YouKnowWhat Rolls Downhill

New York City Mayor Eric Adams, who “identifies” as progressive and who actually governs that way as often as not, ran into the problem that idealists encounter when the cold fish of reality smacks them in the face: Grand, magical ideas and policies come with consequences. Consequences they never seem to anticipate, even though the rest of us see them from miles away.

In this case, I speak of the flood of migrants into the city. Joe Biden's mind-numbing abandonment of the southern border and the barely-veiled "come to America, we'll take care of you" message have seen nearly four million (half of them undocumented/illegal) enter the country in the less-than-three years since JoeB took the oath of office. At first, they only flooded the southern border states. But, a couple stunts by red-state governors, a lot of "no one is illegal" virtue signaling from sheltered liberals, sanctuary city spillover from previous years, and invitations like the city’s unique right-to-shelter law, changed all that, and now New York has to see to the needs of over 100,000 migrants.

The likes of Bernie Sanders, The Squad, the socialists in city council, and myriad other progressives pontificate from legislative perches, where they get to pass laws without having to actually do any of the executive work those laws create. A mayor, on the other hand, has to "mayor," and Adams found himself staring at billions in unexpected expenditures to house, clothe, and feed all these migrants.

Seriously, Mr. Mayor, what in the wide wide world of sports did you expect to happen?

As Nicole Gelinas notes at the New York Post, either Adams deliberately under-budgeted or was stupendously negligent. Normally, I’d apply Hanlon's Razor here, and conclude stupidity, but there is reason to believe deliberate gamesmanship.

Since everything everywhere is always about Other People's Money (OPM), Adams looked to Biden and the rest of the Feds for funding to remediate the problem they created… a problem that Adams et al saw coming and warned the city's voters about.

In Season 4 of The Wire Baltimore Mayor Eric Carcetti (Democrat) goes hat-in-hand to the governor to cover a big shortfall in school funding. The governor (a Republican) makes him wait in a stairwell for an hour before conditioning his help on Carcetti publicly humiliating himself. Sometimes life imitates art.

Despite (or perhaps because) the city being a true-Blue stronghold, Biden told Adams to go scratch.

Then, suddenly, what do you know? The FBI went nonlinear in investigating potential fundraising shenanigans and payola involving Adams, making a public spectacle of seizing his phone and other devices. Here's where a cynic or a conspiracist might suspect punishment from above for daring to highlight the migrant problem in an election year, and while I default to skepticism as to such correlations, this one stinks of gamesmanship and slap down.

Adams' hat came back empty from DC, so he had to find some other way to pay for the migrants' needs. Unlike the Feds, states and cities can't simply print more money, so Adams has to cut some other spending.

Wouldn't you know it? The city's spending is so lean, so efficient, and so carefully waste-free that the only places they could find to cut are police, school safety, and libraries.

Ladies and gentlemen, behold New York City's version of Washington Monument Syndrome.

[T]he phenomenon of government agencies in the United States cutting the most visible or appreciated service provided by the government when faced with budget cuts.

The bloated bureaucracies never get nibbled. The pork fat never gets rendered. The City Council's "member item" spending doesn't put under the spotlight. Instead, the things that matter most to voters get threatened. Seems pretty obvious that this is intended to get NY's Democrats to raise a stink big enough to get Biden to cough up some dough.

Since OPM’s provenance doesn't matter, Adams also put on his beggar’s rags to exhort New York’s dwindling number of billionaires to donate cash beyond the vast sums they already pay in taxes.

But, unless and until that dough comes through, NY's residents are set to get the shaft. Crime, already trending upward because of other asinine progressive policies, will accelerate as policing cuts and other services are likely next on the block. Classic pass the buck: President-to-mayor-to-local politicians-to-apparatchiks-to-the hoi polloi.

As the old saying goes, shit rolls downhill.