by Roger Starr

About the author: Roger Starr is a contributing editor for the City Journal, a quarterly publication of the Manhattan Institute, a New York City public policy research organization.

A week before the 1994 elections, Mayor Rudolph Giuliani received a piece of very good news from the New York City Department of Sanitation, perhaps the last good news he was to receive for quite some time. The department reported that the market for used newsprint (the paper on which newspapers are printed) had become so strong that the city would now receive $10,000 a day for bringing discarded newspapers to wastepaper dealers instead of paying the dealers $10,000 a day for taking papers off the city’s hands. The prospective net savings enabled the mayor to reduce the department’s annual budget by $5 million a year—a tidy...