If New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg decides to run for president in 2008, there's one issue that may make it difficult for centrist voters to support him - especially if their centrism includes a portion of fiscal conservatism.
That issue is New York City's ballooning debt.
Nicole Gelinas, a Chartered Financial Analyst and a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute for Policy Research, explains in this article published by the New York Post...
Gotham is groaning under the weight of $55 billion in debt - more than $6,800 per resident. That's 60 percent higher than the per-capita level of Chicago, the second-worst U.S. city in this regard.
And, as figures from city Comptroller Bill Thompson show, much of the pile-on took place on Bloomberg's watch. When Mayor Rudy Giuliani left office, debt was $43 billion, or less than $5,300 per resident. Borrowing rose at about 5 percent a year in the last five Giuliani years; the rate's jumped to nearly 7 percent a year under Mayor Mike.
One of the reasons voters voted Republicans out of the majority in Congress was the GOP-lead Congress didn't control spending, and piled up billions and billions more on the national debt. Bloomberg's record of expanding NYC's debt will undermine any claim he makes to fiscal conservatism if he runs for president.
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