Fifty years ago today, this newspaper ran our famous front page headline “Ford to City: Drop Dead,” with President Jerry Ford saying New York City would get no help in our deepest financial crisis. Despite that, we have come back strong with economic stability, proper accounting and smart management and cannot, and must not, ever go back.
But there is now another president in the White House also aiming to harm us and a potential mayor whose outlandish spending plans could wreck our hard-won fiscal solvency, which is the foundation of the $116 billion annual enterprise called city government and which pays for everything from schools to cops to parks to hospitals.
We can’t do much about Donald Trump, but we can reject Zohran Mamdani and vote for Andrew Cuomo, who knows how to handle budgets and keep the books balanced.
New York City hit a low point in October 1975, when a cycle of mismanagement and insolvency had put us into technical bankruptcy and on the brink of absolute collapse. In short, we were unable to pay our bills.
Thankfully, we have come a great distance from that nadir and Ford’s indifference. We emerged from the standoff much better. Ford was wrong, of course, as everyone who has ever bet against NYC has been wrong.
Ford narrowly lost New York State in 1976, costing him the White House, even though Republicans had carried the state in 1972 and 1980. But New York City, with help from the state and the unions, straightened up and put our house in order by being cautious with our public funds, building up savings, not paying for things that we cannot afford and tamping down on inefficient spending.
Not only did the city rebound and rebuild our coffers, but became a more central economic, scientific, academic and cultural hub. NYC weathered the nation’s worst terrorist attack, financial crisis, global pandemic and literal extreme weather, and still we are stronger than ever, a global beacon of what America has to offer even as Queen‘s most famous son does his utmost to tear it all down.
Trump is just looking to inflict pain and chaos and will use his perch to attack his hometown and we defend ourselves. But we need a mayor who is best able to do that and keep the White House wolf at bay. Cuomo has experience fending off The Donald, as he did during Trump’s first term when Cuomo was governor.
But the untested hardcore leftist Mamdani would be squashed by Trump and as mayor would cause his own financial damage by busting the budget with his promises of free, free, free, from child care to buses. Someone has to pay and Gov. Hochul is rightly saying no to Mamdani’s desires for more and more taxes.
As we found out during the primary, Mamdani’s promised borrowing of $100 billion for housing construction would violate the city’s statutory debt limit as written in the state Constitution. Calling 1975, we have someone whose economic ideas belong back then.
The times were dark and dire a half century ago when we printed that front page. The city’s financial mismanagement was causing chaos with huge layoffs of hardworking public employees and crumbling municipal services. That’s not a New York we want to go back to.
One near-death experience is plenty for New York City, even if it was 50 years ago. We didn’t drop dead, but bounced back. Let’s move forward, not backwards, with Cuomo in City Hall.
