Back in 1972, a one-hit singing pair named Cashman & West released an ode to New York City called American City Suite. The song reflected back on the city’s happy days and mourned its then-current decay. Although a 7-3/4-minute version was produced for radio, the full version of the song was 12 minutes and it became an “anthem” for New Yorkers in the 1970s.
At that time, many people believed that the problem with the cities was that the wealthy and middle-class had fled to the suburbs, leaving only the poor behind. Big-city officials viewed the suburbs as parasites, because they benefitted from the city but paid no taxes to it. They hoped to remedy this by imposing some sort of commuter tax on suburbanites.
Having grown up in a city, I remember repeating this viewpoint as a high-school student to a suburban relative. He vehemently responded that there was no way he would pay taxes to a corrupt city government. The notion that modern government officials might be corrupt, at least outside of Chicago, had never occurred to me.
