MONEY: Empty Pockets on a Trillion Dollars a Year

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for fiscal 1973 that is "balanced" only by counting in nearly $800 million of new state and federal aid that it is highly questionable the city will get. The budget gap would be even larger without "economies" that have grievously hurt the quality of life. A prohibition on hiring shrank the city's police force by 800 cops last year, despite a level of street crime that makes many New Yorkers barricade themselves in their apartments after sundown. At the overcrowded Morrisania City Hospital in The Bronx, a new obstetrics wing is kept locked because there is no money to hire anyone to operate it. Slashes in city support of the New York Public Library have forced it to reduce its operating hours from 78 to 40 per week, and to close many of its special research facilities to the public.

· Detroit has enacted income and property taxes as high as Michigan law allows, and slapped a 5% tax on residents' telephone, gas and electric bills. Still, the city faces a $30 million deficit this fiscal year. "Every morning we gather in the mayor's office to pray for money," quips a mayoral assistant, "and we face Washington." Since the prayers have gone unanswered, Mayor Roman Gribbs has requested cuts of 5% to 45% in all city departmental budgets. All Detroit skating rinks are closed this month, parks and playgrounds will not be cleaned up for the spring, and recreation programs in city schools have been dropped. One result: Martin Cramatie, a 15-year-old former car thief and alumnus of a detention home, who for a while had switched his energies to playing basketball in the gym of Butzel Junior High, has been forced back on to the streets for his fun. "It's bogue [a bad trip], man," grumbles Cramatie. "Everybody will be getting into trouble."

· East St. Louis, Ill., like many urban centers, has seen its tax base steadily eroded by a flight of relatively well-off whites and an influx of low-income blacks, who now constitute 70% of its 68,000 population. The city is desperately short of policemen, firemen, sanitation workers, teachers and public housing. "We are even begging for paint to fix up our high school," says Mayor James E. Williams. In order to pay its bills, the city began selling as many bonds as Illinois law permits. When that proved insufficient, it resorted to an annual charade. The city would borrow from banks to meet its payroll, then, by prearrangement, would fail to pay when the loan came due. The banks would sue and win a judgment demanding repayment. That would enable the city legally to sell bonds beyond the normal debt limit. Today, 35% of East St. Louis' tax revenue must be used to pay off old borrowings, causing the city to fall ever further short of covering its bills.

Deeper in Debt. These are only some of the worst examples. Though the squeeze is most intense in the old and crowded states and cities east of the Mississippi River and north of the Mason-Dixon line, it is nationwide. New Orleans cannot afford to add the 300 sanitation workers and some 350 police that city officials figure it needs; authorities are afraid to raise the 6% sales tax for fear of driving more businesses to neighboring areas where taxes are lower. At the University of Kan, sas in Lawrence, students have only limited access to 80,000 recently acquired books in the