...cryptocommie mayor of New York and for some reason a Dem candidate for president in 2020. Corrupt and incompetent, his qualifications for office seem to consist of being married to a black woman, with whom he honeymooned in Cuba. He has a preppy-looking son named Dante, whose Divine Comedy involved getting his back hair up when a police car drove past him slowly. New Yorkers voted for him, so they deserve him...calls it his "Recovery Budget," but it’s actually a sad bid to put some shine on his legacy while sabotaging his successor.
De Blasio’s own announcement of his record $98.6 billion spending plan for fiscal year 2022 crowed that "almost $6 billion in direct local aid will be used now through 2024, $7 billion almost in federal education aid also will be used by 2024."
That doesn’t leave a lot of flexibility for the man or woman who takes the keys to City Hall in January 2022. And, as we noted recently, average New Yorkers will pay the price.
Top challenger Andrew Yang
...Former 2020 Democratic presidential candidate. Unlike most of the other Dem 2020 candidates, he actually did things besides politix in his adult life, which made him political poison. He worked in startups and early-stage growth companies as a founder or executive from 2000 to 2009. After he founded Venture for America, the Obama administration selected him in 2012 as a
Champion of Changeand in 2015 as a
Presidential Ambassador for Global Entrepreneurship. His signature campaign policy is what he calls the
Freedom Dividend, a form of Universal Basic Income for every American over 18. Yang believes UBI is a necessary response to the rapid development of automation that is leading to workforce challenges. The other two central elements of Yang's platform are Medicare for All and
Human-Centered Capitalism....
urged de Blasio to save 70 percent of the federal windfall to cover the costs of recovery in the coming years and to reduce the gaping multibillion-dollar deficits now locked in over the next few years.
Instead, the mayor is boosting the baseline budget by hundreds of millions. He’s not just dropping his hiring freeze, he’s adding tens of thousands of city jobs.
Leading candidate Eric Adams has similarly fumed at the mayor’s move to spend the windfall on pet projects that add thousands of new jobs to the baseline.
Heck, the mayor’s even trying to make his ThriveNYC debacle permanent, along with spending $234 million for a New Deal-style City Cleanup Corps that’ll hire 10,000 workers "to make the city cleaner and greener." Adams says he’ll defund the CCC, as "we already have a Sanitation Department."
"Had the city spread the federal money more evenly over a few years, it would have had time to restructure spending to increase efficiency and preserve services," noted Andrew Rein, who heads fiscal watchdog Citizens Budget Commission.
But de Blasio doesn’t care. Then again, he’s never cared about the price everyone else has to pay for his feckless self-indulgence.