Tuesday, December 20, 2011

Just in case you forgot what the priorities are

The NY Times has a report on what is happening with a proposal for a Living Wage payment plan.
Let’s slip into our Louis Vuitton shoes and take a gilded stroll through Manhattan.

We begin downtown, where Goldman Sachs, that exemplar of 0.001 percent America, reaps a multimillion-dollar tax break for its office tower, a deal accompanied by a multimillion-dollar landscaping clause. (You expected Lloyd C. Blankfein to yank weeds, maybe?)

In Midtown, we can draw money from an A.T.M. in the richly subsidized Bank of America tower, and skip over to Ernst & Young, where public tax dollars have underwritten a smashing skyscraper.

Now off to Yankee Stadium, where parking, seats, grossly overpriced hot dogs and pitchers all owe a debt to hundreds of millions in tax subsidies.

Our tour complete, we loop back to City Hall, where with luck, we may hear our billionaire mayor declaim on a ruinous proposal that several thousand low-wage workers could receive a wage of $10 an hour if they labor in developments irrigated with city tax subsidies.

“I think,” Michael R. Bloomberg said a few weeks back, “that when the government tries to too much interfere with the marketplace, it doesn’t turn out well.”

There is an indefinable something about a so-called living wage bill that puts New York’s leaders at risk of breaking out in socialist hives.
The people at the bottom are so easily replaced, there is no need to pay them enough to live.

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