Taxing legacy

To the editor:

Chief contributor Bernard Whalen labelled mayoral candidate Zohran Mamdani “The least qualified candidate” (Commentary, Oct. 1). While young, I don’t believe Mamdani, a thrice-elected Assemblyman, fits Whelan’s characterization. That “honor” surely belongs to the never-elected GOP candidate, Curtis Sliwa.

The meat of Whalen’s critique concerns Mamdani’s plans to expand government services to include a Department of Community Safety focused on reducing homelessness. Whalen correctly identifies the reason past efforts have failed, writing, “The vast majority of homeless on the street are mentally unstable. But there is no provision for long-term care or places for them to live other than the streets.” Missing from Whalen’s analysis is why such places don’t exist.

In 1955, state-run mental health institutions provided 337 hospital beds per 100,000 Americans; today that has dropped by 96.5 percent to 11.7 beds per 100,000. The decline began in earnest when then-President Ronald Reagan embraced deinstitutionalization as part of his “new federalism,” a broad policy whereby the federal government shed responsibilities (and expenditures) in order to fund top-heavy tax cuts. 

Mental hospitals were closed, en masse, and patients were returned to their “communities” or the streets, as Whalen bemoans. Homeless populations exploded from roughly 250,000 in the 1980 to over 750,000 within a decade.

It seems to me that Mamdani is looking to reverse Reagan’s disastrous legacy by, in part, re-balancing the tax code and resource allocations by increasing taxes on the wealthy and shifting funding for homeless services from policing to healthcare, respectively. Will it work? I can’t say, but it is very clear that 45 years of Reagan’s “small government conservatism” has failed, miserably.

Joseph Cannisi