Free Republic

The governor who led New York State out of the fiscal crisis of the 1970s died Sunday at the age of 92. Hugh Leo Carey’s last great public service came when he emerged from retirement in 2005 to fight a proposed constitutional amendment weakening New York’s executive budget law. At a September 2005 conference sponsored by the Empire Center for New York State Policy, Carey denounced the proposed amendment as “a power grab and a purse grab” by the state legislature. Harking back to the tourism slogan popularized during his tenure, Carey declared: “For God’s sake, if you love New...

Hugh L. Carey, the governor who helped rescue New York from the brink of financial collapse in the 1970s and tamed a culture of ever-growing spending, died Sunday at his summer home on Shelter Island. He was 92. ... As the 51st governor of New York from 1975 through 1982, Mr. Carey led a small group of public servants who vanquished the fiscal crisis that threatened New York City and the state — the direst emergency a governor had faced since the Depression — by taking on powers over the city’s finances that no governor had wielded before and none...