WATTENBERG AT LARGE: Frost Belt
WATTENBERG AT LARGE: Frost Belt
New York City Mayor Ed Koch gets on an Amtrak train at the Stamford train station with Ben Wattenberg. Wattenberg and Koch sitting on train and talking. Ed Koch: "There had been the sort of feeling in the Democratic policy-making positions, that the Party, the Democratic Party, being the party of the people, that, somehow or other, it was shameful to ever think about business and profit, and the middle-class. That our job was simply to deal with the poorest of the poor, those that could not help themselves. Now, I believe that does not serve the poor."
WATTENBERG AT LARGE: Frost Belt
Ground view of train leaving train station. Ben Wattenberg and New York City Mayor, Ed Koch, travelling on train and talking. Wattenberg: "What were the sorts of things that were driving businesses out of these areas?" Mayor Koch: "Taxes were a major factor. New York city had its own income tax, state has a tax, our sales tax, occupancy tax, a whole host of taxes that made our businesses less competitive. And we have striven under the leadership of Hugh Carey, since his first election, to reduce the taxes and we have done that. It's my goal, ultimately to have New York City's taxes the median of the country's in all of the various tax fields."
WATTENBERG AT LARGE: Frost Belt
Ben Wattenberg and New York City Mayor, Ed Koch, continue speaking while travelling on train. Koch speaks about cutting social and welfare programs to reduce expenditures, and the protests around those decisions. Wattenberg asks if those protestors, in their desire to do good, were living in a make-believe world of their own making. Koch replies that he helped create the bubble as a Congressman, and proceeds to explains how many social and welfare programs are created. Sometimes funded through deficit spending, and sometimes simply mandated, forcing local municipalities to figure out how to pay for it. Mayor Koch notes that he sometimes refers to himself and "Mayor Culpa" because only as Mayor of New York City does he see how bad some of the programs were, or still are. It wasn't something he saw clearly as a Congressman.