The Week

Hubert Horatio Humphrey, on the high road in Ohio, Sept. 27: “John Kennedy loved Ohio more than any other state except his beloved Massachusetts. Yet he lost this state in 1960. You owe something to his memory. You have the opportunity to redeem your state. I want you to undo what you did in 1960. I want you, in honor of our late President, to go to work between now and Nov. 3. Vote—and send the message so that John Kennedy in Heaven will know we won.”

Governor Rockefeller’s never-never-land financing of New York state obligations is on the verge of dry rot. One of Rockefeller’s principal tricks was to take state obligations and sell them to agencies outside the state budget, then have those outside agencies build and pay for capital facilities (mental hospitals, educational institutions), then have the state “rent” them back. Rent isn’t an interest payment, is it? So the state debt was cut down, wasn’t it? Such zoot-suit finance, under Rockefeller, has reached hundreds of millions of dollars already, and is on its way towards a billion by 1970, unless fiscal soundness intervenes. Last week one of the country’s top creditraters, Dun & Bradstreet, called a halt. It downgraded a New York State debt issue to one notch below the highest rating, saying, “The State of New York is increasingly departing from a debt policy long regarded as a model.” D & B assailed the “phantom debt which will not constitute a direct obligation of the state, even though it will be supported by revenue of the state.” It looks more and more as if Rockefeller, if he chooses to run for re-election in 1966, will have to include in his platform a pledge to clean up the financial mess in Albany.

Featured Tags

Presidential Election

Hubert Horatio Humphrey, on the high road in Ohio, Sept. 27: “John Kennedy loved Ohio more than any other state except his beloved Massachusetts. Yet he lost this state in 1960. You owe something to his memory. You have the opportunity to redeem your state. I want you to undo what you did in 1960. I want you, in honor of our late President, to go to work between now and Nov. 3. Vote—and send the message so that John Kennedy in Heaven will know we won.”

Governor Rockefeller’s never-never-land financing of New York state obligations is on the verge of dry rot. One of Rockefeller’s principal tricks was to take state obligations and sell them to agencies outside the state budget, then have those outside agencies build and pay for capital facilities (mental hospitals, educational institutions), then have the state “rent” them back. Rent isn’t an interest payment, is it? So the state debt was cut down, wasn’t it? Such zoot-suit finance, under Rockefeller, has reached hundreds of millions of dollars already, and is on its way towards a billion by 1970, unless fiscal soundness intervenes. Last week one of the country’s top creditraters, Dun & Bradstreet, called a halt. It downgraded a New York State debt issue to one notch below the highest rating, saying, “The State of New York is increasingly departing from a debt policy long regarded as a model.” D & B assailed the “phantom debt which will not constitute a direct obligation of the state, even though it will be supported by revenue of the state.” It looks more and more as if Rockefeller, if he chooses to run for re-election in 1966, will have to include in his platform a pledge to clean up the financial mess in Albany.