Thread: NYC to lay off 19,000 workers if Albany cuts aid

NYC may lay off 19,000 workers if state cuts aid

Joan Gralla
NEW YORK
Mon Jan 25, 2010 1:32pm EST

NEW YORK (Reuters) - New York City will have to lay off more than 10,000 public workers, in addition to 8,500 teachers, if the state legislature approves the $1.3 billion of cuts the governor proposed in his deficit-closing budget, Mayor Michael Bloomberg said on Monday.

The mayor, in a speech to the legislature, estimated 3,150 police officers would be cut, reducing the force's "operational strength" to 1985 levels.

About 1,050 firefighters would have to be let go, along with 900 correctional officers, and the city would have to cut its daily inmate population by 1,900, he said. The number of at-risk children that service workers monitor would fall to 2,700 from 9,000, Bloomberg said.

The mayor, an independent, said Governor David Paterson's budget "utterly fails the test of fairness." He told lawmakers: "You can't lose control of the streets in terms of safety or cleanliness. You can't lose control of the streets in terms of an ambulance or a firefighter showing up."

Both the economies of New York City and the state depend on Wall Street for much of their tax revenues, and big banks' brush with near-death last year has severely dented public budgets.

Bloomberg is scheduled on Thursday to unveil his own budget plan aimed at closing a municipal deficit of at least a $3 billion. He declined to say how much he would raise revenue estimates for a number of banks and brokerages that have swiftly resumed earning handsome profits.

"It is substantial, but I think here in Albany you have to be careful and not think that you will get the benefit of that," Bloomberg told legislators, noting that the city and state have different tax regimes.

"There's not an expectation that the city's tax revenues will get back to where they were, say, in 2007, very quickly," Bloomberg said. However, he noted that positive economic signs include a rise in tourism-related employment to a record.

Bloomberg, a former Wall Street trader whose news and data company made him a billionaire, said the federal and state governments should avoid tax hikes and financial regulations that could drive banks and brokers overseas.

"We cannot raise taxes anymore; at this point raising income or property taxes will drive more people out of the state than the revenue they bring in," he said. (Reporting by Joan Gralla; Editing by Chizu Nomiyama and Dan Grebler)

http://www.reuters.com/article/idUSTRE6 ... 22&sp=true

Bloomberg is a deceiver. The economy is not in recovery. The reason tourism increases during any recession or depression is because foreign tourists have more money to spend when our dollar isn't worth anything. Tourism = More jobs cleaning hotels and changing beds. Who gets those jobs? That's right. Illegal aliens and H2B Visa Workers who can't support themselves and sign up for welfare assistance to live in the US. They bring their kids too and enroll them in our schools. How does that help the US? It doesn't.

"We cannot raise taxes anymore; at this point raising income or property taxes will drive more people out of the state than the revenue they bring in," he said.

You're darn right you can't.

So Bloomie, when are you gonna stop giving out freebies to illegal aliens?

Some Bloomingidiot comments about IAs.

Bloomberg: New York City Will Collapse Without Illegal Immigrants

Wednesday, July 05, 2006

PHILADELPHIA — The economy of the country's largest city and the entire nation would collapse if illegal immigrants were deported en masse, New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg told a Senate committee hearing Wednesday.

New York City is home to more than 3 million immigrants, and a half-million of them came to this country illegally, Bloomberg testified.

"Although they broke the law by illegally crossing our borders ... our city's economy would be a shell of itself had they not, and it would collapse if they were deported," he said. "The same holds true for the nation."

http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,202132,00.html

NEW YORK (Reuters) - New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg pledged on Friday to promote a more open U.S. immigration policy during his third term, much as he made a campaign against illegal guns a hallmark of his second term.

U.S.

"With leaders from across the country, we will assemble a bipartisan coalition to support President Obama's call for comprehensive immigration reform that honors our history, upholds our values, and promotes our economy," Bloomberg said upon being sworn in for his third term as mayor.

The White House has said it will aim for immigration reform in 2010, possibly including a path to citizenship for the 12 million immigrants who live in the country illegally.

Bloomberg, who considered running for president in 2008 as a political independent, raised his national profile by assembling a coalition of 500 U.S. mayors who banded together in a campaign against illegal guns.

On the hot-button issue of immigration, he favors more liberal laws on allowing immigrants into the country and legalizing those who lack documentation. That will draw opposition from advocates of tightening the border and deportation of illegal aliens.

"We're committing what I call national suicide," Bloomberg said on the NBC's "Meet the Press" last Sunday. "Somehow or other, after 9/11 we went from reaching out and trying to get the best and the brightest to come here, to trying to keep them out.

"In fact, we do the stupidest thing, we give them educations and then don't give them green cards."

Bloomberg, a longtime Democrat, switched to the Republican Party before his first mayoral campaign in 2001 and was re-elected as a Republican in 2005. He dropped party affiliation for his third campaign.

The mayor was able to run for a third term after engineering changes in election law to extend term limits from two terms to three. He has vowed not to seek a fourth term.

(Editing by Doina Chiacu)

http://www.reuters.com/article/idUSTRE6000ZJ20100101

This one is from 2003, archived on Vdare, written by Michele Malkin:

Michelle Malkin Archive
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September 22, 2003
Bloomberg To Illegals: Make Yourselves At Home

By Michelle Malkin

AND this week's award for craven enemy of homeland defense goes to…New York’s Mayor Michael Bloomberg.

Wednesday, Bloomberg revived the city's sanctuary policy for illegal aliens—less than a week after commemorating the mass murder of the 9/11 terrorist attack victims.

Bloomberg's cowardly capitulation is no surprise. Barely two months after 9/11, he broadcast his commitment to preserve the Big Apple as a formal safe haven for illegal aliens. "People who are undocumented do not have to worry about city government going to the federal government," Bloomberg vowed.

Now, under the freshly-signed Executive Order 41, a person's immigration status is "confidential information" that "no city officer or employee shall disclose unless [the suspect is] engaging in illegal activity or is involved in potential terrorist activity."

The amended policy adds this "don't tell" provision to the original "don't ask" directive first enacted by Mayor Ed Koch in 1989.

Visa overstayers, illegal border crossers, illegal ship-jumpers and other immigration-law-breakers have nothing to fear when they show up to collect city welfare benefits, obtain marriage licenses, get medical treatment or pay parking tickets. These outlaws are not, by Bloomberg's definition, "engaging in illegal activity"—so alert clerks, suspicious administrators and savvy street cops will just have to shut their traps when they suspect they are dealing with illegal aliens.

The New York Times hailed Bloomberg's move as widening "privacy rights for immigrants." It is, in truth, a Terrorist and Criminal Illegal Alien Safe Haven Act.

Remember: More than half of the 48 Islamic radicals convicted or tied to recent terrorist plots in the United States over the past decade either were themselves illegal aliens or relied on illegals to get fake IDs. Illegals participated in the first attack on the World Trade Center, the Los Angeles Millennium bombing plot and the New York subway bombing conspiracy. Three of the 9/11 hijackers were here illegally; two had previous immigration violations.

Many of these operatives who were here in violation of our immigration laws were not under investigation for terrorism at the time they hatched and carried out their plots. Several, such as visa violators Mohamed Atta and Hani Hanjour, had been pulled over by police for speeding and set free.

If an NYPD cop were to stop the next Atta or Hanjour on the street today, he would be prohibited from asking about their immigration status—and prevented from turning them over to the feds for detention and deportation.

Attorney General John Ashcroft has stressed the need to use every available tool to combat foreign terrorists on U.S. soil. He has likened his strategy to the one Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy used to bust organized crime: arresting terrorist suspects if they so much as spit on the sidewalk.

Identifying, detaining, questioning, and deporting illegal aliens from terror-sponsoring and terror-friendly nations is critical to an effective homeland defense. But vigorous interior enforcement of immigration laws is impossible if city officials in major terrorist targets—read: New York City—refuse to cooperate.

The dangerous public-safety impact of Bloomberg's new order reaches beyond terrorism. Illegals, some with long criminal records, were the alleged perps in the savage gang-rape of a Queens mother in Flushing Meadows-Corona Park last December. But for the city's sanctuary policy, some of the accused might have been turned over to federal immigration authorities for deportation before the rape occurred.

Bloomberg's message to the rape victim and the 9/11 victims: Ptooey. His politically-correct preferences are more important than upholding the law or stopping terrorism.

COPYRIGHT CREATORS SYNDICATE, INC.

Michelle Malkin [email her] is author of Invasion: How America Still Welcomes Terrorists, Criminals, and Other Foreign Menaces to Our Shores. Click here for Peter Brimelow’s review. Click here for Michelle Malkin's website.

http://vdare.com/malkin/bloomberg.htm