Wealth & Money Quote by Michael Chertoff

Chertoff’s sentence is a bureaucrat’s scalpel dressed up as a folksy shrug. He’s not really talking about New York’s funding; he’s talking about New York’s expectation of exceptionalism, and he’s doing it in the dialect of spreadsheets with just enough vernacular ("by a country mile") to make the rebuke feel plainspoken rather than punitive.

The intent is defensive, almost prosecutorial. "If you look at the average" is an instruction and a trap: accept my chosen baseline or concede you’re arguing from emotion. Averaging across three prior years smooths out spikes and anomalies, a statistical move that quietly reframes any single-year shortfall as normal variance rather than neglect. It’s governance by denominator.

The subtext is about legitimacy and optics in a post-crisis world where federal dollars function as both security policy and political theater. New York, especially in the years after 9/11, carried a symbolic claim to priority. Chertoff counters that symbolic claim with comparative bookkeeping: not only was New York treated fairly, it was treated better than everyone else. The phrase "any other city" widens the audience beyond New York’s grievance to a national jury of mayors and taxpayers, inviting them to see New York’s complaint as entitled.

Context matters: this is the Department of Homeland Security era, where risk-based allocation competed with relationship-based allocation, and every formula looked like a value judgment. Chertoff’s line works because it launderes a political decision through the language of neutrality, then seals it with a punchline. Statistics do the heavy lifting; the "country mile" does the crowd control.