UPDATE: N.Y. to apply for federal funds to pay $300-a-week unemployment benefits
Looks like he felt the heat from his constituents
A few days ago, I detailed how bad of a decision it was for Governor Andrew Cuomo to refuse aid for struggling, unemployed New Yorkers.
Well, I think he got the message from people like me:
From The New York Daily News:
New York will apply for coronavirus unemployment money President Trump made available after the feds dropped a requirement making states pony up a portion of the funds.
State budget director Robert Mujica said Friday that the Empire State will sign up for the so-called Lost Wages Assistance program, which will provide $300 a week to out-of-work New Yorkers in addition to state benefits.
“As Governor Cuomo has said, politics does not impact policy — especially during a pandemic — and if New Yorkers are in need, this administration will do everything we can to support them,” Mujica said in a statement.
Cuomo has balked at the prospect of applying for the program in recent weeks following Trump’s promise to make up to $44 billion available from the Federal Emergency Management Agency’s Disaster Relief Fund.
Good!
You know, I might buy his book, IF HE DIDN’T SHUT DOWN THE MUSIC BUSINESS IN NEW YORK CITY AND MAKE ALL OF US UNEMPLOYED!!!
What an arrogant ass. I’m sorry. I can’t stand this man. Apparently, I’m, not alone:
Brad Polumbo wrote in his FEE piece, Andrew Cuomo’s Book Deal and Why the Worst Rise to the Top in Politics:
Faced with such blatant mismanagement and callous arrogance amid a national crisis, it would be fair for observers to conclude that Andrew Cuomo is among the worst politicians in America. Yet we must also note that this isn’t a coincidence. New York didn’t simply draw the short straw and happen to get stuck with a bad governor. It’s also no coincidence that one of the country’s worst politicians is “failing upward” in his career, from his skyrocketing public profile to his (likely lucrative) book deal.
New York has one of the largest governments of any states in the country. From sky-high taxes to soda bans, it has overwhelmingly voted for statist policies. And, as economist Friedrich A. Hayek famously noted in a chapter of The Road to Serfdom titled “Why the Worst Get on Top,” positions of power in big-government systems inevitably attract a society’s worst and most immoral individuals.
“[Hayek] argued with great insightfulness that ‘the unscrupulous and uninhibited are likely to be more successful’ in any society in which government is seen as the answer to most problems,” FEE President Emeritus Lawrence W. Reed explained. “They are precisely the kind of people who elevate power over persuasion, force over cooperation. Government, possessing by definition a legal and political monopoly of the use of force, attracts them just as surely as dung draws flies.”
Hayek himself wrote, “The probability of the people in power being individuals who would dislike the possession and exercise of power is on a level with the probability that an extremely tenderhearted person would get the job of whipping-master in a slave plantation.”
Cuomo’s rise and New York’s COVID-19 saga prove Hayek right and leaves us with a clear lesson: So long as we entrust massive amounts of power to the government, we will continue to unintentionally place our fate in the hands of the worst among us. However, by leaving more of our problems to be solved by the private sector and civil society, we can ensure that true innovators and moral leaders are the ones leading us forward.
Clayton Craddock is an independent thinker, father of two beautiful children in New York City. He is the drummer of the hit broadway musical Ain’t Too Proud. He earned a Bachelor of Business Administration from Howard University’s School of Business and is a 25 year veteran of the fast-paced New York City music, scene. He has played drums in a number of hit broadway and off-broadway musicals including “Tick, tick…BOOM!, Altar Boyz, Memphis The Musical and Lady Day At Emerson’s Bar and Grill. In addition, Clayton has worked on: Footloose, Motown, The Color Purple, Rent, Little Shop of Horrors, Evita, Cats, and Avenue Q.