Mayor Bill de Blasio continued to call on President Trump to direct desperately needed federal funding to American cities, and to criticize the president’s silence on the matter, NY Times reported.
“President Trump, what’s going on? Cat got your tongue?” Mr. de Blasio said during his daily press briefing on Sunday. “You’re usually really talkative. You usually have an opinion on everything. How on earth do you not have an opinion on aid to American cities and states?”
“So my question is, Mr. Trump, Mr. President, are you going to save New York City or are you telling New York City to drop dead? Which one is it?”, the mayor said in an attempt to use anti Trump sentiment to boast his sinking popularity.
On Saturday night, de Blasio sounded similar sentiments while appearing on entertainment talk network MSNBC. “It means all the things that people depend on in their lives — police, fire, sanitation, education — go down the list of all the things that makes any city, any town function,” the mayor said as he called on Trump to take action
“If you’re missing $7 billion, I assure you, you have to stop — you have to start to cut that stuff back in ways that can be very dangerous.”
The mayor unveiled a “wartime budget” on Thursday with more than $2 billion in cuts as New York City is faced with a $7.4 billion shortfall in tax revenue due to the coronavirus pandemic.
De Blasio’s $89.3 billion executive budget proposal is $6 billion less than the one he pitched in January and $3.4 billion less than last year’s budget adopted in June 2019, according to de Blasio. The new budget includes an array of cuts including canceling after-school programs, keeping the city’s public pools closed for the summer and implementing a hiring freeze for many city agencies, Commercial observer reported.
“Things that might have been a priority a month or two months ago can’t be a priority now,” de Blasio said at a press conference when revealing the budget. “Things that we would love to focus on in peacetime, we can’t focus on in wartime. And this is, in effect, wartime.”
“If the federal government fails us then — I want to be really clear — the notion of this city recovering doesn’t work,” de Blasio said. “If we can’t provide the basics for our people then you can kiss our recovery goodbye.”
De Blasio has developed a speaking relationship with the president, and Trump recently complimented him; one must wonder why de Blasio does not simply discuss this with Trump, instead of the TV dramatics.
On Sunday de Blasio continued to push the program of citizens reporting others who are not social distancing via 311 on their smart phones. Critics call it a “snitching program”
“In war times, in a time when people’s lives are threatened … I’m sorry, this is not snitching, this is saving lives,” Hizzoner said of his “New Squeal” push for New Yorkers to snap photos of those gathering in public.
This is just the same reality, we just have a different enemy — an enemy you can’t see, but an enemy that has taken so many lives,” he said.
“We need those photos. We need those locations so we can enforce right away.”
The mayor admitted that staying inside was only going to get harder with the arrival of gorgeous Springtime temperatures — but threatened to dole out $1,000 fines for those he failed to heed social distancing guidelines, the NY Post reported.
