A clue to his agenda.
OK. Heres my theory: Mayor Bloombergs secret goal is to help the Red Sox finally win a World Series.
Anybody got a better explanation for why hes working so hard to destroy New York?
Think about it: Bloomberg is a confessed Sox fan. (For the record, so am I.) Those nineteen eighteen chants could drive even a multibillionaire mad and to win it all, the Sox have to get past the Yankees dynasty.
So he needs to destroy the Yankees.
And as a businessman, Mayor Mike has to see the Yanks biggest strength as their huge box-office and broadcasting receipts.
Which wont go away as long as New York City remains the center of a wealthy, dynamic region.
Which hes in an excellent position to change.
Its what hes doing, anyway. Think about it:
Hes committed the city to a course of tax hikes first, job cuts . . . never.
Even proud progressive Wayne Barrett, writing in the Village Voice, notes that Bloombergs property-tax hike virtually guarantees that the mayor wont get any of the productivity concessions hes supposedly asking the city-worker unions for.
The unions never give unless theres no choice, and by hitting the taxpayers first, Mike gave em that choice.
Which means that he will have no choice but to come back with more tax hikes plus, eventually (as those tax hikes kill the private-sector jobs that actually produce any tax revenues at all), the kind of mindless, across-the-board layoffs that really will mean dirtier streets and all the other quality-of-life woes that help drag a town down.
Oh, about those tax hikes: Did you think his request for the power to tax the burbs was incredibly naive? After all, theres not much chance suburban lawmakers will OK a tax hike on their constituents so that he could cut taxes on his.
But if Bloomberg is secretly out to destroy New York, it was a great move. First, it alienated Albany, and so made it less likely the city will get any help. Second, it killed time delaying any actions (like cuts in our bloated social services, which utterly fail to make New York any healthier or less poverty-stricken than any city which lacks them) to genuinely address the root problems.
His smoking ban was another two-fer. First, it used up lots of his time, energy and political capital while the deadly threat of a subway strike came ever closer to reality.
The strike would be an economic disaster. Christmas shopping is make or break for every retailer in America; a strike guarantees that its break for every store in town this year.
Longer term, the bans a drag on another top Gotham industry: tourism.
Its not just that smokers will be less eager to visit, and more likely to tell horror stories when they get home. Far worse, itll make us look like small-minded, pleasure-hating puritans in the eyes of most of the rest of the world instead of what we used to be, the only sophisticates in America.
This is one area where Bloomberg has outdone the last mayor of disaster: At least David Dinkins didnt try to stop anybody from having fun.
Even the naive-seeming housing and downtown-development plans that Bloomberg spent so much time on this week fit the theory. First, theyre more time-wasters, while all the doomsday clocks tick down. Second, they signal all the forces of destruction the housing now nuts, the train-to-the-plane public-works fixers, etc. etc. that their ridiculous dreams will still be taken seriously.
(Which, in a way, even boosts the chances of a subway strike: Why should the TWU believe the moneys not there for them, when the mayor and the gov, for that matter are still finding ways to toss goodies to everyone else?)
You may doubt that even a Red Sox fan would be so cruel working to destroy an entire city, not to mention betraying his oath of office just for the sake of ending a lousy jinx.
But the only alternative is to think that Bloomberg is so totally clueless that he doesnt realize hes killing New York. What are the odds of that?
Mark Cunningham is The Posts executive editorial-page editor.