Everything's Up, Up, Up to Date

In front of New York's city hall marched a man carrying a 6-ft., 22-lb. replica of a rubber stamp with a sign:

THE COUNCIL IS A RUBBER STAMP FOR

BOSS WAGNER. Seven busloads of employees from Macy's department store paraded with balloons and placards reading

DON'T DRIVE SALES FROM THE CITY--WE

NEED THEM. A hardy band of Brooklyn Chamber of Commerce members, still full of vim after marching across Brooklyn Bridge, waved banners urging secession from New York City.

These demonstrators, and hundreds of others, had gathered to protest Democratic Mayor Robert F. Wagner's proposal to increase the city sales tax from 3% to 4%. At the city council meeting inside, 129 other New Yorkers voiced their opinions --127 were against it. They called it "infamous," "toxic," and "disastrous." Several objectors warned that city dwellers would swarm into the suburbs to do their shopping. A jeweler predicted a "catastrophic" decline in retail sales and the loss of 100,000 jobs.

Get Out of Town. The objectors' placards and pleas and protests were probably to no avail. The city had to raise more revenue to balance the recordbreaking, 3,306-page budget that Mayor Wagner had presented a few days earlier.

Along with the sales-tax increase, WTagner called for several other new or bigger bites, including an additional 2^-a-pack impost on cigarettes and a brand-new "occupancy" tax on commercial rentals.

In presenting his budget, Wagner followed his perennial ritual: he said his budget was based upon "strict economy," grumbled that the state had refused to give the city its "rightful share" of state revenues. Then he prudently skedaddled off to a vacation in the Bahamas, leaving his fellow New Yorkers to contemplate his budget in dazed dismay.

At $3,093,461,582 it is the biggest municipal budget ever--in New York or any other city. What's more, it is bigger than any of the 50 state budgets except the $3.3 billion record breaker lately proposed by California's Democratic Governor Pat Brown. Each of Wagner's ten yearly budgets has called for more spending than the one before. This year's budget is 11% bigger than last year's, 55% bigger than the one Wagner presented five years ago--and nearly 2 1/2 times as big as the last pre-Wagner budget, a decade ago. During that ten-year span, the city's population declined a bit. so Wagner cannot invoke the familiar excuse of population growth.*

Keep Off the Grass. Yet when it comes to attacking the cause of higher taxes--namely, higher spending--both politicians and taxpayers falter. Opponents of Wagner's sales-tax increase persuaded 265,000 New Yorkers to sign protests, but failed to put forward even one solid suggestion for making a sizable dent in expenditure. City Controller Abraham Beanie, considered a likely mayoralty candidate in 1964 if Wagner decides to run for the Senate, made a front-page splash for himself by proposing budget revisions to eliminate the sales-tax in crease. But what he called for was substi tute imposts, notably a payroll tax, rather than a significant reduction in outgo.*

To some New Yorkers, indee_d, Wagner's budget seemed stingy rather than spendthrift. The New York Times called his tax proposals "economically destructive," but in the very same editorial, complained that he had provided only skimpy increases for education, parks and "cultural institutions." The United Federation of Teachers labeled "completely unacceptable" Wagner's $50 million boost in education funds, $39 million less than the Board of Education had requested. To "dramatize the plight of the schools," and pressure the city fathers for more money, the teachers' union planned to have 825 members, one from each city school, camp out in tents in City Hall Plaza in early May. Parks Commissioner Newbold Morris, however, declared that he would not permit the camp-out. It would ruin the grass, he said. Besides, he added, Mayor Wagner had proclaimed that particular week City Parks Week.

*The federal Census Bureau listed the city's population as 7,891,957 in 1950 and 7,781,984 in 1960. Last year the city health department estimated the population at 7,782.000. Contributing a little spot of cheer in the midst of the city's fiscal gloom, officials reported last week that the take from parking meters is on the rise. In March the total came to $726,414, a new peak for any month. That was $207,772 more than in March 1962.

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