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.
AIR SUPPORT: The Ministry of National Defense thanked the US for the delivery, adding that it was an indicator of the White House’s commitment to the Taiwan Relations Act Deputy Minister of National Defense Po Horng-huei (柏鴻輝) and Representative to the US Alexander Yui on Friday attended a delivery ceremony for the first of Taiwan’s long-awaited 66 F-16C/D Block 70 jets at a Lockheed Martin Corp factory in Greenville, South Carolina. “We are so proud to be the global home of the F-16 and to support Taiwan’s air defense capabilities,” US Representative William Timmons wrote on X, alongside a photograph of Taiwanese and US officials at the event. The F-16C/D Block 70 jets Taiwan ordered have the same capabilities as aircraft that had been upgraded to F-16Vs. The batch of Lockheed Martin
GRIDLOCK: The National Fire Agency’s Special Search and Rescue team is on standby to travel to the countries to help out with the rescue effort A powerful earthquake rocked Myanmar and neighboring Thailand yesterday, killing at least three people in Bangkok and burying dozens when a high-rise building under construction collapsed. Footage shared on social media from Myanmar’s second-largest city showed widespread destruction, raising fears that many were trapped under the rubble or killed. The magnitude 7.7 earthquake, with an epicenter near Mandalay in Myanmar, struck at midday and was followed by a strong magnitude 6.4 aftershock. The extent of death, injury and destruction — especially in Myanmar, which is embroiled in a civil war and where information is tightly controlled at the best of times —
Taiwan was ranked the fourth-safest country in the world with a score of 82.9, trailing only Andorra, the United Arab Emirates and Qatar in Numbeo’s Safety Index by Country report. Taiwan’s score improved by 0.1 points compared with last year’s mid-year report, which had Taiwan fourth with a score of 82.8. However, both scores were lower than in last year’s first review, when Taiwan scored 83.3, and are a long way from when Taiwan was named the second-safest country in the world in 2021, scoring 84.8. Taiwan ranked higher than Singapore in ninth with a score of 77.4 and Japan in 10th with
SECURITY RISK: If there is a conflict between China and Taiwan, ‘there would likely be significant consequences to global economic and security interests,’ it said China remains the top military and cyber threat to the US and continues to make progress on capabilities to seize Taiwan, a report by US intelligence agencies said on Tuesday. The report provides an overview of the “collective insights” of top US intelligence agencies about the security threats to the US posed by foreign nations and criminal organizations. In its Annual Threat Assessment, the agencies divided threats facing the US into two broad categories, “nonstate transnational criminals and terrorists” and “major state actors,” with China, Russia, Iran and North Korea named. Of those countries, “China presents the most comprehensive and robust military threat