Mayor de Blasio apparently has jobs on the brain as he campaigns for re-election.
On Thursday, he unveiled a plan (well, a “pathway,” aides cautiously termed it) for creating 100,000 “high-paying” private-sector jobs over the next decade.
It was long on rhetoric (including the trick of counting 50 grand a year as high pay) but predictably short on details, including how to tell if any given job would’ve been created anyway, when the city economy on its own creates many more new jobs than that.
The week before, the mayor lectured journalists on how to do their jobs, a standard that boils down to covering only the stories he wants and ignoring the ones he doesn’t.
He’s also now talking up the idea of him taking over a significant part of Gov. Cuomo’s job: control of the city’s subways.
And never mind that de Blasio hasn’t even been using the power he has via his four appointees to the Metropolitan Transportation Authority board.
Plus, while he’s grandstanding on getting control of mass transit, he’s at real risk of losing the control he already enjoys over the city’s schools. (And if his handling of public education is a template for how he’d run the trains, good thing his subway demand is pure political fantasy.)
Of course, all the noise may help distract voters in this election year from the mayor’s failure to do his own job.
New Yorkers, after all, are still waiting for signs of actual improvement on the homeless crisis as well as clear improvement at the dysfunctional Administration for Childrens Services.
Maybe de Blasio would’ve been more on top of all the city-management breakdowns if he hadn’t devoted so much of his time in office to pure politics — running around from coast to coast trying to boost his public profile as a national liberal leader, and masterminding a barely-legal fundraising drive to produce a state Senate majority to his liking.
Not to mention the time and energy devoted to working to make his deep-pocketed donors happy by trying to kill jobs by shutting down the Central Park horse carriage industry and limiting the growth of app-hail services like Uber.
From Day One, this mayor’s only real jobs policy has been to add positions at the taxpayers’ expense: The city payroll is at an all-time high, with more growth ahead.
The bottom line on de Blasio and jobs is that New York will be better off when he loses his.