Mayor Adams’ silent unwinding of welfare reform (as outlined by the indispensable E.J. McMahon) in New York City is the worst policy mistake the man has made.
A quick recap . . .
Gotham’s welfare rolls hit a brain-busting 1.2 million at their peak in 1995; the Giuliani mayoralty saw that shrink down massively, to 425,000 by 2001; the trend continued under Mayor Mike Bloomberg as the rolls fell to 346,000.
Then came Bill de Blasio, the Dope from Park Slope who (as he did on crime, public education and a host of other social issues) enacted policies that eventually drove the city backward.
Using the pandemic as an excuse, he loosened eligibility requirements and by the time he left office drove the numbers of recipients back up to where they’d been in 2006.
Eric Adams, unforgivably, has kept that ugly trend going in the wrong direction.
He saw the city’s overall cash-recipient numbers rise by 23%, to almost half a million — the highest it’s been in 22 years.
About 357,000 of those came in under the Safety Net program, which enjoys no federal funding and mainly pays out to single adults and childless couples.
And that program has been shooting up under Adams, with record increases in 23 of the mayor’s first 24 months in office. (And no, these aren’t illegal migrants.)
Worse, the path out of dependence for welfare recipients has been in an utter stall since the pandemic and has seen no improvement under Adams, with 10,000 to 15,000 recipients finding work per year — down from close to 50,000 in 2016.
An even uglier trendline: Work-participation rates for family-assistance recipients stood at 12% as of mid-2023, down from 25% just before COVID hit and 34% under Bloomberg’s last term.
That’s a drop of 22 points, a collapse of almost 65%, when rates never fell below 32% even during the Great Recession.
Something looks to have shifted permanently — and massively for the worse.
Of course, all this dependency comes at a cost in the hundreds of millions at least, with a nearly $500 million annual rate of increased Safety Net spending under Adams.
That’s set to see another $200 million added on by spring 2025 under Gov. Hochul’s new budget.
And don’t forget the coming tsunami of migrant bills, reaching $12 billion through fiscal 2025.
Adams fights the good fight on crime and public education and correctly sees our migrant influx as a crisis — but he’s dead wrong to let this happen, and unless he changes course all New Yorkers will pay the price.
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