 billion next year. Mayor Rudolph Giuliani has asked city agencies to cut their budgets by 15 percent.
More cuts are coming. Libraries will close earlier. Parks will be dirtier. And city workers, who had been asking for big raises, will have to accept layoffs or pay cuts.
Even so, the city cannot get out of this hole alone. With taxes already too high, it cannot reach much deeper into its citizens' pockets. And there are limits to how much it can cut services. A little federal help would go a long way toward righting the city's budget gap and restoring confidence in New York.
Moss suggests the federal government take two steps to show its commitment to the city.
First, it should help create a hub in lower Manhattan that would connect transit lines from New Jersey and Long Island with the subway. Second, it should support ``security zones'' where high-profile securities firms and media companies could congregate if they wished.
For now, at least, it appears that Washington will let New York sink or swim on its own. That decision is foolish for both economic and symbolic reasons.
If New York cannot right itself, the investment banks that are among its most important employers are as likely to move jobs to London or Hong Kong as Chicago or Atlanta. And if New York's streets grow dirty and its crime rate soars, other countries may question Washington's promises of aid to those that try to deter terrorism. Will a government that does not bother to aid its largest city in the wake of the worst terror attack in history really do much for Islamabad or Cairo?
"What do we have a federal government for if it's not to give aid to state and local governments, at the level people live and get most of their government services?'' asks James Parrot, an economist at the Fiscal Policy Institute, a labor-backed research institute.
It is more than unseemly that lawmakers are offering to pass a tax bill that will give billions of dollars to companies like Enron and IBM while refusing to send New York money that that city has already been promised.
It is (whisper this word) unpatriotic.
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