Taxpayer $$ down the toilet
‘I T WILL be a great day when our schools get all the money they need and the Air Force has to hold a bake sale to buy a bomber” went the old bumper sticker often seen on Volvos. In Mayor de Blasio’s New York, it’s more like, “It will be a great day when our schools get all the money they need and the mayor has to hold a bake sale to run mostly useless ads that do little but pat himself on the back.”
We might have crumbling infrastructure, failing schools and an overburdened transit system, but the mayor still found $265,000 for a splashy ad campaign to address the issue of our time: which bathroom should be used by the .02 percent of the population that’s transgender.
Actually, the mayor’s new ad campaign doesn’t even do that. What it does is inform people that it has long been policy in New York City that anyone can use any bathroom.
De Blasio’s press release confirms that “In New York City, equal bathroom access has been policy for years” — so why waste money on these ads now? Could it be that the issue has garnered a lot of national attention recently and the mayor wants to capitalize on that? How else to explain an ad campaign for a policy that Police Com- missioner Bill Bratton says has been in place for 14 years.
The campaign will be extensive — and expensive. From the release: “The ads will appear in subway cars, bus shelters, phone booths, ethnic and community newspapers, and in ads in digital publica- tions and across social media in English and Spanish. Ethnic newspaper ads will appear in Spanish, Korean, Chinese, Russian and Bengali.”
The money from the campaign could have been spent on half a dozen teacher assistants to f ill in at underserved schools, many in those same Spanish, Korean and Russian-speaking communities. The money also could have gone toward better transportation options as even the MTA admits that wait times have spiraled out of control.
The press release for the initiative reads like a who’s who of wasting taxpayer dollars and includes many de Blasio allies, like state Sen. Daniel Squadron (D-Brooklyn/ Manhattan) and Brooklyn Borough President Eric Adams, with stock quotes linking their names to the initiative. None of them explains why this ad campaign is necessary and why the public is paying for it.
“Every New Yorker has the legal right to use the bathroom consistent with their gender identity, no questions asked — and these powerful ads affirm this right,” de Blasio said in the statement.
What the ads actually affirm is that de Blasio is trying to be America’s progressive hero and has no trouble wasting the public’s money to make that happen. There seems to be no point to the campaign other than to massage the ego of our mayor.
Taxpayer dollars are being spent on raising the mayor’s profile among the progressive base he’ll need should he decide to run for higher office. New Yorkers should speak loudly and clearly that they won’t stand for it, no matter where they stand on the actual transgender bathroom issue. De Blasio should spend our money on necessities, not on his pet causes.