Just coming up for air after office-moving hell. (I have vowed to clean off my desk every 16 years whether it needs it or not.) Imagine my delight when I saw Mayor Bloomberg’s latest prescription for solving the problems of urban America. So many fish in the barrel, so little time to shoot at them. This is a keeper:
I would argue the federal government should go one step further. They should deliberately force some places that don’t want immigrants to take them, because that’s the only solution for these big, hollowed-out cities where industry has left and is never going to come back unless you get some people to move there.
Just like former governor Tom Vilsack of Iowa, who suggested something similar (sans coercion) for his state years ago, politicians are always looking for an easy way out. Could it be that people are fleeing the Big Apple because taxes are too high, regulation too onerous, bureaucracy too officious? Never! Immigrants apparently aren’t human beings, responding to the same incentives as others; instead, they’re a vitamin B shot for mismanaged metropolises reeling from the effects of leftist social policy, 21st-century snake oil that will rid you of warts, straighten your posture, and make your breath smell better.
And one would assume a businessman would have some basic grasp of arithmetic, but not Bloomberg:
There are no heroes here. Today, with a liberal Democratic administration in Pennsylvania Avenue, we are deporting more people than the last four or five presidents put together.
Uh, no. Let’s be generous and go with the previous four administrations, rather than five, and assume that FY 2011 had about the same level of deportations as the prior two years (it’s probably down a little, but it’s close). That would mean that during fiscal years 2009–2011, something under 1.2 million “removals” (deportations) took place. Contrast that with the 3.2 million during fiscal years 1981–2008. Sure, there’s no reason a mayor has to know this, but if a mayor is intent on pontificating regarding a policy area about which he knows absolutely nothing, he should at least have his staff check a free public website to make sure he doesn’t look like an idiot.