50,000 homeless in New York City. 21,000 children. The lasting legacy of Bloomberg and Giuliani–an extraordinary waste.
Overall, the homeless shelter system has grown 61% during Mr. Bloomberg’s three terms, raising questions about whether the city’s remarkable turnaround in the past two decades has benefited the poorest New Yorkers.
The Mayor tries to blame everyone other than his own sycophants and extraordinary ego, perhaps where it lies.
Yes it’s a good thing. Yes it’s a chance to lock in the gains on healthcare reform, perhaps a chance to move past some of the ridiculousness of tax policy. But three distinct caveats:
Could you pass a 10th grade math exam? The Washington Post interviews a school board member from Florida who positively bombed a test called the FCAT which is required for graduation. While in general it’s undeniable that the US educational system is flailing around on the assumption that standardized tests are somehow going to make kids smart, there also is a funny undertone that there are two classes of students–those who need to be good at math and reading and those who only need to be “good enough.”.
Trying to implement immigration reform from the bottom up is strikingly ineffective. Federal policy forced farmers to make additional efforts to advertise jobs and raised minimum wages with little effect on the numbers of non-immigrant labor willing to do the work. The US is a nation of immigrants and needs immigration to grow–no matter how much some people want to deny it..
Growth industry? Private prisons…
Great article today from Nina Bernstein on detention centers for immigrants and privatized facilities that enrich multinational corporate interests, but don’t actually save the taxpayers any money as well as being fraught with abuse and mismanagement..
Jobs would be good. Stimulus would be good. However, doing it earlier, when he had a Democratic majority in Congress would have been better..
In the aftermath of the near collapse of the world economy, it seems unlikely that the Republicans are so disconnected from reality that they are going to play chicken with the debt ceiling. Tim Geithner has laid out the clear and stark consequences in a letter to Republican Senators. Think it’ll work?
There’s so little thoughtful discussion of immigration that reading Jose Antonio Vargas’s account of almost twenty years of hiding in plain sight in the Times is a bit shocking. Immigrants are a source of extraordinary dynamism and growth for a country and on simple, cynical, economic terms, the US and Europe need immigration fairly urgently. Vargas vividly illustrates the undercurrent of anxiety he felt for years and years even while he made lemons into lemonade (and won a Pulitzer)..
So much has gone wrong in Afghanistan for so long that the WikiLeaks documents on the current war are exhausting and infuriating. But this is us doing this, so the more that we know the better.