At the stroke of midnight on January 1, 2022, Mayor Bill de Blasio’s term of office will finally end.
Thank goodness for term limits. Eight years of de Blasio’s arrogance and incompetence is more than enough for struggling New Yorkers.
During the past century, the City has had its share of beauts who served as chief executive of the Big Apple.
Mayor James “Beau” Walker (1926-1932) personified the excesses of the Jazz Era. He charmed the citizenry with his wit and style and ran the government from speakeasies and night clubs. Walker resigned in 1932 and fled to Europe before Gov. Franklin Roosevelt removed him from office.
In 1950, Mayor William O’Dwyer (1946-1950), politically wounded by revelations of a police corruption scandal and fearing indictment, convinced President Harry Truman to appoint him Ambassador to Mexico.
And then there was the mayor I believed would hold the title of “Worst Mayor” forever, John Vliet Lindsay (1966-1973).
Lindsay presided over a city that became the welfare and crime capital of America.
Welfare rolls exploded (1966: 556 thousand recipients, 1973: 1.2 million) and by the early 1970s, 30% of the city’s population were on welfare.
Crime soared. The murder rate jumped 137%. Murders skyrocketed from 734 in 1966 to 1,740 in 1973.
Staggering welfare rolls, decaying infrastructure, skyrocketing taxes and spending, rampant crime, graffiti-laden subways, and filthy streets took their toll. Tens of thousands of middle-class folks fled, and the city faced bankruptcy. It took decades to recover from Lindsay’s ineptness.
When Bill de Blasio was sworn in as NYC’s 109th mayor on January 1, 2013, the city was in good shape. The economy was booming, crime was at record lows, real estate values were increasing, and tourism was at record highs.
But de Blasio, like Lindsay, lived in a far-left ideological bubble.
Like Lindsay, de Blasio was beholden to municipal and teacher unions. He approved huge raises and hired tens of thousands of unnecessary bureaucrats.
The budget of the Department of Education, for example, grew from $20 billion in 2014 to $31.6 billion by 2021. The number of bureaucrats working in central administration jumped during the same period from 3,537 to 5,109.
Like Lindsay, de Blasio opened the spigot on welfare assistance. There were approximately 129,000 on welfare in 2013; in 2020 it stood at 334,000 — a 158% increase.
Like Lindsay, de Blasio spent taxpayers’ money like a drunken sailor.
De Blasio’s operating budget grew by leaps and bounds. When he took office, the budget called for $72 billion in spending. By 2020, it hit $100 billion.
Like Lindsay, de Blasio presided over failing public schools. Declining education standards hit minority children the hardest. Last year, only 28% of Blacks and 33% of Hispanics were proficient in math. As for English Language Arts, 35% of Blacks and 35% of Hispanics were proficient.
And like Lindsay, de Blasio treated the city’s criminal element as victims of society.
That guiding philosophy drove de Blasio to terminate proactive policing and Stop and Frisk; to defund the police budget by $1 billion, and to disband the NYPD’s Anti-Crime Unit.
As a result, Newsday reported on Monday that the city “is on track to close 2021 with some of the worst crime statistics seen in years… .” Shootings, murders, robbery, felony assault, rape and grand larceny are hitting levels not seen since the late 1980s.
When Bill de Blasio leaves office on December 31, he will leave a city with projected budget deficits as far as the eye can see, a declining tax base and declining economy, social unrest, filthy and unsafe streets.
It will not be very different from the city Lindsay left behind on December 31, 1974.
However, de Blasio now tops Lindsay as the worst mayor because he learned nothing from the disastrous “Liberal Experiment” of the 1960s and 1970s.
Throughout his tenure, the politically dense de Blasio imposed Lindsay’s fruitless far-left ideological formulas expecting different results. He is the poster boy for the Ground Hog Day effect: For de Blasio, the Lindsay years didn’t happen and he repeated time and again the same awful policy patterns.
Thanks to de Blasio’s insouciant leadership, New York City is back on the treadmill to fiscal, economic and social oblivion.
And that’s why I say, good riddance to the city’s worse mayor ever!
Happy New Year!
George J. Marlin, a former executive director of the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey, is the author of "The American Catholic Voter: Two Hundred Years of Political Impact," and "Christian Persecutions in the Middle East: A 21st Century Tragedy." Read George J. Marlin's Reports — More Here.
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