New York wouldn’t be New York if the new logo for the campaign to boost the city didn’t raise hackles.
The naysayers were quick to argue there’s nothing wrong with Milton Glaser’s iconic “I ♥ NY” poster from the ’70s and they are right — up to a point.
The point being that the new logo, “We ♥ NYC,” offers a snappy reminder that this is a new time, a new crisis and a new call to action.
Besides, because this is an emergency, there’s no time to waste in arguing over aesthetics.
The new effort to juice New York’s image and economy has a $20 million bankroll from big employers including Amazon, Google, Macy’s, Madison Square Garden and major real estate firms. Monday’s Times Square kickoff gave Mayor Eric Adams and Gov. Kathy Hochul a chance to put a positive spin on the push to woo visitors and lift spirits by celebrating community volunteers and local businesses.
Adams claimed there are “only two types of people on the globe: those who live in New York and those who wish they could.”
For accuracy’s sake, he should have included a third type: those who lived here and bolted because of the decline gripping the city and state.
The boosterism is all well and good, except the heart of the problem is not with ordinary New Yorkers or the private sector.
Nor is it one of poor public relations.
The problem is the government. It’s terrible and getting worse.
From City Hall to Albany, elected officials seem to have sworn an oath to make New York unlivable. The litany of their dirty deeds is too well known and causing too much ruin to be airbrushed out of the picture.
Center could not hold
The political class has imposed a regime of high crime, high taxes, failing schools, public disorder and a sclerotic bureaucracy that is responsive only to the highest bidder and the most radical ideas.
The sensible center no longer has a prayer.
For their part, Adams and Hochul since their early days in office have pledged to work together to fix what’s broken, but each has taken turns sabotaging the goal.
Adams took aim at the crime problem, but Hochul wasn’t much help and showed little willingness to use her power to fight fellow Dems in the Legislature.
Now it’s Adams who is sabotaging a comeback with his open-ended invitation to the illegal immigrants who claim asylum.
Upwards of 50,000 have accepted the invitation and the strain on city services — and taxpayers — threatens to become an unsustainable burden.
Projected costs started in the millions, then billions and most recently, more than $10 billion. The sky is no limit to the price tag of sanctuary madness.
The result is that the Adams-Hochul partnership, while preferable to that of their feuding predecessors, hasn’t yielded anywhere near the significant changes needed to save the city and state.
With each passing day, the climb gets harder and the options fewer.
One thing for certain is that nothing they have done will stanch the stampede for the exits.
Having just spent a few days in Florida with former New Yorkers and others who are thinking of changing their residency, I returned with even less confidence in the city’s future.
One thing the governor and mayor haven’t done, and should, is take their combined firepower on the road and get voters across the state riled up about how the Legislature and bleeding-heart prosecutors are creating the crime climate.
Bloomberg bucks
The time is especially right for that extra effort because Hochul is also getting the benefit of another big bankroll. Michael Bloomberg, the multibillionaire former mayor, is reportedly the lead funder behind a $5 million ad campaign promoting some of her budget proposals.
Most prominent among them is a fix for the notorious bail law that would give judges more discretion and a pledge not to hike income taxes.
The ads are digital, on television and in the mail, and are paid for by a 501(c)(4) called American Opportunity.
Yet Hochul hasn’t exactly helped her cause with a budget proposal increasing spending by $5 billion, to an astonishing $227 billion.
The one-house bills the Senate and Assembly offered would double that spending increase, to $10 billion.
As for taxes, the Citizens Budget Commission says the lawmakers’ proposals both add “$2 billion in additional annual taxes” and come “on top of the roughly $1 billion business tax surcharge extension proposed by the governor.”
And so it goes under one-party rule.
There’s not a meaningful Republican anywhere in sight, so the only hope is that relative moderates — emphasis on relative — unite to limit the damage.
They’d better act fast.
The budget is due before the new fiscal year begins April 1, leaving little more than a week to save New York from even further ruin.
Times takes two tacks on Dems, GO
Two stories, one agenda.
Tuesday’s New York Times profiled Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg, a Democrat poised to indict Donald Trump, and James Comer, the Republican leading the House investigation of the Biden family’s influence-peddling schemes.
The contrast offers a lesson in partisan advocacy masking as journalism.
“Alvin L. Bragg, the Manhattan district attorney, has insisted that he does not pay attention to politics when deciding whether to charge someone with a crime.
“But Mr. Bragg’s stated reluctance to consider the political ramifications of his office’s decisions has not quelled the storm brewing around him: He now appears poised to become the first prosecutor to indict a former president.”
As for Comer, “In his new role leading the Republican Party’s chief investigative committee in the House, Comer, 50, has himself become a promoter of sinister-sounding allegations against [President] Biden and his family. This pursuit has propelled him to stardom in a party whose best customers — vengeful, hard-right voters — are bent on bringing down the Democratic president.”
Back to Bragg: “Still, as a candidate, Mr. Bragg was mostly focused elsewhere. His fundamental campaign promise was to balance public safety and fairness, following in the footsteps of a wave of recently elected prosecutors who pledged a new approach to crime. They argued that cracking down on minor infractions only led to recidivism, and that taking a more merciful approach to defendants made cities safer.”
Back to Comer, who “has transformed himself to command the Republican war machine in Congress — becoming a high-profile example of what it takes to rise and thrive in the Fox News-fed MAGA universe.”
And this: “It also underscores the cutthroat instincts of Mr. Comer, who presents himself as an affable country boy of limited abilities, but who has proved to be a methodical and transactional political operator, willing to go to great lengths to crush his adversaries.”
There you have it — All the News That’s Fit to Twist!
