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The Coming Detroitification of New York
The high cost of all things New York has reached such an extreme that it now costs a truck $102 just to cross the George Washington Bridge. No worries; after Bill de Blasio has been the mayor for a few years, no one will want to come into the city anyway.
De Blasio’s election was the ultimate triumph for the lunatic Left:
Headlining a Brooklyn fund-raiser for the group New York Communities for Change, Mr. de Blasio was hailed as a progressive hero and the fruit of a more than decade-long battle by labor groups, grassroots organizations and the Working Families Party to crown one of their own. …
“We are in a progressive moment right now,” declared East Harlem Councilwoman Melissa Mark-Viverito, an early endorser of Mr. de Blasio and a leading candidate for council speaker.
It wasn’t all hugs and kisses. Ideologically demented actress Cynthia Nixon “warned Mr. de Blasio that the city’s left-wing institutions would hold him accountable, even if he was their current darling.”
What does it mean for the nation’s largest city to have succumbed to a “progressive moment”? The New York Post offers a clue by pointing out that while the previously declining city turned itself around by radically reducing the welfare rolls since Rudy Giuliani took office, de Blasio “has opposed virtually every key element of welfare reform.”
The incoming mayor is against a requirement for welfare recipients even to look for a job, calling the idea that people should work for a living an “ideological hang-up.”
He opposes diversion, by which case workers try to help welfare applicants without hooking them on the dole, for example with one-time rental assistance or by finding them a job; he has explicitly promised to “stop efforts to divert individuals from accessing cash assistance.”
Eligibility verification also meets with de Blasio’s disapproval. When the goal is to get as many people on the welfare rolls as possible so as to build a liberal political base, measures to prevent fraud make little sense. He denounces fingerprinting welfare recipients as “stigmatizing.”
The encouragement of personal responsibility will be replaced by a very different brand of rhetoric. De Blasio has proclaimed that “providing basic income and food security to all New Yorkers [is] a key responsibility of government.”
If that sounds like communism, it could be because the next mayor of America’s First City is a communist.
The past foreshadows the future:
In 1960, 328,000 New Yorkers were on cash assistance. By 1972, after two terms of Mayor John Lindsay, the rolls had swelled to nearly 1.25 million, or 16 percent of the city’s population. One in every 10 US welfare recipients lived in New York City, reports Vincent Cannato in “The Ungovernable City.”
As de Blasio promises to do, Lindsay dismantled the city’s processes for detecting welfare fraud and streamlined the welfare-application process. By 1972, welfare fraud was costing the city $100 million a year. Lindsay said that asking welfare recipients to work would return us “to the dark ages.”
Not coincidentally, crime also exploded on Lindsay’s watch.
De Blasio promises to make Lindsay look like Giuliani by comparison.
Crime isn’t the only affliction that a skyrocketing welfare rate will carry along into the stratosphere. The money to pay for it will come from ever higher taxes. This will drive out businesses, thereby driving up unemployment, thereby expanding the welfare rolls still further in a vicious cycle that if not broken will end in societal collapse. To see what that looks like, visit formerly thriving Detroit.
Crossing the Hudson at $102 may soon look like a bargain — provided you are on your way out of the city in a moving van.
The high cost of all things New York has reached such an extreme that it now costs a truck $102 just to cross the George Washington Bridge. No worries; after Bill de Blasio has been the mayor for a few years, no one will want to come into the city anyway.
De Blasio’s election was the ultimate triumph for the lunatic Left:
Headlining a Brooklyn fund-raiser for the group New York Communities for Change, Mr. de Blasio was hailed as a progressive hero and the fruit of a more than decade-long battle by labor groups, grassroots organizations and the Working Families Party to crown one of their own. …
“We are in a progressive moment right now,” declared East Harlem Councilwoman Melissa Mark-Viverito, an early endorser of Mr. de Blasio and a leading candidate for council speaker.
It wasn’t all hugs and kisses. Ideologically demented actress Cynthia Nixon “warned Mr. de Blasio that the city’s left-wing institutions would hold him accountable, even if he was their current darling.”
What does it mean for the nation’s largest city to have succumbed to a “progressive moment”? The New York Post offers a clue by pointing out that while the previously declining city turned itself around by radically reducing the welfare rolls since Rudy Giuliani took office, de Blasio “has opposed virtually every key element of welfare reform.”
The incoming mayor is against a requirement for welfare recipients even to look for a job, calling the idea that people should work for a living an “ideological hang-up.”
He opposes diversion, by which case workers try to help welfare applicants without hooking them on the dole, for example with one-time rental assistance or by finding them a job; he has explicitly promised to “stop efforts to divert individuals from accessing cash assistance.”
Eligibility verification also meets with de Blasio’s disapproval. When the goal is to get as many people on the welfare rolls as possible so as to build a liberal political base, measures to prevent fraud make little sense. He denounces fingerprinting welfare recipients as “stigmatizing.”
The encouragement of personal responsibility will be replaced by a very different brand of rhetoric. De Blasio has proclaimed that “providing basic income and food security to all New Yorkers [is] a key responsibility of government.”
If that sounds like communism, it could be because the next mayor of America’s First City is a communist.
The past foreshadows the future:
In 1960, 328,000 New Yorkers were on cash assistance. By 1972, after two terms of Mayor John Lindsay, the rolls had swelled to nearly 1.25 million, or 16 percent of the city’s population. One in every 10 US welfare recipients lived in New York City, reports Vincent Cannato in “The Ungovernable City.”
As de Blasio promises to do, Lindsay dismantled the city’s processes for detecting welfare fraud and streamlined the welfare-application process. By 1972, welfare fraud was costing the city $100 million a year. Lindsay said that asking welfare recipients to work would return us “to the dark ages.”
Not coincidentally, crime also exploded on Lindsay’s watch.
De Blasio promises to make Lindsay look like Giuliani by comparison.
Crime isn’t the only affliction that a skyrocketing welfare rate will carry along into the stratosphere. The money to pay for it will come from ever higher taxes. This will drive out businesses, thereby driving up unemployment, thereby expanding the welfare rolls still further in a vicious cycle that if not broken will end in societal collapse. To see what that looks like, visit formerly thriving Detroit.
Crossing the Hudson at $102 may soon look like a bargain — provided you are on your way out of the city in a moving van.
