Description
New York was once the land of opportunity. For years its dynamic economy created millions of jobs and attracted streams of immigrants, offering them a share in the American dream. New York's streets were paved with gold.
Today the world's greatest city teeters near bankruptcy. Many of the manufacturing companies that were the heart of New York's economy and the middle-class families that made their livings from them have fled the city or gone broke. As a result, New York has lost thousands of jobs and the tax revenues that came from them. Conflicting special-interest groups all vied for funds from the city's shrunken treasury. And to win votes, politicians lavished public money on them that New York could not afford. Essential services deteriorated while taxpayer costs rose, leaving vast sections of the city abandoned or burned out.
The Streets Were Paved with Gold tells not only how the decline of New York happened, but for the first time-why it happened and who is responsible. In the most comprehensive and balanced account we are likely to get of New York's fiscal crisis, Ken Auletta, New Yorker writer, columnist for the New York Daily News and one of the most astute authorities on the city's affairs, argues that New York's decline was partly inevitable, the result of shifting migration patterns, technological changes, and other factors beyond the city's control. But mostly it was caused by New York's anarchic political and economic factions, each angling for its own advantage; by the city's well-meaning attempts to help its disadvantaged citizens; and by the tacit agreement between the city and its banks to create money through borrowing when both parties knew or should have known that the city's cupboard was nearly bare. For these reasons and others, as Auletta shows, democratic government failed in New York.
In a fascinating narrative Auletta raises and answers such questions as: Why is New York City liberalism's Vietnam? How are Nelson and David Rockefeller, Mayors Wagner, Lindsay and Beame, and others responsible for New York's crisis? What were their motives for spending money the city did not have? To what extent was New York City abused by Washington? Was there a conspiracy between the city's banks to keep bad news about New York's budget from investors? Why was press coverage of New York's financial difficulties so remarkably poor? How much are New Yorkers to blame for the appalling condition of their city? And are New York's problems unique, or do they foreshadow a crisis of national proportions?
The Streets Were Paved with Gold sheds light on such national issues as: the reasons for the growing taxpayers' revolt; the apparent inability of government to cope with economic decline; the conflict between democracy's social goals and its economic system, and be- tween special-interest groups and the public good. Auletta's book warns that what happened to New York City is happening to many of our states, cities, counties and towns, and indeed, to the nation itself. ISBN:9780394500195 
