Alex at Brokentype is railing against \Bloomberg's Doomsday Plan, villanizing the mayor for releasing a (proposed, alternate) budget that includes deep cuts to police, fire and zoo budgets. [Via Gawker]
A fun read maybe, but lacking an explanation of why that budget was released, or what the situation is in City Hall and Albany.
Webloggers are portraying the mayor as putting out this budget because he doesn't want to raise taxes. He does, and he wants to do it in a fairly reasonable way -- a commuter tax and increased bridge tolls. The budget you're discussing is being used as the "alternate" option to those taxes being allowed by Albany -- and it's intentionally as painful, and brutal, as possible.
The excuse can be made, of course, that this is just snide, insider commentary that assumes readers already fully understand the situation's reality -- extremism for the purpose of humor, etc. But I'm pretty sure that if I stopped people on the street, not one in ten would understand why this "doomsday" budget was released, making these kind of posts irresponsible (not that weblogs always care about that.)
The commuter tax is a reasonable request. New York spends million in extra police, fire and transportation for people who work in NYC but don't pay taxes here. (And I point out, many of those are among the highest paid in New York.)
Albany, of course, doesn't much like New Yorkers and is the middle of being late with its own budget, for the 19th year in a row. Our city wouldn't have any bargaining power in terms of getting higher tolls or a commuter tax without showing just how deep the cuts are going to have to be if Albany doesn't help us.
One of the biggest problem with many weblog posts is that they're knee-jerk reactions to headlines, the same complaint that many of us online writers make about print journalists when they cover stories we're personally close to. (e.g weblogging, dot-coms, etc.) There's been a rash of editorializing lately that seems to have been driven by only reading the first paragraph of the news articles about this situation.
[Followup: The New York Times has a great op-ed today by Bob Herbert on the state of the city, and the issues of the doomsday budget. When my Financial Times free student subscription runs out, I'm going to start buying the NYT every day instead of the Journal, which is fine to read online.
