Tuesday, March 18, 2014

BUT YOU TOLD ME NEW YORK WAS PARADISE UNTIL DE BLASIO RUINED IT

I meant to make note of this, from yesterday's New York Daily News:
It's a quiet crisis. In a city of plenty, a staggering number of people are struggling to feed themselves and their families.

Nearly one in five New Yorkers, 1.4 million people, now rely on a patchwork network of 1,000 food pantries and soup kitchens across the city to eat.

That represents an increase of 200,000 people in five years -- straining the charities that are trying to help....

The hunger crisis erupted when the Great Recession set in.

The number of city residents receiving aid under the federal Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, commonly known as food stamps, soared from 1.3 million in 2008 to 1.8 million today....
So this has been a crisis for five years, and yet when Bill de Blasio won the mayor's race by talking about New York as "two cities," one for the haves and one for the have-nots, we were told (sometimes in the Daily News) that he was inappropriately fomenting class warfare. As Mike Bloomberg left office, we were told that he'd done a magnificent job; we were told he'd presided over "the city's renaissance," and all good people were terrified that de Blasio, the class-obsessed resentnik, was going to ruin everything Bloomberg had accomplished. Incessantly contrasting the fates of the rich and the poor in New York -- why was it necessary for de Blasio to do that?
The mix of clients was typical of those battling hunger, advocates say.

"Contrary to popular belief, the homeless are the smallest population we serve. The No. 1 group is women over the age of 50 -- it's Grandma who has to go to the soup kitchen to eat," said Purvis.

Veterans, children and working families aren't far behind.
I guess the renaissance missed them.

5 comments:

Victor said...

Of course Bill de Blasio is responsible!

Just like Clinton was for 9/11, and Obama was for the Great Recession.

Victor said...

Hey, Steve,
Where are the links?

Steve M. said...

Is there a problem? They're working for me.

Victor said...

They're back now.

Jules said...

Bloomberg allowed smug people to smugly assure themselves that they'd done all they could to help the right kinds of deserving poor people.

As a side note, it is starting to seriously chap my ass that women of an age the writer deems old are referred to as Grandma.