Here's Part Of Mayor Bloomberg's Legacy

This is it, in a nutshell:

The city's poverty rate sat at 21.4% in 2012, barely unchanged from a year earlier, according to a report released by Mayor de Blasio's office and the Center for Economic Opportunity on Wednesday.
The rate increased across nearly every demographic group between 2008 and 2012, the report found.
Notably, New Yorkers of Asian descent saw the rate rise 6.6% to 29% and non-U.S. citizens experienced an increase of 5.3% to 29.9%. About a third of the city's Asian-descent residents are also non-citizens.

Eight percent of adults between the working ages of 18 and 64 lived in poverty in 2012, up 1.8% from 2008. Among families with two full-time workers, the rate increased by 1.3 percentage points to 5.2%.

Conditions in the city improved after the 2008 recession, but -- using the CEO's metrics -- 45.6% of New Yorkers continued to live near the poverty line in 2012, the report says. The standard federal measure set the rate at 30.7%.

Almost half of all New Yorkers live either in poverty or near-poverty.

You know whose fault that is?

Teachers, that's who!

If more of these lazy, pension-sucking, tenure-loving, test-hating teachers could just be fired, and more failing schools closed, we could address this poverty issue and - oh, wait, no, that's not actually right.

You see, middle class jobs have disappeared at an alarming rate over the past decade and they aren't coming back.

As Gothamist noted:

New York's reality mirrors what the country is experiencing. Per another report on the meager wage job boom in the Times:

The National Employment Law Project study found that there were about a million fewer jobs in middle-wage industries — including parts of the health care system, loan servicing and real estate — than there were when the recession hit. 

Economists worry that even a stronger recovery might not bring back jobs in traditionally middle-class occupations eroded by mechanization and offshoring. The American work force might become yet more “polarized,” with positions easier to find at the high and low ends than in the middle.

Now you can blame schools and teachers for this mess, as Mayor Bloomberg and so many of the education reformers like to do, but the truth is, the plutocrats running things (including Bloomberg himself) are sucking up more and more of the economy, they're paying less and less in taxes, and even when they engage in so-called "philanthropy" to "help others," it's more often than not a way to a) lower their tax bills and b) make money for other parts of their conglomerates.

That's why Bloomber is worth five times as much now as when he became mayor, it's why Bill Gates has more money than he ever has even as he claims he wants to give most of his fortune away in philanthropy.

It's one big racket, folks, and it's rigged for plutocrats.

You can blame teachers and schools, government workers and pensions or whatever, but the truth is, the economy and government policy are now rigged for the 1% and that ain't changing unless people take to the streets and make it change.