DANIEL GREENFIELD: BILL DE BLASIO’S RED (NON DELICIOUS) APPLE AGENDA
http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/dgreenfield/bill-de-blasios-red-apple-agenda/print/
The further left a radical politician wants to go, the more likely he is to wrap his agenda in a mainstream Republican brand. In his interview with Bill O’Reilly, Obama compared himself to Nixon (not for the reason most Republicans would expect) and in his State of the City address, Bill de Blasio compared himself to Fiorello H. La Guardia; a former Republican mayor of New York City.
The constant mentions of La Guardia, a universally popular figure, were a poor mask for a radical address filled with ugly divisive rhetoric, class warfare and schemes that will bankrupt the city.
If William Wilhelm Jr., aka Bill de Blasio, had been more honest, he would have compared himself to Mayor Dinkins, his old boss, who was sitting in the audience, while the first Democratic mayor since the end of the disastrous Dinkins era unveiled a package of class warfare, high taxes and ID’s for illegal aliens.
But Dinkins, despite being almost as friendly with Al Sharpton as De Blasio, was a moderate compared to Red Bill whose State of the City address was another call for a Red Apple. For all his many shortcomings, Dinkins had never embraced divisive rhetoric to the same extent that Bill de Blasio did in his address.
Instead of simply laying out a series of programs, Bill de Blasio ranted about the rich (a group that he is a member of) and announced that he wanted to discuss “the core values we share as New Yorkers pursuing progressive change.”
Not every New Yorker is a fan of progressive change, especially once he finds out that it means dangerous streets, high taxes, poor services and lots of buck passing, but Red Bill was really saying that non-progs who weren’t committed to his extremist program had no place in the city that his corrupt allies had taken over.
Instead of uniting New Yorkers, Bill de Blasio harped on his “Tale of Two Cities” story that is as much a work of fiction as the Dickens original.
If you believe Red Bill, the biggest problem in a city with a $70 billion annual budget is that the taxes aren’t high enough and that not enough money is being spent on education and social services.
“The children of this city deserve billions more in educational resources and now is the time to provide it,” De Blasio demanded.
The question is, how many billions more?
New York City debt is at $110 billion and the school budget has already hit $25 billion. Not only is the school budget for a single city bigger than the entire state budgets of Utah, Wyoming, Nebraska and South Dakota combined, but Bill de Blasio is claiming that it somehow still isn’t high enough.
“Raising taxes on the rich makes our commitment to our kids more than just words. It makes that commitment REAL. It makes that commitment fair,” Bill de Blasio ranted.
Our commitment to his kids is about the same amount of money it cost to put a man on the moon. That’s more than the average public school grad will ever do no matter how much Red Bill raises taxes. New York City already spends $19,000 per student. It can spend $190,000 per student and it still won’t match the results in Utah which spends $8,224 per student. But some things, money just can’t buy.
In the city budget, the Department of Social Services eats up $9.3 billion and Health and Welfare consumes another $5.5 billion. Eight billion goes to pensions for city workers; a number that will skyrocket under Bill de Blasio as his union backers cash in their support for the 150 pending municipal union contracts that he mentioned in his address.
“We will navigate towards a future that is progressive and fiscally responsible,” De Blasio boasted. It’s safe to say that he doesn’t know what the words “fiscally responsible” mean or that they go together with “progressive” the way that “safe” goes together with “nuclear disaster.”
Another $4.7 billion of the city budget already goes to debt service and $865 million goes to the City University of New York, whose total budget is $2.5 billion. In his address, Bill de Blasio pledged to incorporate a dedicated science, technology, engineering and math program into CUNY “to start preparing more graduates of our public high schools for jobs in the city’s tech industry.”
“Our aim is that within eight years, the majority of skilled technology-related jobs in New York City are being filled by those educated in New York City schools,” Bill de Blasio added.
That fanciful plan fails to take into account the fact that 80% of public school grads need remedial education in reading and writing to even get started at CUNY. Unlike Bloomberg, Bill de Blasio didn’t discuss any plans for reforming schools. That’s not surprising considering what his backers in the educational unions think of reforms that would actually force them to do their jobs for a change.
Instead, Red Bill continued his bizarre showdown with Governor Cuomo over universal Pre-K. Cuomo had already promised universal Pre-K, but Bill de Blasio insisted that he was “asking Albany to allow New York City to tax itself – its wealthiest residents” for a program that Albany was already going to pay for.
The red and red-faced mayor also demanded that Cuomo give him the power to raise the minimum wage. Like most radicals, Bill de Blasio is unable to keep from picking fights even with fellow Democrats.
Bill de Blasio pledged to shift money from “corporate subsidies” to “tuition assistance.” Considering how huge the education budget is and that the unemployment rate is at 8 percent for the general population and at 30 percent for the young, that’s a formula for handing out a lot of useless diplomas with no jobs.
But that’s an economic logic that extreme leftists like Bill de Blasio are incapable of understanding.
Red Bill threatened Wall Street, but it’s already shifting jobs outside the city. While other cities are providing incentives to lure Wall Street firms, Bill de Blasio is giving them more reasons to leave while promising a science and technology diploma for every CUNY illiterate who can point to a picture of a cat.
Since all those grads without jobs will need someplace to live, Bill de Blasio repeated his promise of 200,000 units of subsidized housing for 500,000 people living at someone else’s expense to be achieved by blackmailing developers. Considering the kind of developers who will be willing to meet his demands, it’s a formula for the disastrously mismanaged housing that can be experienced in Sochi or the Bronx.
For those New Yorkers looking forward to the return of Dinkins era crime, Red Bill took credit for scrapping Stop and Frisk, which kept down gang violence and shootings of mainly black men, and he offered municipal ID’s to illegal aliens so that they can obtain “bank accounts.”
“We will protect the almost half-million undocumented New Yorkers whose voices too often go unheard,” Bill de Blasio said. But their voices were heard when they cast someone else’s votes for him.
Bill de Blasio boasted that shootings were down. In fact, murders had risen by 33%, an increase that police sources blamed on Red Bill’s dismantling of the successful Stop and Frisk program.
With his first State of the City address, Bill de Blasio had demonstrated that he had nothing to offer working people. His address was full of goodies for gang members, illegal aliens and welfare voters. It had nothing to offer New Yorkers except more crime, taxes, bankruptcy and the fast lane to Detroit.
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