From the NY Post:Homeless and unemployed, Kenneth Wecker, 62, moved back from Florida to his native city to take advantage of New York's social services...
The former accountant was first told in 2007 that he was eligible for a taxpayer-funded monthly rent subsidy of $899 from the city through its Advantage New York program, started by the Department of Homeless Services. It's the most generous municipal rental-assistance program in the nation, DHS said.
He also collects $1,226 a month in federal Social Security disability payments and a small monthly allotment of food stamps that he says isn't enough to feed himself properly.
Wecker is part of a wave of benefit seekers who have arrived in the city since the Great Recession hit, social experts say. As middle-class residents flee because of high taxes, the poor and disabled look to New York to access some of the best taxpayer-funded social services in the nation.
The state and city have long been what some economists call a "welfare magnet." In particular, New York City offers better housing and Medicaid options than much of the rest of the country.
It's impossible to quantify how many city programs are accessed by out-of-staters like Wecker, because New York doesn't track that data. And of the dozens of programs offered in New York, none makes local residency a requirement for getting benefits.
But increases in applications for social services suggest a surge in welfare immigration. The Advantage NY program assisting Wecker, for instance, is providing city-funded leases to about 131 households a week -- a 79 percent increase over the previous year.
Demand for Food Stamps has soared by 30 percent in the city in the last two years -- up to 1.6 million. The federal government pays for 90 percent of those costs, but New Yorkers make up the difference.
That leaves the door open for people to come to the Big Apple -- where Medicaid qualifications are among the most liberal in the country, said Human Resources Administration Commissioner Robert Doar.
New York also provides dozens of housing programs, free heating subsidies and school meals for needy children, plus a program started in the 1980s to offer housing to HIV and AIDS sufferers.
"Many of these federal programs have a required state contribution to the state program -- so, yes, New York taxpayers are paying twice," said Rector.
You can also spend your entire career in another country and then come here to retire on the public dole. Don't worry, NYC taxpayers will take care of you until you croak!
37 comments:
IS Lindsay still in office?
I like to know what percentage of the total NYC budget is spent on welfare programs. I have a feeling the answer might be surprising.
Oh, I'll keeps this in mind for my broke buddies in Florida and friends overseas.
Now that's diversity economics - you gotta love what you pay for here - others smarter, stealing your lunch and pail!
So glad we can help out!
I think the credit for this one has to go to Patterson, who seems to be concerned about nothing but Gay Mariage.
A revised version (see caps below) of the 1883 Emma Lazarus poem:
The NEW, New Colossus:
Not like the brazen giant of Greek fame,
With conquering limbs astride from land to land;
Here at our sea-washed, sunset gates shall stand
A mighty woman with torch, whose flame,
Is the imprisoned lightning, and her name
MOTHER OF LEACHES. From her beacon-hand
Glows world-wide welcome; her mild eyes command
The air-bridged harbor that twin cities frame.
"Keep ancient lands, your storied pomp!" cries she
With silent lips. "Give me your tired, your poor,
Your huddled masses yearning to GO ON WELFARE,
The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.
Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me,
I issue MEDICAID AND EBT beside the golden door.
Y'ALL COME NOW!"
Pretty soon this is gonna be a city of rich and poor people. Then what are the rich and the poor gonna do? They won't have the middle class to pay for the poor and the rich won't have anybody to dump their shit on.
There's plenty of homeless down in Florida too.
I was recently in South Beach, Miami Beach and every building carried a warning that those who are on private property will be arrested if they refuse to leave when asked to by police.
Even the local churches had this warning. The contrast between these signs and the wealth of Miami Beach was mind-blowing.
This is how our country is going.
Wait, he gets $2,125 PLUS food stamp allotment to live in NYC without having to work???
It has definitely become more profitable to go on public assistance than actually work a job.
Disgusting.
Anonymous said...
Wait, he gets $2,125 PLUS food stamp allotment to live in NYC without having to work???
It has definitely become more profitable to go on public assistance than actually work a job
Only because it's legal to employ full time workers at below livable wages by huge profit making corporations. Pass living wage laws, increase rent stabilization and you'll get people off the dole.
BTW I'd like to see any of you slobs make it on any sort of disability or welfare.
WOW! To think a few years ago I was going through a really rough patch. And was denied and told that the fact that I was getting evicted was not their problem.
there was a book written by Karl Marx,in which he describes this welfare state that we live in now.his policy was called "the redistribution of wealth".
a person who now wields great power in this nation recently slipped up and told us that he believed in "spreading the wealth"
is this not communism/marxism ?
"Only because it's legal to employ full time workers at below livable wages by huge profit making corporations. Pass living wage laws, increase rent stabilization and you'll get people off the dole."
So more government regulation will lead to less handouts? Sorry, that's not freedom.
How the hell do they even determine who gets public assistance? I'm all for helping those who need it but come on the program has been abused for years. How can they crack down?
(LOL. If that's you I'll eat my hat.)
Am I not a true primadonna??
:)
I like to know what percentage of the total NYC budget is spent on welfare programs. I have a feeling the answer might be surprising.
------------------------------------
I think for FY 2009 it was about 13%. I came to that using HRA's budget numbers from here - http://www.nyc.gov/html/omb/html/publications/projections.shtml?48, although don't know if that is completely accurate. I would guess that 13% for one agency is pretty high...what do other folks think?
New York politicians want as many welfare people here as possible. They like to keep their people poor and dumb. They want the middle class to move out and then they'll have more welfare people which will lead to more seats for more politicians. It's called job security for them. Screw everyone else.
That's right. It's called tweeding.
Farewell...welfare seekers!
AND DON'T COME BACK!
"BTW I'd like to see any of you slobs make it on any sort of disability or welfare."
And I would like to see you hold down a 9 to 5 job or run a small business in this city.
Belief in the "common good" has NOTHING to do with Socialism or Marxism.
Winston Churchill says it best -
"Socialism seeks to pull down wealth; Liberalism seeks to raise up poverty. Socialism would destroy private interests; Liberalism would preserve private interests in the only way in which they can be safely and justly preserved, namely, by reconciling them with public right. Socialism would kill enterprise; Liberalism would rescue enterprise from the trammels of privilege and preference. Socialism assails the pre-eminence of the individual; Liberalism seeks, and shall seek more in the future, to build up a minimum standard for the mass. Socialism exalts the rule; Liberalism exalts the man. Socialism attacks capital; Liberalism attacks monopoly.
BRILLANT MAN.
"The basic and crucial political issue of our age is: capitalism versus socialism, or freedom versus statism. For decades, this issue has been silenced, suppressed, evaded, and hidden under the foggy, undefined rubber-terms of 'conservatism' and 'liberalism' which had lost their original meaning and could be stretched to mean all things to all men.
The goals of the 'liberals - as IT EMERGES FROM THE RECORD OF PAST DECADES [my emphasis] - was to smuggle the country into welfare statism by means of single, concrete, specific measures, enlarging the power of government a step at a time, never permitting these steps to be summed up into principles, never permitting their direction to be identified or the basic issue to be named. Thus STATISM WAS TO COME, NOT BY VOTE OR BY VIOLENCE, BUT BY SLOW ROT - by a long process of evasion and epistemological corruption, leading to a 'fait accompli'. (The goal of the "conservatives" was only to retard that process.)" - Ayn Rand Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal, P. 178
A more brilliant woman.
Send this jack... back to Florida.
when a government despot can order my family to jail
for not buying health insurance,that is tyranny.
when this same statist gives the fruits of my labor to a freeloader,this is socialism.(spreading the wealth).
the U.K. is now a socialistic mess. they turned their back on Churchill,after he led the Isle from destruction by the NAZI REGIME( national "socialists"). the U.S.troops fought and won freedom for Europe.
george soros gambled that the U.K.would decline,and he won. is he betting against the U.S.A.,now ?
a socialistic nation like Norway now has vigilante groups attacking those immigrant free loaders, who are there to "share the wealth".
BABS,read " LIBERTY OR TYRANNY",by Mark Levin.
it was a recent best seller for months.
a sign of a communist government is exposed when the party in power expels all political opponents from employment. civil service becomes extinct.
lol, i don't know where this guy thinks he's going to live?? there are already homeless families living in shelters, waiting on available apartments. wait maybe all those "condos" will now be housing.. i can't believe you can just come back to new york and apply. if i was working for the city, first question would be, where have you been living the past 5/10 years. holy shit no wonder the city is going to crap!! the city will be broke soon.
Ayn Rand was an industrialist groupie - her desire for the 25 years younger Nataniel Branden became the absolute law of the universe.
The Rand movement during its heyday was a kind of Communist Party insomuch that it demanded absolute obedience and conformity from its members. Rand was a Russian immigrant - her philosophy boldly reflexs this.
Rand never resolved the contradiction between her radical laissez-faire philosophy and her notion of a society controlled by an elite of supermen.
The cultist Libertarian philosophy relies on the integrity of man to succeed - which is its most serious FLAW.
The Party has not changed much since then - it's for idealists, cultists and potheads.
Sorry, Democrat is generally the chosen party of idealists, potheads and cultists, along with other undesirables.
You can't get blood from a turnip. Between mad-dog capitalists who want the wretched of the earth to produce for pennies for America, the dons of the entitlement mentality who want to confiscate what pennies remain from the pockets of the working class. The obsessive-compulsive nitpicking lawyers and bureaucrats who wait to pounce on every minor mistake, "Did that meter expire, is it 5:00 or 5:01 pm? The workers are bleeding out of our ears.
We need to stop exporting so much capital oversees and rebuild our industrial base to provide for domestic needs. No one gets nuthin' without productive labor and sensible use of resources.
Folks, a veritable litany of ignorance and stupidity.
"The integrity of man to succeed". And you call that a "flaw"? Cf. her brilliant 1969 comparison of the success of the Apollo moon landing with the wallowing in the mud at Woodstock. Do you cast your lot with Neil Armstrong or Wavy Gravy?
"Her desire for the 25 years younger Nathaniel Branden" So what? She was the Ur-cougar. Are you that repressed against sexual desire? Rand also was a chain-smoker which probably caused her lung cancer. Despite your lame attempt, ad feminam attacks do not dilute the power of the intellectual message.
"Rand never resolved the contradiction between her radical laissez-faire philosophy and of her notion of a society controlled by an elite of supermen." A glaring faux pas on your part. Rand excoriated this aspect of Nietzschean thought.
"Rand was a Russian immigrant." An escapee from the Bolshevik toilet which confiscated her familial property. Hello? "Kelo" decision anyone?
"Demanding absolute obedience and conformity" What gun was pointed at her followers? The Stalinists chased the defector Trotsky half-way around the world to Mexico and put an ax in his head. She protected her intellectual property rights while she was alive.
The "heyday" of the movement. Read the just-published "Goddess of the Market. Ayn Rand and the American Right" by Jennifer Burns (Prominently reviewed in the NY Times Book Review 2 weeks ago.)
Let the dogs howl and bay. The Rand Grand Caravan moves onward.
You substantiate my assertion about Libertarians being idealistic fools in the first sentence of your rebuttal!
It’s a JOKE that when the global economy is collapsing because of greed that ANYONE could seriously consider that crypto-fascist Ayn Rand is the answer to ANYTHING. BTW in case you haven’t noticed, unregulated, personal-bonus-seeking capitalism is the PROBLEM - not the answer.
Libertarianism is for people who like un-implementable simple answers to complex problems that assuage any latent feelings of accountability or responsibility for their fellow man. They have their fundamentalist fringe of hardliners who believe that anyone who deviates even one angstrom from their point of view is not a true Libertarian – they mistake philosophy for dogma which is why they are considered a cult.
Rand’s life in Russia? - In a country where 5 million people died of starvation in just two years, she and her family went hungry on occasion.
P.S. Are you going to sell small plants door to door like the old Moonies used to?
Save your breath. Objectivists are not Libertarians. Rand called the latter the "Hippies of the Right". Do some research.
The global economy collapsed because guilt-ridden Liberals like Clinton's Housing Secretary and now NYS Attorney General Andrew Cuomo forced banks under pain of prosecution to make residential loans to people who were not credit worthy. (Cf "Andrew Cuomo and Fannie and Freddie: How the youngest Housing and Urban Development secretary in history gave birth to the mortgage crisis" by Wayne Barrett in the Village Voice, Aug. 5, 2008) Wall Street went wild with his meddling imprimatur.
"Accountability or responsibility for their fellow man." After Cain slew Abel, God asked Cain what he had done. Cain replied "Am I my brother's keeper?" Do you know how God answered? Look it up in Genesis. I bet you'll be surprised.
And finally, you have my permission to sound it out. Go ahead. I'll humor you. I'm a sport. Say it. "F-a-s-c-i-s-t". Let the sound roll over your tongue. The fricative and sibillants. Then wipe the frothing drool off your Che Guevara shirt.
Now go chew on the carpet.
I have no doubt that Babs is a rugmuncher.
Let’s then put it this way – and very simply - BOTH philosophies are unrealistic. BOTH want very limited government. BOTH would abolish child labor laws – because we wouldn’t need them . . . . .
Fairy tales aside, a better read would be why Republican Senator Phil Gramm is nicknamed Foreclosure Phil.
The mortgage market was better run when it was Freddie and Fannie setting standards along with HUD. When the private actors got into the business with CDO's rated by private agencies, it lowered standards and created the seeds of destruction for the current crisis.
And for the record, Corporatism (or Fascism) is the merger of big business with big government to further subsidize costs, eliminate risks and/or guarantee profits by our government. These giant multinational corporations have no allegiance to any country or community.
And lastly, I AM a capitalist who is left of center – so spare me the Che jokes please. You’re obviously so far right you couldn’t find left without a map.
Why the arguments about left vs. right when America is obviously devolving into a Kleptocracy?
Government of the thieves and by the thieves. Honorable men and women need not apply. Pockets picked daily.
I agree - I think the majority of Americans are on the same page on this issue - who doesn't trust big business / who doesn't trust big government - they so intertwined anyway you can't pull them apart like Chinese finger trap toys.
They come to vote!
Post a Comment