Bill de Blasio’s mayoralty will be primarily judged on whether he sustains New York’s record-breaking crime drop. But keep your eye on another number, too: 348,000, the tally of New Yorkers now receiving cash welfare.
Sixty-nine percent fewer residents are on cash benefits today than when Rudy Giuliani took office in 1994, and 24 percent fewer than when Mike Bloomberg took over in 2002, thanks to a deliberate attack on New York’s post-1960s dependency culture. As a result, more New Yorkers are employed today than at any time in the city’s history.
Mayor-elect de Blasio, however, has opposed virtually every key element of welfare reform:
Work first: The central idea of welfare reform was that recipients should work or look for work in exchange for their benefits. This principle exploded traditional welfare ideology, which held that it was demeaning to require work, especially in government-created workfare jobs. At most, recipients should be gently nudged toward optional education and training, which would allegedly allow them to leapfrog over “bad” low-wage jobs and into “good” higher-wage jobs.
In fact, few pieces of social science research are more repeatedly corroborated than the uselessness of “education and training” for getting off the dole and into the workforce. The best way to get a job, it turns out, is to get a job — any job. All jobs confer dignity, and working full-time and persistently in one is the surest way to escape poverty (short of marrying the father of your children, but that’s another controversy).
Yet de Blasio has called Mayor Bloomberg’s belief that everyone should work for a living an “ideological hang-up.” He fought Bloomberg’s efforts to preserve the city’s requirement that able-bodied, childless adults at least look for work in exchange for food stamps. That requirement blocks a “path out of poverty,” he said in 2009 — in other words, working or looking for work keeps one in poverty, per de Blasio, while collecting benefits without working is a “path out of poverty.” He has promised to restore “education and training” as a core activity of welfare recipients and will ask the state to again allow four-year college students to collect welfare without any reciprocal obligations.
Diversion: The surest way to escape welfare is never to get on it in the first place. City case workers try to help welfare applicants without signing them up for the dole, whether through a one-time rental-assistance payment, or (ideally) through a job. Welfare rolls dropped 650,000 on Giuliani’s watch thanks to diversion.
Yet de Blasio has vowed to “stop efforts to divert individuals from accessing cash assistance.” He wants to use ObamaCare outreach workers to put more New Yorkers on all government welfare programs and thinks that the city’s already high number of food-stamp recipients — nearly 1.9 million or 21 percent of the population — is at least a quarter-million too low.
Eligibility verification: Giuliani instituted finger-imaging and in-person interviews for welfare applicants. Yet the battle against welfare cheating is a never-ending imperative. In 2000 alone, the city’s welfare administration uncovered 40,000 cases of fraud and ineligibility.
De Blasio appears to believe that welfare applicants would never dream of ripping off taxpayers. He grandstanded against Bloomberg’s insistence that food-stamp applicants be finger-imaged, claiming it was “stigmatizing.” Somehow an identical finger-imaging requirement hasn’t stopped hundreds of thousands of New Yorkers from working for the city.
Responsibility rhetoric: As important as any policy change was welfare reform’s public philosophy of personal responsibility and self-sufficiency. De Blasio, by contrast, holds forth on government’s alleged power to provide for its citizens: “Providing basic income and food security to all New Yorkers [is] a key responsibility of government,” he announces in his mayoral blueprint.
New York has been down this path before. In 1960, 328,000 New Yorkers were on cash assistance. By 1972, after two terms of Mayor John Lindsay, the rolls had swelled to nearly 1.25 million, or 16 percent of the city’s population. One in every 10 US welfare recipients lived in New York City, reports Vincent Cannato in “The Ungovernable City.”
As de Blasio promises to do, Lindsay dismantled the city’s processes for detecting welfare fraud and streamlined the welfare-application process. By 1972, welfare fraud was costing the city $100 million a year. Lindsay said that asking welfare recipients to work would return us “to the dark ages.”
Not coincidentally, crime also exploded on Lindsay’s watch. Like de Blasio, he believed in government’s power to uplift individuals — except where that power really existed and mattered: in the provision of public order.
The welfare and crime triumphs of the last two decades went hand in hand: The city asked more of would-be government dependents while making sure that individuals and entrepreneurs could better themselves free from the fear of crime. Watch the intertwined fates of welfare reform and crime suppression to see how New York will weather the de Blasio years.
Heather Mac Donald is a contributing editor at the Manhattan Institute’s City Journal.
Bill de Blasio
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
| Bill de Blasio | |
|---|---|
 | |
| 109th Mayor of New York City Elect | |
| Taking office January 1, 2014 | |
| Succeeding | Michael Bloomberg |
| 3rd New York City Public Advocate | |
| Incumbent | |
| Assumed office January 1, 2010 | |
| Preceded by | Betsy Gotbaum |
| Succeeded by | Letitia James (Elect) |
| Member of the New York City Council from the 39th district | |
| In office January 1, 2002 – December 31, 2009 | |
| Preceded by | Stephen DiBrienza |
| Succeeded by | Brad Lander |
| Personal details | |
| Born | Warren Wilhelm, Jr. May 8, 1961 New York City, New York, U.S. |
| Political party | Democratic |
| Spouse(s) | Chirlane McCray (1994–present) |
| Children | Dante Chiara |
| Alma mater | New York University (BA) Columbia University (MIA) |
| Religion | Unaffiliated[1] |
| Signature |  |
| Website | Government website Transition website |
Bill de Blasio (born Warren Wilhelm, Jr.;[2] May 8, 1961) is the Mayor-elect of New York City. Since 2010, he has held the citywide office of New York City Public Advocate, which serves as an ombudsman between the electorate and the city government and is first in line to succeed the mayor. He formerly served as a New York City Council member representing the 39th District in Brooklyn(Borough Park, Carroll Gardens, Cobble Hill, Gowanus, Kensington, Park Slope, and Windsor Terrace). He was the Democratic Partynominee in the 2013 election to become Mayor of New York City. On November 5, 2013, De Blasio won the mayoral election by a landslide, receiving over 73% of the vote and will become the first Democratic mayor of the city in nearly 20 years.[3]
Early life and education[edit]
De Blasio was born Warren Wilhelm, Jr. in Manhattan, New York, the son of Maria (née De Blasio) and Warren Wilhelm.[2] His father had German ancestry, and his maternal grandparents, Giovanni and Anna, were Italian immigrants[4][5] from the city of Sant'Agata de' Goti in the province of Benevento (where his mother's surname is spelled with a capital "D" — De Blasio).[6] He was raised inCambridge, Massachusetts.[7] De Blasio has stated that he was 7 years old when his father first left home and 8 years old when his parents divorced.[8] In an April 2012 interview, de Blasio described his upbringing: "[My dad] was an officer in the Pacific in the army, [and] in an extraordinary number of very, very difficult, horrible battles, including Okinawa…And I think honestly, as we now know about veterans who return, [he] was going through physically and mentally a lot… He was an alcoholic, and my mother and father broke up very early on in the time I came along, and I was brought up by my mother’s family — that’s the bottom line — the de Blasio family.[9]" In September 2013, de Blasio revealed that his father committed suicide in 1979 while suffering from incurable lung cancer.[10]
In 1983 he legally changed his name to Warren de Blasio-Wilhelm, which he described in April 2012: "I started by putting the name into my diploma, and then I hyphenated it legally when I finished NYU, and then, more and more, I realized that was the right identity." By the time he appeared on the public stage in 1990, he was using the name Bill de Blasio as he explained he had been called "Bill" or "Billy" in his personal life.[9] He did not legally change over to this new name until 2002, when the discrepancy was noted during an election.[11]
De Blasio received a B.A. from New York University majoring in metropolitan studies, a program in urban studies with courses such as Politics of Minority Groups and The Working Class Experience, and a Master of International Affairs from Columbia University's School of International and Public Affairs.[12] He is a 1981 Harry S. Truman Scholar.[13]
Early career[edit]
De Blasio's first job was part of the Urban Fellows Program for the New York City Department of Juvenile Justice in 1984.[14][15] In 1987, shortly after completing graduate school at Columbia University, de Blasio was hired to work as a political organizer by theQuixote Center in Maryland. In 1988 de Blasio traveled with the Quixote Center to Nicaragua for 10 days to help distribute food and medicine during the Nicaraguan Revolution. De Blasio was an ardent supporter of the ruling Sandinista government, which was at that time opposed by the Reagan administration.[15]
After returning from Nicaragua, de Blasio moved to New York City where he worked for a nonprofit organization focused on improving health care in Central America.[15] De Blasio continued to support the Sandinistas in his spare time, joining a group called the Nicaragua Solidarity Network of Greater New York, which held meetings and fundraisers for the Sandinista political party.[15] De Blasio's introduction to City politics came during David Dinkins' 1989 mayoral campaign, for which he was a volunteer coordinator.[16] Following the campaign, de Blasio served as an aide in City Hall.[17]
In 1997, he was appointed to serve as the Regional Director for the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) for New York and New Jersey under the administration of President Bill Clinton. As the tri-state region’s highest-ranking HUD official, de Blasio led a small executive staff and took part in outreach to residents of substandard housing.[18][19] In 1999, he was elected a member of Community School Board 15.[20] He was tapped to serve as campaign manager for Hillary Rodham Clinton's successful United States Senate bid in 2000.[20]
New York City Council (2001–2009)[edit]
Elections[edit]
In 2001, de Blasio decided to run for the New York City Council's 39th district, which includes the Brooklyn neighborhoods of Borough Park, Carroll Gardens, Cobble Hill, Gowanus,Kensington, Park Slope, and Windsor Terrace. He won the crowded primary election with 32% of the vote.[21] In the general election, he defeated Republican Robert A. Bell by 71%–17%.[22] In 2003, he won re-election to a second term with 72% of the vote.[23] In 2005, he won re-election to a third term with 83% of the vote.[24]
Tenure[edit]
On the City Council, de Blasio passed legislation to prevent landlord discrimination against tenants who hold federal housing subsidy vouchers, and helped pass the HIV/AIDS Housing Services law, improving housing services for low income New Yorkers living with HIV/AIDS.[25][26] As head of the City Council’s General Welfare Committee, de Blasio helped pass the Gender-Based Discrimination Protection law to protect transgender New Yorkers, and passed the Domestic Partnership Recognition Law to ensure that same sex couples in a legal partnership could enjoy the same legal benefits as heterosexual couples in New York City.[27] During his tenure, the General Welfare Committee also passed the Benefits Translation for Immigrants Law, which helped non-English speakers access free language assistance services when accessing government programs.[28]
New York now has its own Community Organizer in chief. Never held a real job.
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