Looks like NYC is about to get as mayor a confused Keynesian-type central planner.
New York City Public Advocate Bill de Blasio has surged to a 43 percent lead among likely voters in the Democratic primary for mayor, passing the 40 percent cutoff and possibly avoiding a runoff, according to a Quinnipiac University poll released today.
Former City Comptroller and 2009 Democratic nominee William Thompson is at 20 percent, with 18 percent for City Council Speaker Christine Quinn, 7 percent for former U.S. Rep. Anthony Weiner, 4 percent for Comptroller John Liu, 1 percent for former Council member Sal Albanese and 8 percent undecided.
The WSJ reports New York's next mayor faces union showdown ... http://tinyurl.com/keepj6m ... The city's next mayor will face the biggest showdown with labor unions since New York's brush with bankruptcy in the 1970s,
ReplyDeleteDaily KOS posts The Nation article NYC Mayor: Bill de Blasio (D), The only candidate who will end the stop-and-frisk era ... http://tinyurl.com/ms2hoz9 ... In running for mayor, de Blasio has promised to tackle the city’s inequality crisis head-on, harnessing what he has called “the most powerful local government on earth” to bring affordable housing, living-wage jobs, universal pre-kindergarten and genuine opportunity to the city’s millions of forgotten residents. “My job is to help New Yorkers live in New York,” he told New York magazine in a recent interview.
There is a lot to like, from proposals on education and homelessness to public safety—but among the ideas that we found most persuasive is his unusually diverse economic development strategy, which embraces not only job creation but also enhanced labor protections and long-overdue investments in New York’s once-great public universities. De Blasio was a major force behind living-wage and paid-sick-leave legislation—indeed, he fought for much stronger bills than those ultimately passed by the City Council—and his platform contains additional policies to increase wages for the city’s working poor. He is also steadfastly pro-union, which is both a welcome change and a crucial one after twelve years of an administration so hostile to labor that all 152 of the city’s public unions are without contracts. And in an effort to stanch New York’s affordable-housing crisis, he has put forward an ambitious plan to build or preserve nearly 200,000 affordable-housing units over the coming decade, while pledging to remove wasteful tax breaks for real estate developers.
Perhaps most unexpected is the centerpiece of de Blasio’s platform: a city income-tax surcharge on New Yorkers earning over $500,000 a year to provide truly universal, full-day pre-kindergarten to every child in New York City—a game-changing investment in the next generation of New Yorkers. The revenue from this surcharge would also fund after-school academics, athletics and cultural programming for every middle-schooler. It is notable that de Blasio made this tax proposal in the belly of the beast, at a meeting of the city’s corporate leaders.
Finally, de Blasio has been one of the fiercest critics of the NYPD’s stop-and-frisk policy, which has seen hundreds of thousands of young black and Latino men wrongly detained and subjected to searches. And of the candidates, he has been the most vocal and persistent supporter of a bill to prohibit racial profiling and impose greater police oversight. He has also pledged to replace Police Commissioner Ray Kelly, who stubbornly defends stop-and-frisk. - The Nation, 8/8/13