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What do New York City’s rising welfare numbers mean? Some see the 4.4 percent rise in January’s cash-assistance roll over the previous year (a number that itself was was 3.5 percent higher than the year before) as an indicator that Mayor Bill de Blasio is overseeing a return to the days of deep dependency. They’re especially alarmed that it’s happening despite a falling unemployment rate and rising numbers of new jobs in the city.
Others wonder if there is any cause for alarm. After all, the number of people receiving cash assistance is still well below where it was even during the early Bloomberg years. And with the city’s poverty rate still stuck at a relatively high level, and unemployment in three boroughs higher than the state or national average, it could be that de Blasio’s welfare system is just doing a better job responding to need than Mayor Bloomberg’s did.
Watch Gotham Gazette reporter Samar Khurshid and Alex Armlovich, a policy analyst at the Manhattan Institute, discuss these issues in the clip below from Wednesday’s edition of BRIC-TV’s BkLive.
2 Comments
carter
A return to the days of deep dependency????
Why not? Crime is headed back to the 80’s, so yeah why not dependency too?
Like Mayor Koch said, you don’t get what you want, you get what you deserve. NY voted for this douchebag.
native new yorker
IIRC some time after his loss to Dinkins in 1989 Koch said something like ‘New Yorkers are being punished (by the high crime) by voting for Dinkins’. Koch was a character!