Books, Arts & Manners: A Correspondence with Reality

All the Best: Letters from a Feisty Mayor, by Edward I. Koch (Simon & Schuster, 265 pp., $19.95)

IN NOVEMBER 1975, the City of New York’s seven and a half million people discovered that four decades of liberalism had driven their city into financial default. Budgetary gimmicks and phantom revenues had resulted in a budget with $12.8 billion in expenditures and only $10.9 billion in revenues. The politicians had managed to accumulate deficits that were masked with $4.5 billion of short-term borrowing.

GJ

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George J. Marlin

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All the Best: Letters from a Feisty Mayor, by Edward I. Koch (Simon & Schuster, 265 pp., $19.95)

IN NOVEMBER 1975, the City of New York’s seven and a half million people discovered that four decades of liberalism had driven their city into financial default. Budgetary gimmicks and phantom revenues had resulted in a budget with $12.8 billion in expenditures and only $10.9 billion in revenues. The politicians had managed to accumulate deficits that were masked with $4.5 billion of short-term borrowing.