Could you imagine telling your kids that you weren’t going to have money for home security, their schoolbooks, or grandma’s meals because you want to support some squatters who invaded your property? This is analogous to what’s now happening in New York City, where left-wing Mayor Eric Adams has announced budget cuts to pay for the “migrant crisis.” This includes slashing Gotham’s police force to 29,000 cops — the lowest level since the mid ’90s. Note here that police morale is already low in the wake of Black Lives Matter-movement-oriented attacks on law enforcement.
In addition, the city has announced that it will close public libraries on weekends and cut almost $550 million from its Education Department. This comes after learning in June that NYC would cut “meals for senior citizens, re-entry programming for Rikers Island prisoners, and free, full-day care for three-year-olds,” as Bloomberg related at the time.
Oh, the Big Apple also plans to remove trash cans from the sidewalks. This, of course, is just what the city needs as it battles a rat crisis.
But, hey, you have to pay for the migrants’ $300-a-night hotel rooms somehow.
The New York Post reported on the police cuts, and some others, last Thursday:
Under City Hall’s newly unveiled updated 2024 financial plan, the next five police academy classes will be axed — essentially decimating an already strained department as roughly 4,500 officers are expected to leave their ranks within the next 18 months.
Firefighters are also in the firing line with FDNY members who are on “long-term light duties” — meaning they’ve been injured on the job or are out sick — being forced into early retirement or fired under the plan.
“The defund the police crowd’s woke dream has come true. We were fed a line of BS that the wave of migrants would be a benefit to the city. Now we are defunding the police to pay for their beds,” Council Republican Minority Leader, Joe Borelli, raged.
Rage (the informed variety) would be the proper reaction, too. After all, in “exchange for hundreds of thousands of migrants from the third world on their streets, commit[t]ing crimes, draining public resources, and demanding more, New Yorkers will have to deal with unpicked up garbage, fewer teachers in schools, no cops on call, and better hope your home doesn’t catch fire,” writes commentator Monica Showalter, adding perspective. “New York’s world-class museums, such as the Met and the Natural History Museum will see cuts, too.”
What’s more, it’s not as if Adams didn’t have other options, Showalter asserts. That is, he’s “doing this in the classic city-government way…: By cutting only the visible services. [sic] such as cops and teachers, he’s avoiding cutting the real fat in government, such as bureaucrats, diversity administrators, arts commissioners, non-essential welfare programs, youth leadership building teams, travel and field trips, DEI administration and other dispensible [sic] agencies,” she states. “He couldn’t cut from that kind of waste? He had to start with the cops and firefighters?”
“New York City is brimming with bureaucratic fat to be cut but it’s pretty suspect that he starts his cuts with the most visible parts of government services, except, of course, tax collectors,” Showalter continues.
Moreover, all this “points to a call for a federal bailout,” Showalter adds — and, right on cue, Adams reportedly urged New Yorkers Friday “to ‘reach out to Washington, D.C.’ and demand more support for the city, which he says is carrying a ‘national crisis,’” relates Fox News. He’s also asking rich New Yorkers (you know, the people left-wingers usually shower with contempt) to voluntarily pony up cash, saying that this is a “moment our philanthropic interests must align with some of the gaps and services that we are seeing today,” Fox also informs.
Unsaid by Adams is that this “national crisis” was authored by himself and countless immigrationist co-ideologists (e.g., Joe Biden) in politics, media, academia, entertainment, and beyond. Even more maddeningly, all these demagogues pretend as if they’ve no idea why this is happening. It’s like an earthquake — an act of God! And now we must all just “come together”; all hands on deck to solve this unfathomable problem visited upon us by the Fates.
But if “New York City can’t handle its influx of illegal immigrants, it should stop inviting them to cross the border illegally by claiming to be a sanctuary,” points out the Washington Examiner. “Adams wants the city to have the moral superiority to lecture ‘intolerant’ Republicans on the issue without having to actually shoulder its share of the crisis.”
But the problem isn’t just the world’s Adamses. In fact, the narrative here has been so successfully shaped by immigrationist pseudo-elites, and the common man so wrongly conditioned, that common sense seems uncommon.
For example, presidential candidate Vivek Ramaswamy promised at a campaign stop Tuesday that if he won the White House, he’d deport all illegal aliens within 12 to 15 months. One can argue about whether he actually would or could, but that’s secondary. The real issue is that enforcing just law — and immigration law qualifies — and securing the border should be a no-brainer. We could say that all the candidates should be making this vow, except that they shouldn’t have to: Deportation of illegals should’ve been the standard all along, in which case we wouldn’t even have the current “crisis.”
In fact, only two questions need be asked here: Is steadfast refusal to secure the border not akin to an act of treason?
And if a government fails in this most basic of functions, should it even exist?
