Forget Term Limits: NYC Needs Mike

Term limits have been great for New York City, but it’s time to make an exception, billionaire philanthropist Ronald Lauder writes in the Times. Lauder believes Michael Bloomberg is the man to steer New York through the current economic disaster, preventing a repeat of the 1970s crisis that ruined life “not just on Wall Street, but on every street in every borough.”

Lauder has been a hardcore term limits proponent, and still believes this should be a one-time suspension of the rule. In the last crisis, property values fell, crime skyrocketed and the Big Apple became nigh-uninhabitable. “Experience tells us that economic disasters eventually become social disasters,” he writes, and the city’s “prosperous future depends in large measure on a mayor with a deep understanding of finance, governance, and politics”—Bloomberg. (More Michael Bloomberg stories.)