Booker Is Now Officially in the Lion's Den

Cory Booker, Newark, NJ's new mayor, who has been a symbol of a new politics in the inner city, has picked his first big fight with the entrenched machine. Newark has a severe budget deficit and Booker is taking an approach that is about as boringly sensible as you can get - raise revenue and cut costs. (Ignore supply-side dynamic effects for this analysis and assume that raising taxes will raise revenues on a linear basis.) Naturally, the government worker unions will have none of this, at least the cost cutting part of it, and so it begins. We'll see how Booker handles this.