Private Club Member Eric Adams Really Sorry Those Migrants Made Him Slash Budget For Libraries, Schools, Rat Control
I might have to move back to NYC just to vote against this clown.
New York City public libraries, a priceless resource, are closing their doors on Sundays after devastating budget cuts that are expected to impact their ability to purchase new materials, organize new programming, and even maintain and repair the very buildings themselves.
“Brooklyn Public Library, Queens Public Library, and The New York Public Library regret to announce that as a result of mid-year budget cuts, we must eliminate seven-day service across the city, including ending Sunday service at the vast majority of branches that currently offer it,” library leaders told local media.
This is terrible, but it’s not Joe Biden’s fault, as performer Cardi B. suggested. Biden’s president of the entire United States, and while that includes New York City, it’s Mayor Eric Adams who slashed the budget and closed libraries. Eric Adams sucks, which I’ve reported at length.
Cardi B., perhaps forgivably, did not read my article from earlier this year that detailed the mayor’s attack against literary and overall public good. However, she might’ve noticed when Adams personally announced the steep cuts last Thursday.
From The New York Times:
The budget cuts would bring the number of Police Department officers below 30,000 for the first time since the 1980s, slash the Education Department budget by $1 billion over two years and delay the rollout of composting in the Bronx and Staten Island — one of the mayor’s signature initiatives to address rats and climate change. The cuts would also weaken two popular programs: summer school and universal prekindergarten.
But wait, I thought it was a great time to be rich in New York, so why is the city acting so broke ass? Well, Adams blames those damn migrants.
“No city should be left to handle a national humanitarian crisis largely on its own, and without the significant and timely support we need from Washington, D.C., today’s budget will be only the beginning,” he said.
Yet another centrist Democrat putting the hammer to Joe Biden, but I thought they were the “adults in the room”?
New York City added a half million foreign migrants to its population between 2010 and 2019. The city was averaging tens of thousands of new migrants each year until 2022. Since then, the numbers have surged to more than 118,000 migrants and asylum seekers.
Will Freeman at the Council of Foreign Relations writes:
As of September, nearly sixty thousand newly arrived migrants were living in the city’s shelters; about two-thirds of them families with children. Their sheer numbers have placed enormous fiscal pressure on New York City, costing it over $1 billion so far, and prompted officials to declare a state of emergency. Some estimates say the cost of housing could surpass $4.3 billion by July 2024 …
But New York City’s entire budget is just $4.4 billion! No, wait, I didn’t add a decimal point. The city’s fiscal budget for 2024 is a $107 billion, so the migrant issue accounts for just four percent of the 2024 budget. Guess Adams has no choice but to torch the libraries.
Adams warned New Yorkers about “extremely painful” budget cuts, but it can’t help feeling as if he’s setting up migrants as convenient scapegoats for that pain. Cutting the police budget will also inevitably create a link between any perceived rise in crime and the arrival of migrants from the southern border, which he’s already claimed could “destroy” the city.
While he’s pleading poverty, Adams is also a member at the exclusive club Zero Bond in Noho. It’s open to anyone with the right “character” who can spare $3,850 a year and pony up the $1,000 initiation fee. Maybe the next time he’s chilling at the club, this true mayor of the people can ask one of his rich buddies for some spare change to keep the libraries open.
Or he can just keep blaming desperate people from another country.
PREVIOUSLY:
Follow Stephen Robinson on Bluesky and Threads.
Subscribe to his YouTube channel for more fun content.
Catch SER on his podcast, The Play Typer Guy.
I am totally going to skip the comments on this because I am a NY Democrat and I don't feel like being shit on. Because I know how this is going to go. Obviously all of us voted for Adams in the primary(not me) and really wants this to crap be happening,(not me), but have at it you guys.
Migrants are only a burden when they first arrive. After a few months, they work and contribute to the economy where the economy needs it the most.
Immigration is supposed to be the responsibility of the federal government. As a nation, we are stuck in the year 1996, which is the last year when the US Congress revised immigration law. In that year, our federal legislators decided that the thing we needed to do was to criminalize immigrants for mundane, victimless crimes like "overstaying one's visa." They did it to distract from their own stupidity in passing trade agreements like NAFTA that created new rights for multinational investors but none for multinational workers.
So here we are, almost 30 years later, and we still have no national plan for dealing with the challenge of human migration except to place blame on the migrants themselves. So where do they go? They go to where other migrants have gone before, including family members. They go to where they are treated with a little more fairness and a little less bigotry. They go to places like New York City.
But even New York City can experience too much influx too fast. The task of helping migrants to get their economic footing should be spread more fairly across America. If we did this, as a nation, there would be no more local crises caused by overcrowding.
So in conclusion, Cardi B. might have a point -- if she is willing to propose that migration is not New York City's specific responsibility, but a national challenge that needs a national plan that treats migrants as human beings and not as a problem.
Mayor Eric Adams doesn't have any point at all. He is bad across the board. My condolences to all New Yorkers who have to suffer this man's mean-spirited bigotry. He betrays everything that his great city is supposed to stand for. I hope the Statue of Liberty clobbers him with her torch.