{"id":29421,"date":"2016-03-30T01:00:49","date_gmt":"2016-03-30T05:00:49","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/?p=29421"},"modified":"2020-08-07T09:44:12","modified_gmt":"2020-08-07T13:44:12","slug":"qotd-the-spendthrift-governor-nelson-rockefeller","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/2016\/03\/30\/qotd-the-spendthrift-governor-nelson-rockefeller\/","title":{"rendered":"QotD: The spendthrift governor, Nelson Rockefeller"},"content":{"rendered":"

In 15 years as governor of New York, Nelson A. Rockefeller, popularly known as \u201cRocky,\u201d was as careful with the public\u2019s money as he was with his own \u2014 which is to say, he spent lavishly, impulsively, and often indiscriminately. New Yorkers have been paying the bill ever since. As portrayed in Richard Norton Smith\u2019s new biography, Rockefeller believed that there was no problem (least of all a lack of cash) too big to yield to a big-money solution. \u201cAs much as I loved Nelson,\u201d Smith quotes the financier Frank Zarb, \u201chis meter didn\u2019t start until you reached a billion dollars.\u201d<\/p>\n

Rocky\u2019s meter began to spin soon after he became governor of New York in 1959, and it accelerated as time went on. To be sure, every level of American government was expanding<\/a> during the 1960s and 1970s. But Rockefeller made an outlier of the Empire State. He quadrupled the state budget and quintupled state debt, including off-the-books public-authority borrowing. He created the nation\u2019s most lavish Medicaid program<\/a>, designed to draw down maximum federal aid to the state while saddling New York City and county governments with half the non-federally reimbursed cost. He pushed through a collective bargaining law that would bequeath to New Yorkers the nation\u2019s highest level of public-sector unionization. Though New York had been a cradle of open-handed liberalism, its state and local taxes, relative to personal income, were slightly below the national average when Rockefeller took office, according to Census data. By 1974, the combined burden had nearly doubled to a level well above the 50-state norm \u2014 where it has remained ever since.<\/p>\n

Smith demonstrates that Rockefeller\u2019s profligacy was at least as much a matter of personal disposition as political preference. There\u2019s no small irony in this: Rocky\u2019s grandfather, John D. Rockefeller, Sr., built his Standard Oil mega-fortune<\/a> on penny-pinching attention to detail. As one story goes, even as a wealthy man, \u201cSenior\u201d was delighted to discover he could eke out a slightly larger profit by encouraging his employees to use one less drop of solder on each tin can of Standard Oil kerosene.<\/p>\n

E.J. McMahon, “Hiya, Big Spender! For good or ill, Nelson Rockefeller\u2019s legacy lives on”, City Journal<\/em><\/a>, 2014-12-04.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

In 15 years as governor of New York, Nelson A. Rockefeller, popularly known as \u201cRocky,\u201d was as careful with the public\u2019s money as he was with his own \u2014 which is to say, he spent lavishly, impulsively, and often indiscriminately. New Yorkers have been paying the bill ever since. As portrayed in Richard Norton Smith\u2019s […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":35193,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[84,41,13],"tags":[1391,71,384,392,315],"class_list":["post-29421","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-government","category-quotations","category-usa","tag-biography","tag-debt","tag-newyork","tag-unions","tag-wealth"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/06\/favicon.png","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p2hpV6-7Ex","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/29421","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=29421"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/29421\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":59406,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/29421\/revisions\/59406"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/35193"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=29421"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=29421"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=29421"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}