Whoever you are. Probably DeBlasio, but let’s count the votes. In a recent article, the New York Times reported that his margin in the polls means he is “flirting with a record win for a non-incumbent; that record is currently held by Abraham D. Beame, who won election in 1973 with a 40-point victory margin, the largest in an open race since five-borough elections began in 1897.” It is fitting. Another long time Room Eight poster predicted DeBlasio would be another Lindsay, but as far as I’m concerned that job has already been taken. Giuliani, Bloomberg, and the New York State Legislature have already re-Lindsayed with regard to the debts and pension enhancements/underfunding that the next Mayor will inherit.
In keeping with a tradition that goes back all the way to Wagner in the mid-1960s, the current Mayor will leave the next Mayor a city that is going broke. Bloomberg has vastly increased the city’s debt, in some cases to pay for investments that will pay off in the future, but in other cases to just get by for a few years. After underfunding the pensions following the massive retroactive pension increases of the 1995 to 2000 period, Bloomberg is again currently underfunding the pensions by $1 billion per year according to the BS estimates of the city actuary (the reality is more). Including underfunding the huge 2008 pension increase for NYC teachers that Bloomberg went along with. Moreover, Bloomberg has also cashed out the entire retiree health care fund he built up earlier in his terms. He leaves behind public employees who have become vastly richer relative to the average New York City resident, given their pension increases and the stagnation of everyone else’s wages, and who are nonetheless demanding in the press to become richer still – and that the next Mayor not negotiate in the press. And that is just part of it, as explained further on Saying the Unsaid in New York.