Manhattan Institute for Policy Research

At an education-themed event today hosted by the Manhattan Institute featuring Jeb Bush and Michael Bloomberg, something happened.

There's probably more to say. But despite the fact that the event was on the mayor's public schedule, and that the Manhattan Institute called around to invite reporters to watch, the press wasn't actually welcome.

After the mayor arrived, employees of the Union Club, where the event was held, began purging the room, plucking reporters from their seats around white-clothed tables. The Club's explanations ranged from improper attire (no jeans or sneakers) to the citing of strict privacy policies for members.

More after the jump.  read more »

Rupert Murdoch thinks New York State is headed for a crisis, he explained during a speech last night at Cipriani, where he and former Mayor Ed Koch were honored by the conservative Manhattan Institute.

Murdoch said that the Manhattan Institute's ideas about governance had helped improve public policy. “But," he said, "I think the storm clouds are threatening again.

"Not to be too pessimistic tonight, but the crisis has already begun.”

The problems, according to Murdoch: high taxes, the high cost of Medicaid and record-high spending on public education funding and too little to show for it.

“One effect of all this taxing and spending is clear: people are voting with their feet,” he said. “More people move out of New York state since 2000 than any other state, except Louisiana. Many who remain simply can’t leave, so they stay in spite of everything. New York’s current political thinking takes for granted that they will never leave. New York’s experiment with high taxes and higher spending has been failing for 50 years.”

Murdoch also discussed the fiscal crisis, blackout, Son of Sam murders and arson that plagued New York shortly after he and his family moved here in 1974. Then, with some amusement, he said, "It seems there are people in this town now who believe these things happened because I came to New York."

One of the few light moments came at the beginning of Murdoch's talk, when he referred to his bid to buy the Wall Street Journal:

“Before these speeches, I’m advised one should try to tell a joke. Well, I’m not a jokester. But I think I remember one. So here we go. There were these two rich guys who walked into the Wall Street Journal. Well, I think I’ve forgotten the rest, but I believe it had a good ending.”

More on the potential conflict between the corporate watchdog role Eliot Spitzer has played for the last eight years and the economic cheerleader role he's about to take on:

Here's a clip of Spitzer wearing his attorney general hat, defending the tough corporate accountability rules that Congress passed in the wake of his Wall Street investigations.

"When they limit our capacity to prosecute, they are doing something egregious and will harm investors across the nation."

Spitzer is in his element here, making the case that the markets flourished when government stepped in to protect investors. But the argument also is putting him at odds with Chuck Schumer and Mike Bloomberg, who think the crackdown is making it harder for New York to attract business.

Update: Manhattan Institute's blog has more on Spitzer's position, saying it is "self-defeating." because of "the state's reliance on Wall Street, which provides more than 20% of all tax revenues." -- Azi Paybarah

Another sign the debate over congestion pricing for auto-heavy areas, if not congestion pricing itself, is coming our way: The Manhattan Institute (whom one would think would be against these things) is holding a breakfast next Thursday on the topic. And it seems like toll-foe David Weprin will be outnumbered. - Matthew Schuerman

Steve Malanga, senior fellow at Giuliani's preferred think tank, the Manhattan Institute, thinks that Rudy Giuliani's formation of a exploratory committee for president was as good as an official declaration. Almost.

"Having talked to some of the people in Rudy's administration, I think they give it up to 90 percent chance that he will run," said Malanga. "The odds seem to be in favor of it."

Malanga, along with a number of other Giuliani observers I've been talking to, said that the GOP setbacks in Tuesday's midterm elections only make his candidacy more likely.

"The election, to a certain extent, makes a candidate like Rudy more interesting in 2008. The far right, the Christian right, is likely to have less influence in the next election within the party. Moderates are going to be looking for a candidate with broader appeal.

"He is one of the people with a national appeal that fits that model. That helps with the typical criticism that he won't make it through the primary."

--Jason Horowitz

Rudolph Giuliani has repeatedly extended the hand of friendship to Christian conservatives in recent  read more »

Yesterday, The New Republic introduced its readers to The Open University, its "first-of-its-kind blog, featuring America's top academics on today's top stories." As promised, there are lots of big-name professor types--the University of Chicago's Cass Sunstein, Harvard's Steven Pinker--and they've already taken on such weighty topics as "ideological amplification" and the demise of the HBO series "Deadwood."

Also among the contributors is deposed Harvard president Lawrence Summers, who ran afoul of female academics by speculating that women might be underrepresented in the science departments because of their inherent limitations. And it looks like the laboratory isn't the only place where the fairer sex isn't pulling its weight: A quick count of the 20 contributors turns up 17 men and 3 women: Harvard Professor Elisa New, Princeton Professor Christine Stansell, and Manhattan Institute Fellow Abigail Thernstrom.

Asked how TNR's newest blog wound up looking so old-school, the publication's online managing editor Adam Kushner said the magazine had tried to court more lady contributors.

"We did invite quite a number of women professors and some of them turned us down," he said. "The original conceit of the plan was roughly 50-50. I think we cast a lot of invitations all over the place.

"So we're not happy with the balance right now, and we've already been looking to improve, and we hope to improve," he said.

-Lizzy Ratner

Bill Weld had his audition for the theoretically friendly, in fact polite but unenthusiastic, audience at a Crains New York Business breakfast at the Sheraton this morning.

On the substance, the most striking point was his apparent retreat from his sweeping opposition to emininent domain at the Manhattan Institute not long ago. There, he framed his opposition to the Kelo decision as broad, and not limited to its endorsement of the role of a private developer:

"The fundamental problem with Kelo is that it represents statist central planning. The government decided that it wanted new real estate projects, and then let a private entity effectuate a transfer of wealth."

But asked about the details by Crain’s Greg David, he said he supported the Atlantic Yards project becuase it’s "imbued with public interest." He has mixed feelings about Columbia’s expansion into Morningside Heights. And he doesn’t want to demolish "a whole neighborhood" to build affordable housing.

Oh, and semi-relatedly, he’s all for the West Side Stadium. Doctoroff’s presentation was, he said, "completely persusive." He even wore his Olympics tie.

So it’s unclear if he actually opposes government planning as it’s actually been practiced in New York State since Jane Jacobs basically won the debate decades ago.

The Manhattan Institute has a well-produced indictment of Albany out today, and a new Web site to go with it.

Their bottom line is that the state taxes and spends too much, and the targets for blame are "the special interests," identified as teachers unions, public authorities, public employees, public "servants," and the plaintiffs' bar.

It's hard to argue that any of those groups don't have a great deal of power over Albany, but it seems unfair to leave out the vast private-sector contracting world that has grown fat off lobbying and doing business with state government. Like that Newt Gingrich line about it taking two to make a corrupton scandal.

To be fair, one policy recommendation is to make contracting more competitive.  read more »

Another, newsier suggestion -- Fred Newman, rejoice! -- is introducing a California style system of initative and referendum.

In a New York Sun article on Williamsburg’s Schaefer Landing, which will have 210 condos and 140 low-income apartments once it is finished next year, Manhattan Institute scholar Julia Vitullo-Martin asks if the rich will want to live next to the poor. (Why is that question never asked the other way around?) The thing is, people are already doing it all around town: about 30 buildings, mostly in Manhattan, have been financed by something called the 80/20 program, in which, in return for city-sponsored loans, the developer must agree to rent one-fifth of the units to people who met income guidelines. And the low-income units must be indistinguishable from the market-rate units, which is something that they won’t be at Schaefer Landing, where the 140 rentals are segregated in their own building—with 8-foot ceilings.

The piece does include a newsy tidbit, however. One of the developers of Schaefer Landing, Don Capoccia, the gay Republican who quit the U.S. Commission on Fine Arts in protest over President Bush’s policy on gay marriage, has bought a condo in his own project—at full market value, mind you.  read more »

-Matthew Schuerman

New York clearly demonstrated its confidence in Mayor Michael Bloomberg by handing him an overwhelmi  read more »

New York clearly demonstrated its confidence in Mayor Michael Bloomberg by handing him an overwhelmi  read more »

The folks over at the liberal Drum Major Institute seem to have enjoyed the Times's story today on the Manhattan Institute's waning local influence, and add their own slap:

"Certainly the Manhattan Institute has sensed a political opportunity to stir up xenophobia in the absence of contributing to a meaningful conversation about immigration policy in this country in this country. Maybe that's why Mayor Bloomberg doesn't listen to them. The scarier question for thoughtful Americans is: who still is?"  read more »

This seems rather unfair to Tamar Jacoby, but in any case, the Manhattan Institute's position reflects the uncomfortable one a lot of national conservative think tanks have been thrust into: what happens when your team wins, then betrays you? Some, like E.J. McMahon locally and the CATO Institute in Washington, haven't let loyalty get in the way of their politics. Others have.

It's something of a surprise to me that the Manhattan Institute, in general, hasn't quite managed to get traction with its critiques of the Bloomberg administration. They have to take some of the blame for the fact that no serious conservative challenge to Mike ever emerged.

I'd sort of expected the free-speech conservatives over at the Manhattan Institute to appreciate how the logic of Steve Minarik's attack on the Drum Major Institute threatens them.

Minarik's underlying point is that think tanks are arms of political campaigns, or movements, and thus should be regulated. And the conservative think tank's motto is "turning ideas into influence;" that sounds indictable by Minarik's argument.  read more »

But partisan loyalties seem to be trumping ideological consistency in this case:

"We don't want to comment on what the Drum Major Institute is doing," was all the Manhattan Institute's spokeswoman, MacKenzie Chambers, would say on this one.

We suspect you'll be hearing a lot about Fred Siegel's new Rudy book, which we mentioned in our story this week. He's reading from it today at a Manhattan Institute event, and we suspect that's just the start of the kind of media blitz anything remotely connected to America's Mayor inspires.

Anyway, Siegel has a website, where you can see the eerie yellow cover art and get a taste of Siegel's argument, which includes some defenses and explanations of aspects of Rudy that you don't often see defended: Brooklyn museum battles, building the bunker at 7 World Trade, and even, to some extent, the heavily criticized policing that led up to the Diallo shooting.  read more »

His basic case is that Rudy took on the people Ed Koch used to call "poverty pimps," and that much of the conflict was inevitable. This book, and an, er, more critical collection Rob Polner edited for Soft Skull Press, mean that some sort of conversation is emerging about Rudy as Mayor, kind of a relief from the exclusive focus on 9/11 in the discussion of a guy who, after all, ran the city for eight years.

Around the time Human Resources Administration commissioner Verna Eggleston was making a cameo appearance at Mike's campaign launch, her agency quietly made a major -- and ideologically-charged -- policy shift.

City Limits reports that in January, the city changed its workfare rules to allow all welfare recipients to count one year of full-time education as "work" and still receive benefits. (This option had already been available to parents; the new rule makes it available to single people without kids.)

The decision is striking because Mike had earlier fought a similar change. Advocates were outraged when the Mayor vetoed, then successfully beat in court, the Council's Access to Training and Education bill (CATE). Manhattan Institute critics hated the bill, which they saw as a return to the bad old days of endless, useless, "job training" programs, and saw the Mayor's veto as a key piece of continuity with Giuliani-era welfare policy.

Now, says a lawyer who backed the legislation, City Hall has "implemented by policy large swathes of what would have been granted by CATE...It doesn't include 4-year college [like CATE], but...it's an enormous step forward."  read more »

Mike seems to be trying to keep this step away from Rudy under wraps. Today, we got a press release about a minor increase in Staten Island Ferry service -- but we don't recall ever seeing an announcement of this major shift in a key area of social policy.