Michael Bloomberg announced his proposed $63 billion budget for New York City at a news conference on May 6, detailing the devastating cutbacks he says are needed to close a $5 billion budget deficit in time for the legal deadline of July 1.

Although newspaper editorialists praised the billionaire Mayor’s proposals as moderate and responsible, and said they would have been far worse if the city hadn’t made earlier cuts, this only means that workers in New York are already suffering and will be facing far greater attacks in the immediate future. The most dramatic of the planned cuts affects the school system. The budget would reduce the number of public school teachers by 6,700, the first such layoffs since the city’s near-bankruptcy of the mid-1970s.

Other cutbacks include the elimination of 400 firefighter jobs and the closing of 50 senior centers and 17 day care centers. Five thousand city workers’ jobs would be wiped out, in addition to those of the teachers, though the Bloomberg claims these will be cut via attrition. Among the few areas to be spared is the police department, with Bloomberg pointing to the latest failed car bomb plot in Times Square as the reason.

To make the education cuts even more deep-going, the Bloomberg administration is calling for doing away with seniority rules in implementing the layoffs. This would supposedly allow the city to retain good young teachers, but would in reality allow the layoff of higher-paid and more experienced educators. Chancellor Klein said the layoffs should begin with the 2,000 teachers who received unsatisfactory ratings from their principals.

http://www.wsws.org/articles/2010/may2010/nycb-m10.shtml

He's just like a corporate CEO. Fire the little people, while the moron in charge of fucking the city up is a billionaire.

They deserve what they got.

At an annual salary of $50,000, one of these will pay 2,000 teachers for one year:




Or, at an annual salary of $100,000, rather than build one of these, you can pay 28,000 firefighters for one year:




Or for one of these you can give each senior center and day center facility $3,283,582 for a year:




This picture really impresses me as you are looking at over $2.6 billion of cargo aircraft.

The money is there; we need to redirect it.

People raised during the Cold War have it ingrained in their DNA that we need to spend $600 billion annually for perpetuity on defense no matter the threat. Until those generations are no longer in the voting majority, we won't see the kinds of cuts that you are proposing.