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(NewsNation) — When you thought life in New York City couldn’t get any worse, Mayor Eric Adams announced budgets cuts to police, the education department and other basic services that New Yorkers rely on every day. It’s about to get worse.
“This is probably one of the most painful exercises I’ve gone through. And, you know, when we look at around police, when we look at some of the other initiatives that we’re doing, that you know it’s going to it’s going to be extremely painful for New Yorkers,” Adams said.
Painful, indeed. And it’s going to be the most painful on New York’s working poor and middle class.
The rich don’t feel this. They don’t care. They escaped to Connecticut. Their kids go to private schools. They go out to the Hamptons on the weekend. Maybe they moved to Miami.
But the poor and the middle class among New Yorkers rely on those services from the city. Normal folks in New York City will now have to brave the city with fewer cops to protect them from random attacks. There will be fewer subways for them to get and they’ll have to sit on the platforms longer.
And at some point, they’re going to probably get stuck with a larger tax bill for the privilege. It doesn’t stop on the subway. Adams said parents might soon have to volunteer at their kids’ schools as safety officers because he doesn’t have enough money to protect kids.
Adams blames the migrants coming to New York. Turns out, housing and feeding and dealing with the thousands of illegal immigrants costs a lot of money. New York has that thing where you have to provide housing or right to shelter.
But now, they are using this crisis. Rather than to change the rules in how they are dealing with the illegal immigration population, they’re using the crisis to cut the budget for the people who need those services the most — the poor and the working class.
But New Yorkers have watched the Big Apple rot for years. New York used to be the home of the country’s fabulously wealthy. But, starting with a series of tax hikes in the 2010s to pay for all of these continual progressive ideals, the ultrarich began to flee the Big Apple in droves.
In 2010, New York was home to 13% of the country’s millionaires. By 2020, that had fallen to less than 9%. With that mass exodus that continues went billions of tax dollars that are spent protecting everyone left behind.
Fewer tax dollars means fewer cops, fewer firemen, fewer transit workers, which means trains are slower and a loss of quality of life that boomed under Mayor Mike Bloomberg. Tax dollars to educate kids that certainly can’t afford to attend private schools — those are gone out the door.
Now, those tax dollars help educate kids in Miami or Austin. Sorry, New York, the working poor and middle class can’t afford to move there. They’re the real victims.
New Yorkers of all shapes, shades and sizes are used to seeing placards in windows shouting to tax the rich. There’s organized marches in the streets everywhere. So, New York taxed the rich, and the rich have left.
The amount of social services continues to go up. Crime has spiked. The people left behind are forced to live with the homeless crisis, fentanyl crisis, a crime crisis, immigration crisis, a crisis of leadership, we could go on.
Mayor Adams says it’s painful. What he failed to say is that it was predictable, and it was preventable.
