Furloughed NYC workers will get their money back according to Hizzoner Bill de Blasio. How? By using federal stimulus money, OUR taxpayer dollars.

“City workers who lost out on a week’s pay last year in the depths of New York’s coronavirus budget crunch will get their money back — courtesy of the rest of the nation’s taxpayers.

“We had to make difficult decisions as we faced a massive budget shortfall last year,” Mayor de Blasio said Saturday. “Thanks to the federal stimulus, we are in a much better place and can pay these workers back for their sacrifice.”

More than 9,000 nonunion workers were forced to take five-day furloughs, starting in October, to help balance the bloated city budget.

When the initial stories about this broke last September, as I wrote about here, it was only going to be about 500 workers. Which is bad enough given they were told to PLAN for their unpaid furloughs. In the middle of a nationwide pandemic panic attack. With no other avenues of income, due to everything being shut down. Well, now it turns out that it was 9,500 people who were furloughed.

Presumably that did include de Blasio and his wife…right? Uh huh. The loss of $4900 in salary for de Blasio is nothing compared to someone who doesn’t have the millions that de Blasio does. Furthermore, de Blasio never cut his salary, so he was on easy street compared to the majority of the 9,500 furloughed workers. 

Meanwhile, New York City struggled and is struggling. I’m not talking about just the massive budget shortfalls, of which de Blasio is a key architect of. No, I’m talking about the K-12 implosion that reporters such as Karol Markowicz have been writing about for over a year now. 

When, last spring, I first started writing about opening the schools, I was agitating for school districts across the country to do the right thing and get their kids back in classrooms. But now, my columns aim at a minority of districts around the country.

Most have opened. Only the most ­deformed, broken systems remain closed or only partially open, and Gotham’s is among the most ­deformed and broken.

Like the Big Apple, other areas that still have little to no in-person schooling are either big cities or the suburbs immediately abutting them, all deep-blue Democrats ­politically, all in the grip of anti-science teachers unions.

Meanwhile, the homeless situation is out of control and de Blasio is doing nothing to fix it. Which is very likely leading to significant parts of New York City starting to resemble the streets of San Francisco. Which is not a compliment by any means. Hell’s Kitchen is a prime example:

Neighbors cite a visibly ugly increase in trouble spilling out of the hotels and onto the sidewalks: theft, drug abuse, public defecation, open-air sex and random violence.

“It’s dangerous, very dangerous,” said Dan DePamphilis, who manages Rudy’s Bar and has lived in the neighborhood for more than 30 years. The cameras outside his Ninth Avenue watering hole have captured everything from drug deals to gunfire over the past year, he said.

“Our leaders have destroyed the city and Hell’s Kitchen has been a focal point.”

But now, New Yorkers are supposed to stand up and cheer because they’ll be repaid for their sacrifice! They’re supposed to just say thank you and be grateful that their efforts, which were forced upon them, saved the city a measly $21 million dollars. 

An itty bitty drop in the bucket once you realize that the budget deficit is over ONE BILLION DOLLARS. 

Yet the new budget proposed by de Blasio and crew is even larger. Like massive. But where will the money come from given that rent costs are way down, and people are leaving the city in droves?

How many of those furloughed workers have or are planning to leave the city because of de Blasio? 

Oh but wait! Giving the furloughed workers their lost wages courtesy of the federal stimulus (our tax dollars ladies and gentlemen), will solve everything!

"I feel very good. We can put the layoffs behind us now," Mayor Bill de Blasio says of the $1.9 trillion Covid-19 relief stimulus plan. "It gives us the stability we needed. We lost $10 billion over several years. This makes us whole so we can take layoffs off the table."

— Amanda Eisenberg (@aeis17) March 15, 2021

Yes, you read the above correctly. The federal stimulus money flowing into New York City will not only repay the furloughed workers, it will be the fix the NYC budget needs. Will that money be used to solve the homeless problems? Will any of those funds go into the NYPD where it’s needed, such as hiring and training? Nahh…it’ll probably go to Green New Deal crap and bringing more Critical Race Theory into our schools.

Who knows where our taxpayer dollars stimulus money will end up. But I can tell you one thing, de Blasio and his wife were furloughed as well. You can darned well bet that they will happily accept reimbursement for their trials and tribulations. 

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Feature Photo Credit: DonkeyHotey via Flickr, cropped and modified