New York’s financial crisis that occurred after 1975 was due to the inability of the city government to maintain the city at a level the people were accustomed to. Roger Starr states that the maintenance was not possible, because the city’s input of wealth was not sufficient to maintain the standards of the people. However, after reading the goals on how to increase or acquire funds for the city, I think a major contribution to the problem is failure to acknowledge change, and the growing population within New York City.

Starr describes the problem by separating the problem into two cities: Economic City and Political City. I agree with him that the crisis was formed by the problems of the Political City, which as a result created problems in the Economic City. Starr explains that there is money involved in the Political City, and this money comes from the government. For instance, government funds for criminal justice and education. The national government was strict with how much money was given in the case of poverty and nonsocial programs, which made it difficult for New York to increase their wealth, even though they increased local taxes. Although it was difficult to attain funding from the national government, if New York’s government focused on the biggest problem of financial trouble, there might have been a way to avoid this crisis. For instance, problems in the economic sector began to arise when the city’s exports began to diminish. While exports were dwindling, the city began to increase more imports. If the city noticed that increasing imports would not increase the city’s wealth, maybe there could have been a relatively heavy tax on importing goods so that businesses would have to think twice about buying goods abroad.

I think that the city’s desire to stay the way it was contributed to the crisis. When the city was increasing imports, they did not do so out of necessity, but out of “hope for the future.” People of the city wanted to use the reputation to convince others that New York would stand on top in the future even though they were going through a bumpy road at that moment. Although this reputation holds some truth to it today, if there had been some slight changes to adjust the wealth of the city to match the amount that was incoming, maybe the crisis could have been avoided. Maybe the city could have changed the level of maintenance accordingly with how much the predicted wealth would be after proposals to increase wealth were put to action.

Population also played an important role to the crisis. Starr stated that to increase the wealth of the city, there needed to be more jobs so there would be less unemployed people and more people boosting the economy. During the crisis, employment dropped more than it had before, yet the population was growing. With a growing population up to 8 million, decreasing employment would only further deepen the crisis. Even so, there were only slight attempts to increase employment, which in the end did not do much to boost the economy. I think there should have been more efforts to create more jobs, especially since the population was not going to decrease anytime soon. More people without jobs would just mean more money needed from the government to help people out of poverty, which is due to unemployment.

I believe that this crisis would have happened even if the government provided more help to New York. New York, with its growing population, had refused to change, which led to its downfall. Even if New York decided to change just a bit, I think the local government could not have done enough to bring more wealth in. Without increasing or stable incoming wealth, New York would not be able to avoid the crisis it fell into.