Mayor de Blasio gave his sixth State of the City address Thursday, and he conjured an image of a revolutionary leader prying money from terrified billionaires.
That’s because, in a Democratic primary with candidates tracking increasingly leftward, he stands out for the wrong reason: When it comes to governing, de Blasio is more old-school, big-city Democratic pragmatist than new-school, Democratic Socialist. He fears his left flank.
De Blasio used to talk about New York as a tale of two cities. Now, he is trying to write a tale for two audiences. After more than a half-decade of scrutiny, de Blasio grasps that the City Hall press corps — with its nonpartisan stories of his various failures — won’t pave his way to the White House.
So as he starts his sixth year in office, he is looking for new fans. On MSNBC’s Morning Joe recently, he previewed his new “universal” health-care plan. The program isn’t really universal — it’s just a tweak to New York’s $8 billion public-health system to direct the uninsured to clinics rather than to emergency rooms, plus some new initiatives to sign people up for health plans. But de Blasio bet — correctly — that MSNBC hosts wouldn’t show skepticism, as the local press has.
De Blasio used the Washington Post to unveil another major initiative: He wants the City Council to force private employers to offer all full-time workers two weeks’ paid time off. In his remarks on Thursday, de Blasio characterized the proposal as a blow against corporate “exploitation.”
Vacation, however, is hardly an unheard-of perk for New York’s workers, no matter their income. Nearly nine of 10 in the workforce already receive this benefit, per city statistics, and it isn’t large corporations that stint on vacation.
The 11 percent of employees targeted by the mandate work for struggling smaller retailers and restaurants with low profit margins and high turnover. To the extent that it will drive some such marginal companies out of business and their workers out of jobs, yet another mandate is unwise.
But de Blasio has never cared much about small industries: See his relentless attacks on horse-carriage drivers. His vacation program isn’t geared toward truly exploited workers. Rather, the p.r. push is geared toward the middle-class and affluent people who already get vacation but think that it would be great if we were more like Sweden.
What about taxes? For five years, de Blasio has persistently threatened a “millionaire’s tax.” He has talked about it so much that the national media imagine he has already done it.
The mayor is likely happy to let national progressive voters think that he has already raised taxes, though he hasn’t. With the Democrats having taken over the state Senate, 2019 is the first year that he will have a credible chance to do so, though he has become rather tepid on the idea.
Late in his speech, he said half-heartedly: “I continue to believe a millionaire’s tax is the fairest, most progressive way,” but “other people have floated other ideas.” Now that the mayor has a realistic chance to make good on one of his 2013 campaign promises, he doesn’t seem so interested in pursuing it.
Early in his remarks, the mayor crowed: “New York City is now one of the world’s premier tech hubs … The major new announcements from Amazon and Google show that the world’s most innovative companies want to be here … Now we have over 4.5 million jobs in this city, for the first time in history: 4.5 million jobs.”
The mayor has reason to be proud: Amazon is coming in part because he has cut crime to historically low levels. But he didn’t mention the $1.3 billion in tax breaks that the city is handing to Amazon to cement the deal. De Blasio may warn that the city’s money is in the “wrong hands,” as he did Thursday, but he had no compunction about giving a special tax deal to one of the world’s wealthiest companies.
As de Blasio explores the rest of the country, prospective voters should know about his failures. Amid the biggest economic boom the city has ever seen, the mayor still hasn’t come to grips with New York’s trio of scourges: crumbling public housing, chronic homelessness and severe mental illness.
Just as important, he remains uninterested in the decaying mass transit system, the city’s biggest existential threat. All the mayor said about the subways on Thursday was that “we will get Albany to fix” them. In day-to-day governance, de Blasio’s sins are of those of omission, not commission — and they are practical failures, not ideological ones.
This piece originally appeared at the New York Post
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Nicole Gelinas is a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute and contributing editor at City Journal. Follow her on Twitter here. This piece originally appeared at City Journal.
This piece originally appeared in New York Post