One would think a proposed shopping mall offering over 1200 full-time jobs plus another 1000 construction jobs in an area with a 13.4% unemployment rate (welcome to the Bronx, baby!) would be welcomed with open arms, with politicians falling over themselves to help out and take credit for the revival of a horrific neighborhood.
But we are talking about liberals here. So expect none of the rules of sanity to apply. The project was killed while politicians crowed about their part in slaughtering the project.
How did the Democrats (with some help from the unions) help keep the residents of the Bronx enslaved by poverty? With selfishness, stupidity, and adherence to unworkable liberal ideology:
Don't tell the City Council and their union puppet-masters that a job is the best social program. They prefer welfare, thank you very much.
That's the only conclusion to be drawn from the job-killing decision by the council to reject a development plan for a vacant Bronx armory. After failing to negotiate a mandate that all retail jobs on the Kingsbridge site pay at least $10 an hour plus benefits, pols pulled the plug on the $300 million project, most of it to be privately financed.
Gone are 1,000 construction jobs and 1,200 permanent ones. In a borough where the official unemployment rate is 13.4 percent, that's a scandal.
It's also a stuck-in-poverty mindset. As Bronx Borough President Ruben Diaz Jr. proudly crowed: "The notion that any job is better than no job no longer applies."
Maybe not in The Bronx, but in the real world, any job is definitely better than no job. Especially when the only legal alternative is welfare.
Nobody gets rich on the minimum wage of $7.25, but most of the jobs would have paid more, some far more. But it's a losing bet to believe retailers would agree to a mandate that they must pay more than nearby competitors.
Indeed, studies show that requiring any wage leads to fewer jobs being created.
Yet common sense was the first casualty. The talks got so loopy that one idea was to have the city subsidize wages to bring them up to the $10 level.
That the idea was seriously discussed reflects how deeply the entitlement culture is embedded in New York. Nothing moves without a government handout.
....So now nobody gets anything.
Well, not quite. The city, which spent $30 million on the armory's roof and other improvements and planned to sell it to Related, gets to keep an empty building and annual maintenance costs of $1 million.
Some people dare call that a victory.
And they're called Democrats. And this mentality is now firmly ensconced in Washington, DC.
And New York taxpayers will now foot the bill for an empty armory, and will foot the bill for continued unemployment insurance and welfare benefits for the mall's would-be employees, while the city will lose out on millions of dollars in tax revenue that would have been generated from the mall, via sales taxes, payroll taxes, and and the increased purchasing power of an extra 1200+ people. All this, while New York will likely raise taxes on the few remaining working folks in the city to cover this and similar messes.
And the liberals declare victory, just as they are about to on health care reform and cap & trade.
God help us all....
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