Drop Dead, New York!Gerald Ford was only president for two years so it is hard to judge what kind of president he was or what the world would have been like if he had defeated Jimmy Carter in 1976. As most people know, the headline to the left probably cost Ford the election. (If he had won New York state, he would have beaten Carter.) In 1975, New York City was having severe fiscal problems and was on the verge of bankruptcy because of years of out-of-control spending. The solvency of NYC was also threatening New York state as the state had loaned money to the city. Ford, following his advisors, declared that he would not bail the city out with short term federal loans under any circumstances. A short time later, just before the city was forced to go bankrupt, Ford went against his advisors and did come through with the loans.

So who were these advisors who gave President Ford this bad advice that cost him the election? The names should very familiar as they have been giving bad advice for more than 30 years… Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld. Yes, the same two who dragged us into the mess of Iraq are the advisors who thought that New York should go bankrupt because it was a liberal city, ignoring the fact that a bankrupt NYC would have been ruinous to the people of NYC, NY state, and the country as a whole. “New York City was going to be their symbol of what could happen if you let liberalism take hold in a big city,” said Felix Rohatyn, one of the chief architects in steering the city through the fiscal crisis.

Technorati Tags: , , ,