Matt Yglesias

Second Avenue Subway

Petey’s asked me a couple of times if the Second Avenue Subway project in New York shouldn’t qualify as a stimulus-eligible shovel-ready project. I think the issue here is that the project is too shovel-ready and the funding and work is already in place. And I think you can’t just do it faster because of the limited supply of tunneling machines—they’re trying to minimize “cut and cover” construction since this is a very built-up area, and the equipment for this kind of boring isn’t something you can pick up at a hardware store. But if that’s wrong, then, yes, this is definitely the kind of thing that deserves to be in line ahead of new highway construction in terms of infrastructure money.

Still, I mostly don’t have a problem with there not being huge new transit construction in a stimulus bill. New need to reform the overall infrastructure policy for the long run, not just for an economic emergency. But what really does deserve hefty stimulus funding is transit operating expenses which would be both fast-acting, progressive in distributional impact, environmentally sound, and high-multiplier. What’s more, unlike new construction it’s the kind of thing you could phase out relatively easily when it becomes unnecessary.

New York Needs a Senator!

Chris Bowers says:

First, at a Senate progressive media summit today, Senator Charles Schumer said that he was unhappy about the amount of stimulus money set aside for mass transit and rail. He indicated that several other Senators from highly urbanized states were also unhappy about this portion of the stimulus, and that when the legislation reached the Senate, they would be jointly pushing for an increase in money set aside for mass transit and rail. The current amount for mass transit and rail in the stimulus bill is only $10 billion.

This reminds me of something. Around seven percent of the nation’s population lives in New York State. But the constitution allocates just two percent of the nation’s senators to my home state. That’s too bad, and it’s particularly a problem in policy areas such as transportation where we get a structural bias away from the needs of places like New York. But do you know what’s even worse? Right now New York really has only one Senator since Hillary Clinton obviously isn’t focusing her energy on this matter, but David Patterson hasn’t gotten around to naming a replacement yet. He’s doing a disservice to his constituents and to residents of big cities everywhere.

UPDATE: Speaking of which, Caroline Kennedy is withdrawing from consideration.

A Caretaker for New York

Looks like David Patterson may just kick the can down the road:

Sen. Bill Clinton? Sen. Mario Cuomo? Don’t completely rule it out. The former president and the former New York governor are among several boldface names being touted as possible “caretakers” for New York’s Senate seat — people who would serve until the 2010 elections but wouldn’t be interested in running to keep the job.

That’s probably a decent idea. But I have to say that in my view both the Illinois situation, the Delaware situation, and the New York situation all basically serve to illustrate the over-arching point that states would be well-advised to adopt a rule whereby Senate vacancies will be filled by special election. The constitution lets them do this, they just need to walk through the open door. Meanwhile, as a pure tactic matter I’m baffled that Patterson didn’t just act quickly to designate NY Attorney General Andrew Cuomo. That would have been the obvious thing to do, and nobody would have serious second-guessed it had it been done swiftly. Instead, dawdling created this Caroline Kennedy opening and how Patterson’s put himself in an awkward position that he could have easily avoided.

McCain and Crime

The heavy use of Rudy Giuliani as a national security surrogate for conservatives has been baffling me for years. He could have been the greatest mayor of any city throughout American history and that still wouldn’t have anything to do with foreign policy or the military. Using him as a crime control policy surrogate, by contrast, makes sense. Crime went down by a lot under his watch, and his policies had something to do with that. Unfortunately, the basis for his attack on Barack Obama has something to do with mandatory minimum sentencing which had nothing to do with the New York City crime drop. Meanwhile, Robert Gordon observes that John McCain opposes many policies that really did contribute to reducing crime in New York City. Maybe if McCain becomes president, Rudy can talk McCain into changing his mind about some of that stuff.

Bloomberg’s Popularity

It looks like Michael Bloomberg stands a good chance of getting his third term:

A majority of New York City voters (54 percent to 42 percent) now favor extending term limits to 12 years from 8 so they can elect Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg to a third term, even though nearly two thirds (65 percent to 29 percent) favor the basic concept of term limits, according to a Quinnipiac University poll released on Friday morning. [...] Even when the term limits question was phrased a different way, emphasizing procedural fairness, 52 percent said Mr. Bloomberg deserved four more years to finish his work as mayor, while 44 percent said changing the rules in the middle of the game was unfair. [...] The poll found a remarkably high approval rating, 75 percent to 19 percent, for Mr. Bloomberg’s job performance. Approval was highest among white voters (83 percent to 13 percent) but also solid among black voters (69 percent to 23 percent) and Hispanic voters (68 percent to 25 percent).

On the other hand, I hadn’t previously realized that one of the contenders to replace Bloomberg is named “Marty Markowitz” which I think is a great New York name. In all seriousness, I don’t want to come off as unduly in the tank for Bloomberg here. Obviously, I haven’t lived in New York City for some time and have only a limited familiarity with the issues and little-to-any familiarity with his opponents. Very possibly, someone else would be a better mayor. But I think that person should make the argument on the merits. And, yes, “Bloomberg is an unprincipled, power-hungry jerk who opportunistically changed the term limits law when he decided he wanted to stay on” counts as a potentially effective argument against re-electing him. Nevertheless, there’s still no good reason to artificially limit the number of terms to which a mayor can be elected.

More of the Same

I don’t totally grasp the argument, made by Dana Goldstein and others, that it would be horribly “undemocratic” for the New York City Council to repeal the city’s term limits that were imposed years back by referendum. I mean, suppose they did it, what could happen next? Well, either Bloomberg would lose to whoever wins the Democratic nomination or else Bloomberg would defeat whoever wins the Democratic nomination. In the first case, the will of the people to deny Bloomberg a third term would not be subverted — Bloomberg wouldn’t get a third term. And in the second case, the will of the people to deny Bloomberg a third term would not be subverted either — Bloomberg would have a renewed direct mandate from the public.

Now that doesn’t change the fact that the timing and manner of Bloomberg’s decision to seek this change seems kind of sleazy. But the time to take that into consideration is during his re-election campaign when you might think it renders him an inferior choice to the main alternative. But the idea of scrapping term limits can and should still be evaluated on its own merits and it’s a good idea.

Third Term for Bloomberg

Looks like Michael Bloomberg is going to try to get the rule changed to allow him to run for a third term as mayor of New York City. I think Bloomberg’s been a good mayor, but I’m not very familiar with the alternatives so I wouldn’t want to express a view on the underlying merits of re-electing him even if that were the sort of thing that’s allowed on this blog.

But in a broader sense, term limits have never struck me as a policy with an especially strong theoretical or empirical justification. Term limits are more interesting insofar as there’s no duller story in politics than “popular incumbent cruises to re-election” but why shouldn’t popular incumbents cruise to re-election? Term limits for the state legislature haven’t improved governance in California, and I think the country would have been better served in both 2008 and 2000 by a more clear-cut choice about whether or not to continue on the current direction.

UPDATE: As Atrios points out the right way to do this would be to eliminate term limits for your successors rather than for yourself. At a minimum, I’d say it would be strongly preferable to be on record as against term limits before you ever took office.