The Generation, Year: 1, Issue: 12
Cardi B gets it. The hip hop star spoke for all New Yorkers when she raked Mayor Adams over the coals for his disastrous proposed cuts to the NYPD budget.
“Crimes are gonna go through the roof,” she exclaimed in a video posted on X. “What’s going to happen to my nieces, what’s going to happen to my nephews, what’s going to happen to my cousins, my aunts, my friends that’s living in the hood?”
This basic reasoning — fewer cops means more crimes — is obvious to children. But somehow not to Gotham’s political elites. The City Council looks set to OK the cuts to cops, libraries and other essential public services the mayor has proposed.
Why? One former councilman suggested it’s so the Council can likely protect “member item” spending — i.e. councilmembers’ pork for connected constituents. The cuts also leave in place most of the endless handouts for migrants, a lefty priority.
That’s right: The officials elected to represent the interests of all New Yorkers are willing to slash funds for garbage pickups and cops to house illegal immigrants in deluxe hotels. This is yet more proof that more (and different!) cuts are possible, and that behind our fiscal nightmare is an eminently political problem.
The problem has engendered migrant spending — again, this is on social services for noncitizens who entered the country illegally — that this year alone equals four times more than the entire city budget of Miami, which faces the country’s second-largest migrant wave.
Migrants are costing the Big Apple about $40,000 per head, vs. $3,000 for Los Angeles and $7,000 for Chicago. And Adams has failed to tackle head-on one of the real drivers of the crisis, the city’s absurd “right to shelter,” seeking an emergency carveout instead of fighting to end the rule itself.
But the real problem lies in the city’s political culture, where average New Yorkers still come dead last. Until that changes, the fiscal fires will burn and public service and safety will deteriorate.
