6 Ways the 7th Richest Man in America Has Screwed the Poor [View all]

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http://www.alternet.org/6-ways-7th-richest-man-america-has-screwed-poor



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1. Booting Homeless Families from Priority Access to Housing Aid

At the start of his second term, the Mayor promised to reduce the rate of individual and family homelessness in the city by two-thirds in 5 years. Today, there are as many homeless New Yorkers as during the height of the Great Depression, according to the Coalition for the Homeless. The Mayor blames the recession and, strangely, the Coalition for the Homeless itself, but homelessness advocates point to a series of ill-advised policy decisions that separated homeless families from the government aid that had kept many of them housed.

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2. No Plan to Address Homelessness

That didn't go well! This week, a report by Coalition for the Homeless found that as of November, 2,818 former Advantage families had returned to a shelter. A quarter of the families going into the city's shelters are former Advantage users, which explains, in part, why the rate of homelessness is high as during the 1930s.

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3. Crushing the Living Wage Laws
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While the Mayor enthusiastically supported that government intrusion into the market, he deemed the living wage to be an unacceptable government overreach. The measures were "a throwback to the era when government viewed the private sector as a cash cow to be milked, rather than a garden to be cultivated," the Mayor mused poetically. But things were serious. "The last time we really had a big managed economy was the USSR and that didn't work out so well," he warned on his radio show.

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4. Budget Cuts

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Every year, like clockwork, the Mayor's proposed budget contains massive proposed cuts to programs that help poor kids and parents, like child care and after school programs. Between 2007 and 2011 more than 40,000 subsidized child services spots were canned, according to the Center for New York City Affairs. "This year, the slots face the guillotine once again, with a $60 million cut to afterschool programs in Mayor Bloomberg’s proposed budget, and another $77 million to child care services," writes Abigail Kramer Child Welfare Watch.