The NY Sun reports that a forum was held last night featuring "four potential candidates to replace Mayor Bloomberg" who responded to a study last year which showed the middle class in NYC is fast becoming extinct:Potential Mayoral Candidates Give Possible Preview of 2009
John Liu as mayor? God help us...
Newsday also covered the event:
Bemoaning city's middle-class flight
Meanwhile, Metro ignored the politicians in their report:
“New York City is extremely prosperous,” said John Mollenkopf, director of CUNY’s Center for Urban Research, “but income distribution is increasingly unequal.”
He showed charts documenting changes over the last 15 years, saying, “The bottom’s growing, the middle is shrinking,” and “the top part is growing relative to the others not only in numbers, but in total income.”
The state of the middle class
10 comments:
If I remember my Western History correctly.....it was the "bourgeoise" (the middle class) that made cities possible. They sort of invented the modern city!
Before that you had the older (Egyptian, Greek, Roman, etc.) fortified towns and walled cities inhabited by the rich and poor......the top and bottom of the economic ladder! A real middle class didn't exist yet.
Is NYC headed back into history instead of ahead? It looks that way. We've already got an imperial mayor that would rival any ancient Caesar or Pharoah in his callous "get rich or die" attitude!
Well, if the machine really cares, they can easily put in place programs to encourage the middle class. Afterall, look what they did to Manhattan to encourage the rich.
But you see the middle class does not fit into their plans.
You have the poor, the stuff of the machine, the raw material for tweeding.
You have the rich, who provides the mother's milk for the machine, taxes for all the welfare state programs.
Now by putting all the poor in Queens, you cheap 'staff' a subway ride away, but not living too close to drive down property values or make the rich a tad unsettled with noise, dirt and loitering.
Good God this would make a fine essay. A challenge for your aspiring writers out there to take this up and publish it.
Who needs the middle class? They always complaining on quality of life issues, not wild about those the clubhouse tweeds, and are swing voters.
The less the middle class the better life is for the clubhouse.
Sort of explains why they are 'endangered.' Of course, considering how accurate the local press is, it just might be another step in misinformation.
Well well well.
Now here is a wedge issue for the voters to chew over. It seems as if the machine is at war with them by denying resources to programs that could help them.
This is an idea that should be revisited by Crappis time and time again.
"A nation's productive-and moral and intellectual- top is the middle class. It is a broad reservoir of energy; it is a country's motor and lifeblood, which feeds the rest. The common denominator of its members, on their various levels of ability, is: independence. The upper classes are merely a nation's past; THE MIDDLE CLASS IS ITS FUTURE....The middle class is the heart, the lifeblood, the energy source of a free, industrial economy." - Ayn Rand
The Queens middle class is "property rich." If they stopped taking the bucks and running perhaps things would be different.
Property rich? That is the whole point. The bums that pass for leadership encourages the people to regard their neighbhorhood as a strip mine, dig the hole, take the money, then leave an open sewer for future generations to deal with.
Gee, wouldn't it be nice if Pratt and Hunter and Columbia did some studies of this, but, they are too involved in developing techiques like mountaintop mining.
In other words, they are part of the problem, too.
George...you're a poet!
Resevoir of energy....country's motor...lifeblood!
I love it!
That is what it's all about!
Hello Verdi:...Thanks for the kudo but I did quote the philospher/novelist Ayn Rand.
Hey George, knowing who to Quote still makes you a poet!
What a "Foutainhead" you both are!
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