Here is the Daily News on the Mayor of Money's comments:
As I mentioned a bit earlier, my column in today's print editions of The Daily News was about a massive rally unions and community groups plan to stage against Mayor Bloomberg and the titans of Wall Street on May 12. As Michael Kink of the Strong Economy For All coalition told me as I was writing, the protest's message is when it comes to the city budget, layoffs and public services, "There has to be a solution other than 'Cut! Cut! Cut!'"
Via our Adam Lisberg, here's what the mayor had to say to the press about it:
"They have a right to protest. I would suggest they'd do better in, given our, the federal aid was cut by close to $1 billion, state aid by a couple of billion dollars, they might want to go to the federal or state governments and protest. New York City has to balance its budget by law. We will go ahead and do that, you can rest assured. And it will be very painful because we have a lot less money, which means a lot fewer people. What we have to do is decide, is it going to be fewer cops, fewer firefighters, fewer teachers, fewer this, fewer that. We've had 10 programs to reduce the gap over the last half a dozen years. Fortunately we saved some money a while back which will mitigate the pain, but we've used up virtually all of our reserve [this] year, and next year we will use up the balance of the reserve which we have in another place.
"We have to continue to grow this city. We have to make sure that people come here, businesses come here, wealthy people come here and buy apartments and create jobs and pay taxes. That's the only ways we're going to get through this. But I would think that while they have a right to protest, they're probably doing it in the wrong place. We are going to balance the budget. And to balance the budget, we are going to spend less, and spending less means fewer people, and it's going to be difficult. We are trying as hard as we can. We understand the problem. We're trying to work with what we have, but it's going to be a really hard time here, and we need everybody to pull together and find ways to do more with less, and we're going to continue to do that."
I'm sure laying off teachers, closing schools, reducing every part of the school budget except for the no-bid standardized test contracts and outside consultant contracts, closing fire houses, shortening the manpower on fire trucks, closing libraries, shutting hundreds of senior centers, throwing homeless families off city services and out onto the street and slashing taxes on hedge fund managers and Wall Street will make the rich people happy.
But to phrase these policies as "everybody pulling together" is just jive
The pulling together is being done by middle and working class people while the Mayor of Money and the Cathie Blacks and the Whitney Tilsons and the Alex Rodriguezes of the city yuck it up over martinis in their taxpayer-subsidized glass towers and brownstones.
If the mayor doesn't like to take criticism for policies that clearly benefit the rich few (a point he even acknowledges when he says that he has purposely put into place policies that will keep rich people buying apartments here in NYC), well, too fucking bad.
That's EXACTLY what his policies do and there is EVERY reason in the world the unions should be protesting to point this out.
Not to mention the 3.1 billion dollar surplus--which needs to be mentioned every time he talks about the tough cuts he needs to make. I'm surprised you didn't.
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