NYC Race Focuses On Income Gap, But How Much Can A Mayor Do?
Voters in New York City go to the polls Tuesday to choose their next mayor, and it appears all but certain that they'll elect Bill de Blasio, the city's public advocate.
The Democrat has built a wide lead in the polls by distancing himself from the incumbent mayor, billionaire Michael Bloomberg. In fact, de Blasio has made income inequality the central issue of his campaign, name-checking the Charles Dickens novel A Tale of Two Cities dozens of times at debates and stump speeches.
"It always falls back to, 'It's a tale of two cities,' " Republican candidate Joe Lhota complained in a recent interview with MSNBC. "There's nothing more divisive than saying we are two cities, whether it's rich versus poor, black versus white."
But de Blasio won't back down. "There's nothing divisive about acknowledging the struggle that so many New Yorkers face. It's not class warfare," de Blasio said in a speech last month to a group of business leaders. "It's arithmetic. And it's reality."
For the stock market and the real estate business, these have been the best of times, or pretty close. But de Blasio argues those gains haven't been spread equally among all New Yorkers, including the record number of 50,000 people in the city who are homeless.
De Blasio has been eager to emphasize his differences with outgoing mayor Bloomberg. De Blasio lives in Brooklyn, where he sends his children to public school; Bloomberg is one of the richest men in the country, who used his personal fortune to win three terms in office — first as a Republican, later as an independent. And Bloomberg did his best to make the wealthy feel welcome in New York.
"If we could get every billionaire around the world to move here, it would be a godsend," Bloomberg said in September during his weekly radio interview on WOR.
"They're the ones that spend a lot of money in the stores and restaurants and create a big chunk of our economy," Bloomberg said. "And we take tax revenues from those people to help people throughout the entire rest of the spectrum."
“ Great as New York is, it is not actually the federal government.