They’re finding new roads to our shrinking pocket books.
As they battle over budget balancing up in Albany, down in Washington, or even at City Hall where a billionaire prowls, all seek new routes to your shrinking pockets or purses.
A national daily newspaper headline read, “It’s lights-out as cities save money.”
Here in Brooklyn we saw it happen in early summer — always some 45 minutes after the sub sank, but our billionaire mayor turned the “on” switch. That was a carry over from the Koch money-saving on electric bills, while our city led the nation in auto-thefts, the music of car-alarms awakening us each nights, and every corner we passed had tireless autos settled on milk crates and stolen hub caps, antennae and tires were leading drivers to madness.
Our own borough president can’t figure who ordered the zillion bike lanes that now clog our streets, even in areas that have not seen a biker this century.
Our wealthy Mayor Bloomberg is leaking advance info that a new fund-raiser could come out of a cash and need aid tax, a new concept of emergency assistance wherein the fire captain hands you a bill for fire force-visit-to-the-scene, a novel kind of tax, surprising during this season of good will unto man and woman.
The money game is in open season, now that government budgets are in despair and in the same City Hall, a Prospect Heights city councilwoman recently proposed on these pages, parking permits will help. Somebody else had that idea in the 1950s and 1960s. That overnight street parking tax led a mass exodus from NYC and an overflow into Nassau, Suffolk and Westchester from folks who wanted to live without an overdose of taxation.
In that era, we wrote that we were opposed to the over-taxation that was driving wage earners away by taxation mutilation we built up Nassau, Suffolk andall of New Jersey, and now Lucretia had the bat on her shoulder while they brought a mediocre basketball team into the most over trafficked hub of Brooklyn,next to the great MTA junction where BMT, IRT, IND and LIRR all plow into one massive terminal that took eight years to build in two centuries — all without an escalator and in the midst of Brooklyn’s heaviest traffic merger of big Atlantic, Flatbush, Fourth avenues intersecting where autos might someday sneak through the quagmire to see the infant Brooklyn Basketballers try to hit the hoops.
Come alive and fly right, legislators.
