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The Bonfire of the Progressive Vanities
Liberals say they want ‘livable’ cities, but their policies produce high taxes, crime and chaos.
Allysia Finley
By Allysia Finley, WSJ
Dec. 29, 2024 2:39 pm ET
New York is the backdrop for famous holiday films such as “Miracle on 34th Street,” “Home Alone 2” and “Elf.” This year came a less felicitous kind when a video appeared of a woman burning to death on the subway while the man who lit her on fire fanned the flames. It was a nightmare before Christmas.
The video ignited conversation at my family’s table and doubtless many others. What happened? On Dec. 22, a 33-year-old undocumented immigrant from Guatemala allegedly lit the sleeping subway rider on fire. Police identified his most recent address as a homeless shelter in Brooklyn for men with substance-abuse problems.
The video is a snapshot of the city’s problems: crime, mentally deranged and intoxicated vagrants, undocumented migrants and unsafe subways. It’s also an apt metaphor for the destruction of the Big Apple and of other once-great cities by progressive arsonists.
New York’s subways are a microcosm of its disorder. On Dec. 20, a man started a verbal altercation with an 83-year-old rider and then repeatedly punched him in the head. The next afternoon, two young men disembarking a Brooklyn train got shot. Early on the morning of Dec. 22, a brawl broke out on a train when several homeless men attempted to steal another vagrant’s bags, resulting in two of the thieves being stabbed. One died. That afternoon, a disheveled-looking man punched a 76-year-old woman in the head and knocked her to the ground.
New Yorkers know you ride the subway at your own risk. Liberals blame public fright about rising crime on supposedly distorted perceptions. Before Christmas, Gov. Kathy Hochul deployed more National Guardsmen to the subways in hopes of making riders feel safer.
Yet many New Yorkers have no doubt seen mentally ill vagrants accost police on subway platforms. Stone-faced officers let them howl in their faces. Having law-enforcement around is better than not having them at all, but they don’t seem to be preventing crimes or apprehending criminals. Turnstile jumping could be a sport in New York.
Crime on public transit isn’t isolated to the Big Apple. It seems to be an epidemic in big Democrat-controlled cities like Chicago, San Francisco and Los Angeles. Their residents are doing what their elected leaders won’t do: protecting themselves, mainly by using other modes of transportation like Uber.
Thanks to declining ridership—owing also to remote work and population flight—mass transit systems across America are bleeding red ink. New York’s subway ridership was a third lower last year than in 2019. Ridership on California’s Bay Area Rapid Transit is down about 60% from before the pandemic.
Most mass-transit systems had budget problems before the Covid lockdowns owing to generous union contracts that inflate wages and benefits and limit efficiencies. A “telephone maintainer” for New York’s Metropolitan Transportation Authority earns on average $42.24 an hour and gets a Cadillac health plan.
Some $280 billion in federal pandemic and infrastructure dollars for public transportation systems helped paper over their deficits, but that money is running out. So is the more than $550 billion in Covid relief that flowed to states and local governments. Cities and their Democratic friends in state capitals are thus looking to hike taxes. See New York’s new $9 congestion tax on drivers who enter Manhattan’s business district, which is intended to raise $15 billion for local transit.
The Chicago City Council recently passed a budget that aims to raise nearly $182 million in revenue by increasing taxes on cloud computing, streaming services, parking and ride-hailing. The city is also installing more cameras to ding speeders. Meanwhile, Mayor Brandon Johnson this autumn ended the city’s contract for a gunshot-detection system that helped police catch gangsters.
Cities across California are plotting new taxes to rescue their public-transit systems and pay for soaring pension bills. “BART going into a death spiral is a very real possibility if we don’t find the resources to keep it running,” a Bay Area transportation official said this year.
One such “resource” is drivers. A California law taking effect on Jan. 1 bans parking or idling within 20 feet of a crosswalk. Democrats claim the goal is safety, but the more likely object is to force people to take public transit and raise more ticketing revenue from unwitting offenders. The law’s supporters notably include public-transportation agencies and climate groups.
Democrats love to talk about making cities “livable,” by which they mean reducing the number of cars. But their high taxes, crime and chaos have become unbearable. It’s no surprise they are losing population, which has been offset in part by an influx of migrants from south of the border. Adding insult to injury, migrants receive better public amenities than taxpaying natives.
This poses a public-relations problem for Democrats as Americans in the rest of the country associate the party with chaos and mismanagement. When Christmas dinner conversations turn to a poor soul burned to death on a New York subway, Democrats have a five-alarm fire on their hands.
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